Good evening dear readers and welcome to stop on the ever fabulous Random Things Tours blog tour for Unprotected by Sophie Jonas Hill!
She’s fighting to save everyone else, but will she have anything left to save
herself?
Witty, sharp and sarcastic tattoo artist Lydia’s life is imploding. Her long-term relationship has broken down after several miscarriages and she’s hiding from her hurt in loss and rage. After a big night out she wakes beside a much younger man who brings complications she could really do without.
As her grief about her lost babies and failed relationships spirals out of control, she obsesses about rescuing a wayward teenage girl she watches from her window and gets more involved than she should with her charming but unstable young lover.
Unprotected is a raw and punchy story of love, family and accepting yourself
for who you really are.
This kind of book is not usually my cup of tea but I still wanted to give it a try and unfortunately, I was correct that this was not to my tastes. BUT that does not mean I didn’t admire the writing of this book and the raw story woven with it.
The book is written almost in a stream of consciousness, patterned with Lydia’s thoughts and memories throughout the course of the story. Lydia is at a very low point in her life that I think we can all empathise with. The very honest discussion of miscarriages and how it affects both mothers to be and their relationships is an aspect I thought was particularly important. Too long the suffering of women has been ignored and hidden due to ‘shame’ and social norms that are nothing but harmful and old fashioned.
The plot can be difficult to follow in places due to Lydia’s point of view being affected by several factors. At one stage at the start of the novel she is taking MD at a fetish club and its very easy to lose track of what is happening. However it works very well for this book since Lydia as a character is intended to be a flawed, broken character on the very edge of discovering the self she truly is.
Something that I really took from the book was a story Lydia tells is that of a ballet class of when she was young and how she ended up playing a mushroom instead of a fairy in the big performance. All in all I could feel that sense of awkwardness and being the biggest misfit among girls my age come rushing back when I was that age. One quote stuck with me:
That’s what it’s like, when you’re a mushroom girl. You have to be grateful for the role life has handed you, because it is a pivotal role.
This is something I struggled with when I was younger, that you should be grateful and not complain about what you have been given in life. Fuck that. There is no need to ever settle for unhappiness, and Lydia does exactly this. She breaks out from her mould and embraces a side of herself that in doing things that may be harmful or excessive, she figures out her own pace and embraces her traumatic past to rescue herself.
A bold tale of rescue that even though it takes confronting the darkest corner of yourself to embrace what you truly are. Like I said, these kind of books are way outside my comfort zone but I felt deeply for Lydia and moments of the book have really stuck with me.
★★★.5/5
Sophie has had what might be politely described as a varied career, which has seen her be a black-smith, silver-smith, jewellery designer, pattern-cutter and wedding dress designer, home help, teacher, extreme knitter, burlesque performer, artist and various combinations of the above. Her one abiding passion alongside drawing has always been writing, from her early work in year four producing hand bound novellas mostly written in crayon, to the inevitable fantasy epic which pushed 500 pages and, thank goodness, has never seen the light of day.
She began focusing on her writing after the birth of her first child, and has been working on it ever since, losing hands down to the publishing industry’s gatekeepers and Gorgons, until she met fellow traveller Amanda Saint, who as the name suggests, was something of a shining light on the path.
She is currently studying an MA in illustration and discovering how much she hates academic writing, and what a wise move it was to give someone else the task of designing the cover for her first book with Retreat West, Unprotected. She lives in Kent with her long suffering husband, two children and a very handsome cat.
Thank you very much to both Anne and Retreat West for sending me a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review! Unprotected comes out today, November 28th.
