A look back at Lucia Franco's controversial "Off Balance" series, nine months later
As a journalist, I’m always fascinated by what happens after a controversy dies down. What happens when the reporters leave and the society moves on to something else? The people involved may disappear from the public conscience, but that doesn’t mean they’re actually gone.
The rise of Amazon Kindle and other e-readers, coupled with Createspace, made self-publishing and distribution easier than ever. With no one to really tell the authors for what they can or can’t write, a certain subset of works emerged - romance novels that push boundaries, and delve into themes large publishers may shy away from.
Lucia Franco's Off Balance series featured a romance between a 15-year-old gymnast Adrianna Rossi and her coach, the 30-year-old Konstantin Kournakova [sic], as she tries to qualify for the Olympics.
Yes, you read that right. A romance between a teen girl and a man literally twice her age.
In the since-deleted version of the series FAQ, Franco described her inspiration for the series thusly (emphasis mine):
Forbidden romance happens to be a theme I love to read but so hard to find. Late one night many years ago, I was in search of another forbidden book to lose myself in, but I wanted something different. I wanted a gymnast/coach duo. I wanted underage, and not for the character to be of age when intercourse happened. I wanted sexy, and I wanted heavy emotion. And most of all, I wanted the relationship to have a realistic timeline, not insta-love three chapters in. Why did I want all this? Because it pushes the envelope, and if written in a particular way, it could be viewed entirely different and highly desirable. Since I was a gymnast, and had knowledge of the sport, the story quickly came to life.
She also had this to say about the age gap:
While the age gap seems huge, Adrianna is actually little old for real life elite gymnastics. A gymnasts’ body can only handle so much. At 16 years old, she’s at her prime, and she should have already been an elite and competing internationally if she planned to be in the Olympics when she does. That being said, if I went any younger than 15/16, I was certain I’d be crucified. In reality, she should be around 12 years old.
As Franco explained in another since-deleted post, she did gymnastics until she was 13. The same post mentions that she was 31 in 2016, when the first book of the series was released, and that her biggest worry wasn’t the age gap, but the accuracy of the gymnastics, since the sport apparently changed quite a bit in the intervening 13 years.
The age gap, even as wide as this one, isn’t, in on itself, a problem. It’s the everything else. Adrianna is 15 when the relationship started. During my ill-fated attempt to get a teaching certificate, I was struck by just how young a lot of high school students looked - and I was in my mid-20s at the time. You don’t think of yourself as young when you’re that age, but from an adult perspective… It really drove home what one of my instructors said, (to paraphrase) “if you ever find yourself attracted to a student, get help, because there’s something wrong with you.”
And, to compound the whole thing, there was the fact that Konstantin is Adrianna’s coach. I haven’t read the first book, because that would require paying, but the excerpts I could access as part of the free preview emphasized how much she needed his training specifically to achieve her Olympic dreams. There’s a lot of talk about how young Adrianna is, just as there is a lot of talk about how manly and how overpowering the male lead is. And Konstantin nicknamed her “malysh,” which literally means “baby,”and isn’t necessarily a bad thing to call one’s partner, but in this context.
I should also note that I have my own issues with the novels. Any Russian (and people of other eastern Slavic cultures) reading this will immediately realize the problem with the name lead’s name. As I’ve explained many times on this LJ and elsewhere, Russian is a gender-based language. Every word is either masculine, feminine or neuter. And the endings of people’s last names are different based on their gender.
“Kournakova” is a woman’s surname.
I have a feeling that Franco wanted to nickname her character “Kova” and worked backwards to justify it, not realizing just how ridiculous it sounds to a Russian ear. Like, I can’t really explain it to English speakers, but reading about this paragon of masculine manliness with a girl’s last name was in turn cringy and hilarious.
I could point out other things. How Adrianne sounds exactly like the college-aged protagonist of Franco’s other novel, Hush, Hush (no, not that Hush,Hush) How the novels followed the fanfictionsh pattern of characters breaking up and making up over and over. How unlikable both leads ultimately are. But that’s ultimately minor compared to the whole part where the entire Off Balance series is about a romance where a much older mail lead is in position of power over a teenage female lead. And that’s not the only, to put it mildly, questionable content in the book.
When the first book of the series came out in 2016 - there were some reviews pointing out those very things, but the response was largely positive. And I suppose I can kind of imagine the appeal. The romance novels, especially self-published ones, are full of overwhelmingly masculine alphahole protagonists. I imagine there were plenty female readers who fantasized about coaches/teachers when they were teens, and wanted to relieve the thrill. And, as Dan Olson pointed out before, there is something to be said about experiencing relationships dynamics and situations that would be awful in real life from the safety of a printed page.
But in late-November/early-December, as Franco released the fourth book in the series,Off Balance suddenly caught the eye of a larger romance Twitter community. This is around the time I found out about the series thanks to corrinalaw’s Twitter feed. And, suffice to say, people were not amused, especially with the cover-up of sexual assault of teen gymnasts in Michigan State University still fresh on people’s minds. Jenny Trout has a good summary of what ensued. Most pertinently, Amazon TOSed the entire series, presumably for violating its guidelines on sex involving minors. There were Twitter arguments and blog posts, Franco’s supporters tried to doxx some of the detractors, and Franco wound up leaving Twitter entirely.
But, after a few weeks, things have settled down. And, like I said, I was curious where Franco would go from there. So I tried to keep an eye on her Facebook page and author site.
For a while, her Facebook page was nothing but vague inspirational/affirmational images, and the site was quiet. Then… well, COVID-19 pandemic reached Chicago, and I had other things to worry about. But in August, I decided to check on her again - and found out that is is not only releasing the final book of the series, but she reposted the rest of the series online. In, it turned out, somewhat edited form.
Per the new FAQ, Franco aged up Adrianna to sixteen, and moved the setting from Florida (where Franco lives) to Georgia, because, as she readily admitted, 16 is the age of consent in that state. And the resulting changes seem to be fairly minor
The story moved from Florida to Georgia. The Rossi home is on the east coast in Palm Bay, and World Cup is now on the east coast two hours south just outside of Florida. The entire story takes place in Georgia in a fictional town along the east coast.
Palm Beach, Florida, is now Palm Bay, Georgia.
Palm Bay is a fictious [sic] town located in Savannah, Georgia.
Palm Beach Island, is now Amelia Island.
Cape Coral, where World Cup Academy of Gymnastics is located, is now two hours south of Amelia Island on the east coast of Georgia.
Though, upon further reading, it looked like it went a tad deeper than that (emphasis mine):
The revisions caused a serious domino effect in all five books, which called for many extra revisions I did not anticipate. It’s why the publication of Dismount was pushed back so far. There were numerous refences to age for every character, many locations and scenery references that needed to be revised, real cities and highways were changed, seasons were edited, colleges mentioned and new ones added, state laws, words that I feared would trigger someone to report me. Multiple lines of dialogue that could be deemed offensive. Avery and Sophia now have a slight southern accent to fit the new location. These seem small, but in the grand scheme of things, they ended up being much bigger. That being said, a reader most likely won’t recognize them.
Interestingly, Franco kept describing the revised versions as “safe, edited versions,” while also saying that “no steamy scenes were altered during the revisions.”
Back in July, before releasing the final book, Franco wrote a post trying to address what happened in December. What I find interesting about this is that she barely touches on people’s concerns. She apologizes for anybody for whom her context might have been triggering, in a post-traumatic sense, but doesn’t seem to acknowledge that the very concept of a teenager in an inherently unbalanced relationship with a full-grown adult would upset people. Franco’s all-consuming worry is simply that the revised versions might get TOSed again.
I’m not trying to fight with anyone or argue either. I just wish I knew what would be enough for me and my books to be left alone. Reporting and banning books seems to be an indie thing. It happens too often and it’s embarrassing to the book community. Does anyone ever see that in traditional publishing? No. Never. If a reader doesn’t like a book they read, they can write up a review and move on. That’s all they’re entitled to and nothing more. Not to dictate and control someone else’s life. Yet, here we are.
[…]
I changed what I could to prevent the books being reported again, but I still can’t help but feel like it will happen regardless. I’m so stressed about it. Majority of people posting about me or reporting the series admittely [sic] had never read the books. What’s to stop them from doing it a second time? I’ve been an anxious mess and worrying so much that I’m running on fumes it’s going to happen again even after all the time and money and emotions that bled from me to revise it.
In fact, looking over her posts, that’s the oddest thing about it. In the aforementioned 2016 blog post, Franco said that what made her hesitate wasn’t the age gap,or the power imbalance, but the prospect of getting the gymnastics wrong. In fact, while she goes to great length about how she wanted to depict gymnastics in its full breath and depth, the way other novels haven’t, and about how she wanted something hot and sexy, and how she wanted a slow burn, she doesn’t really talk all that much about why it was so important not only for Adrianna to be underage, but for Adrianna and Konstantin to have sex when she’s underage.
If you are going to try to tackle something this controversial, you have to be willing to anticipate how people will react. You have to be willing to talk about what motivated you, and why this was the story you wanted to tell, and why it was so important to tell it in that particular way. But then, reading the aforementioned 2016 post, Franco seems to think that the problem people have with her series is “their blatant dislike for the age gap,” rather than the female lead’s age and innately imbalanced power dynamic.
It would be one thing if she wrote that thing for herself, or on a specific fetish site catering to something like this. But she chose to release it to the general public, even with disclaimers. So long as you are releasing something to the pubic and making money off of it, the audience’s concerns can’t just be waved aside, because it is no longer just about you. And while I get wanting to preserve one’s vision, there is something to be said to listening to feedback and trying to improve your work based on that feedback. If there is one thing being a white reporter covering majority-black neighborhoods taught me, it’s that there there’s always opportunity to learn
I would hope that Franco would eventually learn something from this, that she would be more mindful of the broader implications and impact on her works… But I’m not holding my breath. She clearly still has fans, and there seemed to be enough demand for her to release the final book of the series to mostly positive reviews. Alas, she doesn’t have much of an incentive to do anything different.
I will close this post by saying that, if you’d like to read about an a female high school athlete who engages in risky behavior, has a bad relationship with her mom and dates an older Russian man, Just a Girl by Carrie Mesrobian is a much better choice. Rianne is a much more interesting, complex and sympathetic protagonist than Adrianna, there is no power imbalance, Mesrobian actually did her homework on Russian culture, and it’s just objectively better written.