Archive for: June, 2009

February Book Club: The Edge of Impropriety, by Pam Rosenthal

Jun 14 2009 Published by under Reviews

Welcome to the inaugural February Book Club review, with reviews by Tumperkin of Isn’t It Romance?, Meriam of Rape and Adverbs, and RfP of Read for Pleasure all reading and reviewing the same book. This particular book was RfP’s selection. If you haven’t done so, please check out Meriam’s, Tumperkin’s and RfP‘s reviews of The Edge of Impropriety (if they aren’t up yet, they will be very soon!).

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My Take in Brief: While I am glad I read this book, and certainly appreciated the skills of the author, I was not very engaged with the characters and did not enjoy it as much as I’d hoped. I wonder whether my tepid reaction to this book reflects my own imprisonment within genre boundaries.

Setting: Prologue in Italy, a decade or so prior to the main action, London, about 1830.

Characters: Marina Wyatt, age 36, is the beautiful widowed Countess of Gorham.  A popular novelist who takes a young lover every Season, Marina has a slightly scandalous reputation, but keeps a high enough social standing to maintain her credibility and her invitation to Almack’s, which provides fodder for her fictionalized accounts of upper crust doings. When we meet her, Marina is trying to use her friendship with the handsome and sought after (but, at age 25, a immature and superficial) Sir Anthony Hedges — who wants to become her lover –  to stay on this knife’s edge.

Jasper James Hedges, late forties, is a classicist and antiquarian. He’s a snob, dismissive of novels like the kind Marina writes, and of the trappings of the ton in general. He is Anthony’s biological father, having had a disastrous affair with Anthony’s mother, his sister in law, but after a tragic accident, has raised Anthony and his younger sister, Sydney, as their “uncle”.

Helen Hobart, Sydney’s proper and uptight governess, is secretly in love with Anthony, and this couple provides the secondary romance.

Plot: Marina tries to drum up publicity and thus sales for her latest novel, the hero of which is modeled after Anthony, by having a public falling out with him. She needs the money not only to maintain her lifestyle, but to pay off blackmailer Gerrald Rackham, who knows about her past as the pre-marital mistress of her late husband, and as an Irish girl willing to do what it took to improve her situation. Though a despicable and greedy keeper of dark secrets, Gerrald is not just in it for the money: he’s in covetous love with Marina, and attempts to foil her affair with Jasper.

For his part, Jasper comes to London, which he usually avoids, to talk to Marina’s publisher (a connection enabled by Anthony) about a writing a book.

When they meet, Marina and Jasper are instantly attracted and begin an affair, which they plan to keep secret, for the duration of the London Season.

In the meantime, Anthony is choosing between potential wealthy brides, while noticing that his irritation and interest in his little sister’s governess is morphing into something else entirely.

Racy Romance Review:

Before RfP mentioned this book, I had never heard of it or the author. So I came into the book cold, and I’m coming in to this review cold, not having read my co-conspirators’ reviews. I’m guessing I will be the outlier on this one, but we shall see…

It’s clear from the cover art (a detail from 18th century English portraitist Sir Thomas Lawrence), to the blurbs (Booklist and Library Journal), to the title, that this book is intended to work on some level beyond the usual Historical Romance.

Reading the book confirms its literary ambitions. Rosenthal has a very distinctive prose style that will either make you weep with admiration and joy over its allusiveness, its lyricism, and its erudition, or will make you want to rend your garments in frustration. I’m sorry to say I am in the latter camp. More on that later.

TEOI is, on the face of it, quite conventional. It’s set in Regency era London.  And, despite some red herrings, the real conflict, the one that eventually does threaten the relationship, ends up being whether the hero will reject the heroine because of her sordid past. The secondary romance between a rake with unplumbed depths and a stern governess with hidden charms is also hardly new.

But one of the things I really liked about TEOI was that these familiar settings and conflicts were rendered almost unfamiliar. There is the obligatory dinner party, the ball, and a stint on Rotten Row, but almost all of the interactions between the h/h take place in her bedroom, at night. The hero and heroine are not just older, but mature, both physically and emotionally. Marina wants to keep her social standing not for its own sake, but mainly (I think) to keep writing. She’s independent and strong, sexually confident, very unusual and very likable. Jasper wants their affair to stay secret and disapproves of her past, not because he’s judgmental, but mainly (I think) to protect his foster children’s reputations. I wasn’t sure what attracted Marina to him.

I also enjoyed the way the characters are connected in intricate and believable ways. The relationships between Jasper and Anthony, and between Anthony and Marina, matter significantly to both the primary and secondary romance. It doesn’t feel like they were forced into each other’s orbit at the author’s behest, but rather like you’ve just walked into an ongoing series of natural relations. The world is very believable in every way.

Another thing I liked about TEOI was its attempt to deal with some larger issues. There’s no reason at all why romance can’t do that. Marina and Jasper are extremely reflective and self-aware, and through their inner monologues, and their discussions with each other, questions are raised, albeit briefly and tentatively in most cases, about the meaning of aging, the value of propriety versus integrity, the definition of literature, and even (less successfully) the obligations of imperial nations to return artifacts plundered during their expansion (a belated attempt was made to paint Jasper to the colonizer and Marina, due to her Irish origins, as the colonized. This seemed to be a stretch).

A theme that ran through the text — between the on dits and Marina’s novels, lots of stories floated around — was the question of the stories we tell about ourselves, and that others tell about us: which story is ours? This made sense, especially when the writer, Marina, was thinking about it.

Marina and Jasper take to each other at first sight, embarking on a no strings affair, and while I really enjoyed their forthright, intelligent, and often amusing rapport, the cover copy led me to expect a very different relationship. I expected the tension in their relationship would be generated by Marina’s relationship with Anthony, (the blurb says “intrigue and betrayal”) and by the “edginess” of their sexual adventures (TEOI is billed as an “erotic novel”, and promises us “a dangerous voyage to the edge and beyond”).  In fact, not much tension is generated by either of those things. While I appreciated the attempt to make realistic use of their ages (difficulties getting out of tubs, out of clothes, sore hips, etc.), and understood what the author was going for when she had them making allusions to Greek art during sex, Little Jessica yawned and asked me to wake her when I got round to reading Kiss of a Demon King. My reaction made me wonder to what extent my own physical response, at least to erotic fiction, is tethered to social norms on the one hand, and/or to fixed expectations of the subgenre.

The relationship between Jasper and Marina doesn’t really progress at all, and they are so intellectual and thoughtful, only feeling emotions, when they do, through the lens of reflective distance, that I found myself not generating much emotion for them. Despite the amount of sex, this is just not a very passionate, emotional affair. Again, I wonder if I also felt like the microscope was on them so closely during their many bedroom scenes, that I didn’t really know either of them as well as I would have liked.

For example, here we are almost at page 200 (the affair began very early in the text) of a 300 page book, and we have this thought from Marina, who has just discovered that she will be outed by her blackmailer unless she sleep with him, and plans to leave town, and her lover, forever:

A pity, though, she thought as she entered her bedchamber and shut the door behind her, about her affair with Jasper Hedges. For she must admit she would have preferred if that had lasted out the Season.

The span of time between early spring and midsummer … as long as one needs …

Was that really all the time one needed?

She’d have plenty of time in France to answer that question.

But as for the following seven days in London — and especially the nights — she’d just have to make the time as memorable as she could.

If the heroine feels this way about the affair, why should I get worked up about it? Or is my expectation for drama and intensity in the genre based on the usual youth of the hero and heroine, or maybe (relatedly) on genre expectations that are unfairly restricting?

Now, something about the writing.

One of my favorite authors is Virginia Woolf. Woolf writes novels that are very conventional in many ways, but she emphasizes character, not plot. And the way she does character is also very unique: very internal, very little external action, very impressionistic. Woolf captures subjectivity like few others: we get to know Woolf’s characters as if we were sitting inside their minds, grabbing bits of thoughts and images as if they were floating by on a sea of consciousness. As I read The Edge of Impropriety, I imagined that Rosenthal had just come off a Woolf binge when she wrote it.

In TEOI, everyone is thinking all the time about their own thoughts and feelings, or about someone else’s. Sometimes this interiority worked wonderfully well. For example, here:

[Anthony] doubled the phaeton back upon the path to return to where they’d begun — to the very superior governess herself. Catching sight of her against a stand of graceless, leggy shrubbery, he was surprised to find himself oddly comforted by the picture she made. Perhaps because she, at least, had nothing of that forced husband-hunting brilliancy about her, as she stood tall, lonely, and pensive in the soft, spring afternoon light.

Notice the line, “he was surprised to find himself thinking”? That was constant. I was amazed these characters could walk across a room without knocking something over, so busy were they reflecting on what they were thinking and doing all the time. Here’s an example from Jasper’s head:

Faces swam before his inner eye: John’s, Celia’s, and now another one. He blinked. She didn’t belong in his thoughts right now. She oughtn’t be part of the us he’d been thinking about.

Even sex didn’t put a stop to the constant erudite inner monologue:

Damn, was that nasty little critical voice really going to intervene again, at this moment of all moments? It wasn’t fair — and yet the little voice wasn’t stupid. Because what it was telling her was, To hell with milk-and-water words like taken, Marina; the correct word for what this gentleman is doing is fucking you, and if you can’t call a fuck a fuck you shouldn’t call yourself a writer.

I understand that characters in an erotic novel have to think while they fuck. It wouldn’t be fun to read a blank page. But do they have to think about the things they think? This kind of reflexive self-consciousness is not our normal mode of being in the world — not even for writers and scholars. It feels more artificial and intrusive of the author to have Marina think about her inner voice, than to have her just think with it (“Marina realized she was not being taken, she was being fucked.”) (Ok, I’m no great shakes at writing, but you get the idea.)

And this example brings up another aspect of the writing that didn’t work for me: the obsession with words. It’s one thing for Marina to have this obsession (the difference between “fucking” and “taken” above), but does every other character have to have it?

Here’s Jasper, thinking about his clothing for the ball:

No wonder he’d procrastinated. Ha, procrastinated. Froze in terror would be more accurate.

And, again, from Jasper’s POV, during sex:

They both sputtered with laughter at that, though, at the silly little double entrendre of stiffening up.

Jaspar pondering the meaning of a sigh:

Yes, I’m ready, was what the sigh had signified — to be opened, explored, discovered.

Feckless Anthony thinks about words, too:

Sydney’s been telling him how, on a certain trip to Bath, Miss Hobart had persuaded (though terrorized might have been a better word) a particularly slatternly innkeeper into taking a hot flatiron…

And here:

When they stopped to change horses … he hoped he’d be able to get some advice about the vehicle’s right wheel, that sort of wobble he was feeling — well that unevenness anyway. One probably wouldn’t call it a wobble…

Even the stern governess gets in on the act:

And he had gotten the carriage moving again, even if neither of them knew for how long it would last. And figured out how to use the tool…

Troublesome word — she’d encountered it once in that coarse meaning in her father’s library. In a translation of one of Juvenal’s Satires, a Roman senator’s tool was held up for ridicule for its length…

The style of this book is breathy, lots of ellipses, lots of italics for emphasis, or for taking words out of the narrative to examine them. I think it either suits you or it doesn’t. Tumperkin had a great post not too long ago about the emotional connection a reader has to a romance novel. I recognize to some extent (I probably missed a lot) the many allusions, the metaphors, the lovely turns of phrase, and other elements things that make up very distinctive and very thoughtful writing. This is definitely not one of those books you read and think, “Hmm. Somebody needed to make a mortgage payment.” But –and I am willing to admit this may well be the result of prejudices about what I am going to be reading when I read romance — that emotional connection to the hero and heroine was not there for me this time around.

11 responses so far

A Sookie Stackhouse Reader’s Verdict on Season 1 of HBO’s True Blood

Jun 14 2009 Published by under Sookie Stackhouse

Having read — and fallen in love with –  8 of the 9 Southern Vampire Mysteries by Charlaine Harris (I’m saving the latest for my vacation next week) featuring telepathic Louisiana barmaid Sookie Stackhouse and her vampire, shapeshifter, and faerie friends, I was curious about the HBO series True Blood, based on the books, which premiered in Fall 2008. Not curious enough to purchase a subscription to HBO or break any laws, I waited for the DVD. It came out recently, and I watched all 12 episodes of the first season over the course of a week.

I’m going to a premiere party for Season Two tonight, so I thought I would express my thoughts about the adaptation here rather than annoy people in person later (the other guests haven’t read the books).

What I liked:

1. Casting. Perfectly cast were Stephen Moyer (Bill), Ryan Kwanten (Jason), Sam Trammell (Sam), Chris Bauer (Andy Bellefleur), Lois Smith (Adele Stackhouse), and Alexander Skargard (Eric Northman). Even the minor characters were cast to perfection, especially Carrie Preston (Arlene), Michael Raymond-James (Rene), Jim Parrack (Hoyt Fortenberry), and Todd Lowe (Terry Bellefleur). Anna Paquin (Sookie) did grow on me, although I still wouldn’t call that perfect casting — she’s a good actor, but just not beautiful or statuesque enough to fit my personal image of the character.

2. Sets and setting. Places like Sookie’s house, Merlotte’s, Bill’s house, and Sam’s trailer, were exactly as described in the books and as I had pictured them, with additional touches that enhanced them.

3. The expansion of Jason’s storyline worked for me, mostly, thanks to the engaging performance of Ryan Kwanten. Same for Lafayette’s expanded storyline.

4. The violence of some* scenes was more visceral and scary than in the books, and I enjoyed that. I’m thinking of the Ratrays’ attack on Bill, or Sookie’s visit to Bill’s house when he’s entertaining the bad vamps. (*but see #4 below) The Vamps’ super fast movement was portrayed well.

5. Music: sometimes a bit heavy handed (playing “Devil in Disguise” when the murderer is shown with Sookie) , but a fun addition. Playing the Bangles’ Eternal Flame when Lafayette was about to have sex with his dorky vamp john was inspired.  Same for Bill’s Tuvan throat music and Amy’s Joan Baez.

What didn’t work:

1. Tara. This was one character expansion that failed utterly. I was bored or annoyed every time Tara was on screen. I hated Tara’s “attitude”. Tara’s vomit eating mother. Tara’s crush on Jason. Tara’s having sex with Sam (!!!!!!! — hate that storyline!). We fast forwarded through her scenes at the halfway point in the season.

2. It’s an ensemble. Sookie is just one among many characters. Jason and Tara get more screen time than Sookie. My favorite thing about the books is Sookie’s first person point of view. I am in love with her character, her view of the world, her personal growth. So for me, this show can never compare to the books for that reason alone.

3. Lack of humor. In the books, especially the first few, Sookie often overhears amusing thoughts, and her own take on the world is often humorous. There’s a quirkiness and a fantasy element that get almost entirely lost on the show. In True Blood, everything Sookie “hears” is vile. Even the irrepressible Eric is a big downer. It’s a lot darker than the books, which leads me to …

4. The show is unnecessarily and gratuitiously sexually explicit. Ditto for its goriness. I suppose folks want to make full use of the medium, but it’s not for me. This change in tone is signaled by the change in cover from the original to the show tie in:

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5. The sweat. Every character, in every scene, has a layer of sweaty sheen, and the men usually have armpit stains, regardless of whether they are working out or sleeping. Hair is also often greasy, especially on the men. No one looks clean in Bon Temps. I get it. It’s hot. But is there no A/C? As a bonus, everyone’s skin appears very bad. Am thinking of sending a case of Proactiv to the cast.

6. The Tribunal storyline. I am not one of those people who thinks film adaptations must be literally faithful to the book. Doing that often ends up being less faithful to the spirit of the book and shows a failure of imagination. But how on earth could it make sense that Bill would get in trouble for killing a vampire who stole from his vampire elder? If anything, Eric would be grateful to Bill.

In sum, I can’t say I was all that engaged. The show often seemed quite boring, actually. Was it because I had read the books, and knew how much of Sookie’s characterization was missing? I don’t know. The most interesting thing to me at this point is comparing the adaptation to the books. I can’t say if that will be enough to keep me watching.

I’ve got to get offline and think of something red to make for the party tonight. We have red lettuce and radishes growing in our garden, but something tells me they won’t do. Any ideas??

16 responses so far

Menstrual Cycles in Romance Writing and Reading

Jun 09 2009 Published by under Genre musings

Yes, I am going there. Mainly as an excuse to post one of my favorite scenes from one of my favorite movies. This is Hedwig, from Hedwig and the Angry Inch, playing the 9th stage at the “Menses Fair” (click here if the video isn’t working for you)

Hedwig

The effect of our monthly cycles has been greatly exaggerated, often to our disadvantage. To take just one recent example, conservative radio talk show host (any sentence that starts that way ends in idiocy, doesn’t it? Let’s see:) G. Gordon Liddy wondered on air last week whether Supreme Court nominee Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s judgment will be affected by her periods.

Yet, there’s no denying statistically significant correlations for many women between, for example, increased libido and ovulation, or mood changes and premenstruation. Just a few weeks ago, we had the news that women’s shopping habits are affected by their periods (women apparently shop more when we are premenstrual, to deal with negative emotions).

Of course, the effects of menstrual cycles intersect with a number of other factors. For example, one study found that women’s stress levels were impacted more by day of week than by menstrual cycle (Work days are more stressful. Really??!!). And, I can’t help but add, men have hormonal cycles too.

All those feminist caveats aside, I find it interesting that menstruation is so rarely referenced in romance (a point with which author Kalen Hughes agrees — see comments). I can’t recall any direct references to menstruation that are unrelated to babymaking. Are there contemporary heroines who deal with PMS, or just need to rest for an afternoon due to cramps or migraine? Are the activities of the erotica characters ever delayed or curtailed due to menses? (On that last point, I have to warn you against Googling “menstruation” with safe search off. Apparently there is such a thing as menstruation pornography.)

I guess one way to look at the lack of menstruation in romance is that if romance is escape, as everyone keeps telling us it is in this recession, one thing most women want to escape from is periods (if the rise in popularity of endometrial ablation and products like Seasonique are any indication). Another possibility is that writers and readers alike are silenced by menstruation taboos in North American culture. A third is the feminist interpretation: romance writers and readers refused to be defined by their mentrual cycles. Periods are as relevant to heroines’ characters and actions as having allergies. If it works for the story (i.e. the pregnancy plot point) use it, if not don’t. Just like any other bodily condition.

When it comes to readers, little is said of menstruation. I have seen readers chide romance for everything from unrealistic simultaneous orgasms to the tiny body dimensions of typical heroine. I have seen genitalia, bodily fluids, childbirth, and every kind of sexual situation imaginable discussed at length. But I cannot recall a discussion, or even a mention for that matter, of menstruation among readers.

Not being a writer, I can’t write that book about the heroine with PMS and the hero who rubs her temples like no one else can. But in a bold effort to remedy that lack of discussion among readers, I reveal to you what my reading schedule would look like if it were dictated solely by my menstrual cycle:

1. Ovulation: Erotic romance. Duh.

2. Premenstrual:

Type a. Well-exercised, nutriated, and/or medicated: safe to choose any subgenre.

Type b. Sloth, Doritoes, and red wine by the gallon: I need crazy emotional highs and lows. Only paranormal will do.

3. Menstruating:

a. Day one: Are you kidding? I am asleep.

b. Rest of days: Something easy and predictable, like a category. Or a comfort reread. Reading erotic romance deeply unfair to author and subgenre during this time.

4. Follicular phase: I am calm, energetic, and focused, ready for something more challenging, like a Jo Beverly, a Laura Kinsale, an SFF, or a Meljean Brook.

I leave you with this tampon commercial, the most complained about advertisement in Australia in 2008 (click here if the video isn’t working for you):

U Tampon Ad

34 responses so far

Review: Pleasure Unbound, by Larissa Ione

Jun 08 2009 Published by under Reviews

A very engaging, satisfying paranormal romance.

Pleasure Unbound

Series?: Yes, first in the Demonica series (currently 3 books).

Setting: Present day NYC. Demons live in another realm, Sheoul (hell) and travel to the human world using Harrowgates. Few humans know they exist.

Heroine and Hero: Tough leather clad human Tayla, early 20s, emotionally scarred from watching her mother raped and killed by a demon, raised in foster homes and rat infested warehouses, now fights demons as a Guardian with the Aegis, a group of humans dedicated to eradicating all demons. Eidolon is a 100 year old Incubus demon, approaching S’genesis, a stage of maturation when he must either become bonded to one mate or turn into a monster who impregnates as many females, willing or unwilling, as possible, only to be hunted down and killed by his brethren (that’s a hell of a motivation for marriage). Less fantastically, Eidolon is a physician who founded a demon hospital (Underworld General — UGH) with his two brothers, Shade and Wraith, and he is an extremely conscientious, good, loyal and empathetic. Oh, and hawt.

Plot: Tayla ends up at UGH and is treated by Eidolon. They share an instant attraction — and when I say instant attraction, I mean immediate hot sex — despite their mutual dislike. Eidolon escorts Tayla home (ostensibly to keep the loaction of UGH a secret) and on the way, a demon organ selling scheme is revealed, which they both want to uncover and stop. A side issue is the identity of Tayla’s father and the question of whether she had living relatives in town.

Conflict: Duh. She’s a demon slayer and he’s a demon. Also, he’s not sure if his attraction to her is “real” or a function of his impending s’genesis.

Word on the Web:

Book Binge, Casee, 4.5

Bitten By Books, 4.5 tombstones

Lurv a la Mode (Kmont), 4 scoops

Dear Author, Jia, C

AAR, Ellen, B-

Rip My Bodice, Sheridan, very positive

Happily Ever After (Christine), very positive

SciFiGuy.ca, mixed

Book Loons, 3 books

DarqueReviews, very positive

Ann Aguirre gives an author’s view, very positive

Mrs. Giggles, 87

Better Off Read, 6 stars

TGTBTU, Shannon C., B+

Fun Factoid: Ione gives  a great answer to that stupid wink wink question, “where do you get your ideas for sex scenes”:

Er, same place Stephen King gets his ideas for horror scenes! My imagination, the news, movies, the real world around me! My sex scenes are no more a reflection of my life than are the bank-robbing scenes in another author’s thriller.

Racy Romance Review:

I really enjoyed Pleasure Unbound. It was a fast paced, action packed, gripping story with a hot romance at its center. The plot twists were surprising and terrific. I kept thinking, “Wow. This is a great STORY.” At a very basic level, I had to know what was going to happen next.  I fell asleep with the book on my chest, I had the book in one hand while making toast with the other, and I read a few paragraphs at stop lights. I don’t know when I last felt that way about a paranormal romance.

Pleasure Unbound reminded me a little of Kresley Cole in the way that Ione doesn’t seem to take her world too seriously (consider the name of the demon hospital — UGH). You feel like the author is having fun and as a reader it feels infectious. Some of the stuff is ridiculous and over the top (the hero’s baby batter is an aphrodisiac, the heroine wears red leather and lace to fight, and there is a female named Skulk) (oh, and I totally looked that up in the Urban Dictionary. Baby batter is not in my everyday vocab) but I think if you take the book in a certain way, you can let that stuff slide. On the other hand, I should warn readers that PU a very violent story with some pretty gory scenes.

The sexual tension was high both because of Tayla and Eidolon’s mutual dislike, and because Tayla is sexually disfunctional. As a seminus demon, Eidolon is not having any of that. It takes 2/3 of the book for Tayla to be cured, despite several attempts. I know some readers felt that Tayla was cured too eaily, but come on people. This is paranormal romance. Several days and multiple sexual encounters in PNR is the equivalent in real life of 12 months of behavioral cognitive therapy and high doses of Wellbutrin. This is highly subjective, but I thought it was a very hot read.

Although Ione built the amount of world she needed, this is not the book for people who like a lot of detailed worldbuilding (the one exception would be the sheer variety of demons that populate it). One major question I had was how the Aegis, who got up close and personal daily with demons, had not figured out that some demons were good.

A major theme in the book is good and evil and how we figure out what they are. I like this kind of theme, but I did have problems with its execution.

The lesson Tayla learns, that any species, whether human or demon, can be good and bad, is an oldie but a goodie (Sookie Stackhouse learns the same thing about the supernaturals in the Southern Vampire Mysteries). I did scratch my head at times, however, when the acceptance theme of “we all do things we are programmed to do” and “we are what we are” (in the case of these quotations, a Soulshredder demon who tortures, rapes and kills victims.) reared its head. I felt a tension here. Take Eidolon: on the one hand, we are told he has incredible self-control because he was raised by Justice Demons.  Justice Demons are good because they are Justice Demons (“they are what they are”), but Eidolon is good because he was raised by Justice Demons (he is what parents, and later he himself, choses he be). Later, Eidolon will be powerless to resist his base urges when s’genesis completes — so he’s back to being what he is. No choice.

To say that demons have a morality, as Eidolon says they do, is to say that they have moral rules and a choice whether to follow them. Then to turn around and say demons are driven by uncontrollable instincts is to compare them to, say, nonhuman animals. This isn’t immorality — it is outside morality. Is is amorality (we don’t blame the lion when he eats a baby zebra. And we don’t praise him either.).  I find this tension all over paranormal romance — it is in the Sookie books as well, so Ione is in excellent company — and while I know the uncontrollable urges make for some sexy and edgy reading (those urges so often being sexual or aggressive — why is there never an uncontrollable urge to love, or make peace?) I find the two modes of being not well integrated in general in the subgenre.

Overall, though, I totally enjoyed Pleasure Unbound and will definitely read the next in the series.

7 responses so far

Review: Vampire Academy, by Richelle Mead

Jun 06 2009 Published by under Reviews

Are you sitting down? I am going to write a short review. I swear it.

vampireacademy

I listened to this one on audio, and it worked very well. The narrator, Stephanie Wolfe,  did a great job with most of the main characters (except Lissa, who sounded like she had lungs full of helium), even the Russian beau-hunk Dmitry.

Rose is a Dhampir, a vamp/human combo, in training to be a guardian of Lissa, a royal Moroi. Morois, who are endangered, are good vamps, with magical connections to the elements. When they go bad, they become Strigoi, evil, super strong, pasty bloodsuckers.

When the book opens, Rose and Lissa have been on the run from Vampire Academy for two years, for reasons that become clear later. They are caught by a group of guardians, one of whom, Dimitri, has a huge bullseye around his character as Rose’s future love interest, and brought back to Montana (!).  The rest of the book takes place there. There’s a lot of high school stuff — classes, dances, cliques, rumors, burgeoning sexuality and “experimentation”  — which seemed to me to be handled well.

What made the story interesting to me was Rose, who is not only a total badass, physically, but also a very complex character who is both loyal, good, empathetic, and strong, and mean, superficial, needy and impulsive. Somber, conscientious Dimitri, 7 years her senior, becomes her trainer, and since Rose is a sexy wild child, you can imagine the dynamic. He’s pretty 2 dimensional, but then most hunky duster-clad bad boys are.

The world building was also very interesting, although I confess I was at a loss to understand why Dhampirs would dedicate their lives to Moroi. (It’s funny, surf the web and you find some people saying Mead has done something very new, others say it is all old hat. I have no idea.) Rose’s bond with Lissa is extra strong even for their world since Rose has the ability to get inside Lissa’s head, and since Lissa drank Rose’s blood while they were on the run (the latter described using overt sexual imagery). I find this set up very intriguing — it’s clear that if Rose had to choose between Lissa and anyone else, even a lover, she would choose Lissa. Dhampirs are kind of like Jedi knights. The fact that there will be no marriage or children in Rose’s future (unless she wants to disgrace herself and get drummed out of the guardian corps) is a price she is willing to pay. So those readers looking for romance will be disappointed, at least in this first installment (there are two more).

The plot revolves around the increasingly dire threats to Lissa, and the development of Lissa’s own powers, some of which are quite dangerous and extraordinary even for Moroi. They draw the attention of some unsavory characters. On the quotidian level, Lissa herself has to struggle with a Breakfast Club scenario — choose to be popular or choose to be herself and lose social status.

I will say that I watched the movie Twilight just after I finished Vampire Academy, and maybe the comparison is unfair (I haven’t actually read the book Twilight) but it seems to me that Mead’s world is much more complex and interesting than Meyer’s. Is there a Vampire Academy movie in the works? There should be.

7 responses so far

Review: Not Quite a Husband, by Sherry Thomas

Jun 05 2009 Published by under Reviews

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This review is spoiler free.

My Take in Brief: A beautifully written, deeply moving story of romantic renewal and moral repair set against the backdrop of a heartstopping journey across northwest India.

Setting: Victorian London and India, 1890s

Heroine and Hero: Bryony Asquith, brittle, socially awkward and emotionally scarred surgeon, and Quentin Marsden, popular, handsome and witty mathematician, playwright, adventurer.

Plot: The novel begins with a prologue, describing the courtship and short marriage of Bryony and Quentin. The first chapter begins with Quentin tracking Bryony down in India to notify her of a family emergency that requires her return to London. Most of the rest of the narrative takes place over the several weeks it takes them to get back to London, in the midst of the bloody Swat Valley Uprising.

Conflict: Something acute happened to cause the end of their marriage, and we find out what it is pretty quickly. But it was the botched handling of that conflict, and the underlying problems it represented, that consume Bryony and Quentin for most of the book.

Word on the Web:

Dear Author, Jennie, A

Everybody Needs a Little Romance, very positive

Dear Author, Jane, B-

Author Courtney Milan, very positive

My Thoughts on Nothing Much At All, very positive

TGTBTU, Lawson, A

Sakura of Doom, Oyceter,  negative (you should read this one. She complains about the vanishing of people of color in the book)

A spoiler full but super discussion at Could it Be… Seton?

Fun Factoid: Ms. Thomas on her work in an interview at Romance Bandits:

I think it is not so much heroes and heroines with shared pasts that draw me, but the idea of how do you deal with a relationship that has gone off the rails. How do you recover from that kind of disaster and rebuild? That fascinates me. It goes to the very foundation of what romantic love is. Is it a lesser entity–rising with lust and waning with time–or is it grand and beautiful, capable of the kind of forgiveness, understanding, generosity, and commitment that make life worth living?

I would like to believe the latter so I aspire to it in my books.

Racy Romance Review:

Anyone who is reading this right now has likely already read the Dear Author and TGTBTU reviews, so I’m not going to reinvent the wheel here. I will say that if you liked Thomas’s two other books, Private Arrangements and Delicious, you will like this one, and if those didn’t work for you, I don’t think this one will, either. For my part, I thoroughly enjoyed all three books — they are all keepers for me.

In this review, I want to focus on what makes Thomas different from other historical romances authors I have read, and in ways that push at the boundaries of the genre:

1. Thomas’s writing achieves something remarkable: it evokes the lushness of Ivory or Kinsale while being spare and straightforward. Here’s an example:

She paid the cabbie and stood for a moment outside her house, head up, the palm of her free hand held out to feel for raindrops. The night air smelled of the tang of electricity. Already thunder rumbled. The periphery of the sky lit every few seconds, truant angels playing with lucifer matches.

And another:

From time to time, she would be at the most incidental activity — lacing her boots or reading an article on the adhesion of the intestine to the stump after an ovariotomy — and a physical memory would barrel out of nowhere and mow her down like a runaway carriage  … But mostly those upsurges of memory were nothing but ghost pains, nervous misfires from limbs that had long been since amputated.

The writing is not just lovely, it feels fresh and different. Thomas tries to find new and different ways to say the things that must be said in any romance novel. To take just two examples: it’s not “musk” between Bryony’s legs, but “turmeric tang”, Bryony’s hair is not “silky”, but”spread like the cape of Erebus”.

2. Readers of PA and Delicious know that Thomas favors a nonlinear narrative, or, at least nonlinear-lite, aka flashbacks. I like them. I feel they are now a part of the pop culture landscape — certainly well fitted to our multimedia, multitasking lifestyles — and serve as a way to make romance seem less stodgy than it really usually is. Think of Chuck Palaniuk’s Fight Club or Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient (or heck, Virgina Woolf). Anyone who enjoyed Pulp Fiction, Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Memento, Magnolia, Run Lola Run, Waking Life, Mulholland Drive, etc. has enjoyed a nonlinear narrative.

I am not saying Thomas uses flashbacks just to do something edgy.  A literary argument in favor of nonlinearity says it better reflects the ways our thoughts and memories and feelings actually work.  A story that’s about reinterpreting the past and reforging new bonds out of broken ones is served very naturally by flashbacks that connect the present action with the past.

3. Thomas has come to specialize in broken relationships, for reasons the quote above indicates. This is another way in which she is doing something different. Yes, we have other romances which feature a couple who have known each other in the past — maybe they had a one night stand as teens, for example — but it’s not common to find a couple who have known all of the full-blooded adult joy of romantic lovers, only to have it destroyed. This, of course, is what makes her books so heartbreaking to read, and this woman breaks my heart at least 3 times per novel (with the result that the poignant moments are that much sweeter. A favorite in this book is when Bryony notices Quentin at a funeral of one of her family members).

Most romances are about clean slates, in the case of the virgin heroine, the rake who has never known love. Or somehow the romance makes them clean, as in the heroine (or, in paranormal, the hero) who has been abused. I think what Thomas is doing here is different. At one point, Quentin says, “For the thousandth time, he wished he’d just met her.” But he didn’t, and all the muddy water under the bridge of their relationship doesn’t just flow out to sea with their first post-divorce coupling. It’s more like a windy lake they will always be navigating. But without it, they will be run aground. You can’t really begin anew. The past is done. All you can do it try to make new sense of what happened, give it new meaning in the context of the present.

Other books that feature separation often involve Big Misunderstandings. For example, in Judith McNaught”s Paradise, a book I also have on my keeper shelf, it’s the machinations of the heroine’s cruel father that keeps the lovebirds apart. Typically neither the hero nor heroine is truly guilty or truly flawed. Or if there is a flaw, it’s a flaw that somehow contributes to the desirability of the character, like the too-ambitious or too-driven-by-revenge hero. It’s a flaw but it’s also sexy.

In contrast, Thomas’s characters tend to be fully human, and therefore truly flawed. Quentin does something in this book that shocked my socks off. In any other book, a new hero would have been introduced to heal the heroine’s pain, and Quentin would have been given a red card, never to appear again in this novel or the next. Another envelope-pushing move.

Yet, while the event that separates Bryony and Quentin is his doing, the greater journey is taken in this book by the heroine as she comes to see that her own character flaws not only helped pave the way for Quentin’s moral error, but prevented their overcoming it when it happened. I can’t say more here without spoilers, but suffice to say that this book asks us to ponder what we mean when we say marriage vows. Are we vowing to do certain actions and refrain from others, or are we vowing to try to be a certain kind of person for our lover?  Bryony is truly unlikable at points in this book. She’s strong but not resilient, intelligent but not wise, educated but ignorant of her own feelings and motivations, at times selfish, vain, and cruel, and, deep down, heartbreakingly vulnerable and dependent. I loved her.

4. Thomas also manages to reverse gender roles in a Victorian romance and make it believable. Quentin is the nurturer, the emotional one, the domestic, while Bryony is the driven, take charge surgeon, the one who masks her feelings with an expression Quentin dubs “the Castle”. In this book, the heroine loves the hero for his beauty, not vice versa. It must be said, as much as everyone hates these terms: if there was ever a beta hero, Quentin is it. Yet he’s never less than totally appealing for this reader, because he is exactly what Bryony needs. And they’re both witty and funny when they want to be. Here’s an exchange near the end:

They are in bed, and Bryony is talking about the penis from a medical point of view — blood flow, arteries, etc.

She batted her eyelashes at him. “Don’t you want to know how I know all this?

“No.”

She laughed again. “Anatomy classes. Muscles and blood vessel diagrams. And dissections.”

Not dissections. He moaned. “I was afraid you’d say that.”

She lovingly wrapped her other hand about him. “I used to think the penis was very boring, tedious, and of no consequence whatsoever.”

“The ignorance of our educated women is absolutely shocking.”

There’s a point that I think all of us reach with some writers, a kind of unconditional enjoyment that leads you to overlook or minimize problems while reading. But writing a review forces your attention on weaknesses. Here they are, in my humble opinion (1) I did think Quentin’s bad behavior was so out of character that it needed something more, from his point of view, to help me fit it in with the otherwise utterly perfect man and husband he was. (2) I would also have liked to better understand Quentin’s love for Bryony in the early days.  (3) Bryony’s estrangement from her father and their abrupt reconciliation did not resonate with me as I suspect they were supposed to.

Thomas was thinking about the movie The Painted Veil while writing this, and I was thinking of The English Patient while I read it. So much of what caused them problems was London society, that it made sense to put them in a foreign land. Bryony and Quentin faced mortal peril on their journey (in case you are wondering, Thomas can write some great action scenes. I was truly terrified for the h/h during one of them in particular) –  but they had to in order to be jarred out of their estrangement.

As Quentin says at one point, “in that crucible, everything between him and Bryony had been distilled to the very essence: Only love had mattered, nothing else.” This book makes you believe it.

18 responses so far

Quite a Husband on Not Quite a Husband by Sherry Thomas

Jun 03 2009 Published by under Genre musings

I interviewed my husband about Sherry Thomas’s new release, Not Quite a Husband, which I loved (my review to come). NQAH follows the adventures of divorced couple Bryony Asquith and Quentin Marsden as they journey back home to England through the North-west frontier of India at the time of the Swat Valley Uprising.

Here’s a nice summary of the event, from a longer article connecting those events of over a century ago to current events (the Swat Valley, now part of Pakistan, is where Taliban forces have led an uprising to enforce sharia law in the past two years):

The uprisings of 1897 began in the Swat Valley, when Sadullah a local holy man (the British, predictably, dubbed him the ‘Mad Mullah’) preached the need for jihad against the foreign government in mosques and marketplaces. In late July, at the height of summer heat, tens of thousands of armed Pathans attacked government forts. After having ignored the trouble building up along the Frontier for several years, the authorities in the summer capital at Simla finally decided that a major response was required.

Three full battalions designated as the Malakand Field Force were sent from the plains up into the hills. Accompanying them as both soldier and free-lance reporter for London’s Daily Telegraph was young Second Lieutenant Winston Churchill.

By the end of August, the force had reached the difficult and remote upper reaches of the Swat Valley. But Mullah Sadullah had evaded capture and was now raising followers in a wide area, reaching down to the Kyber Pass well to the south. Storming through the Pass, tribesmen threatened to occupy Peshawar itself — unless government forces were withdrawn from Swat.

Eventually the Raj put an even larger army of 60,000 well-armed men into the field. After bitter fighting with heavy government losses the British undertook a ruthless scorched-earth campaign in which villages, wells and orchards were levelled. The approaching winter more than British might forced the rebellious tribes to sue for peace … for the meantime.

My husband is a history professor, who specializes in the British Empire of the late Victorian period. Although his exact specialty is the Boer War (more on that below), he knows something about India as well.

Here’s me picking his brain:

Me (reading NQAH on my Kindle): Were there such things as “punitive expeditions”?

Him: Punitive uprisings were when the British army would punish an African or Asian power which they felt had challenged their authority in the region. That’s in your book? Really?

Me: Yes, really.

Him: Wow.  Are you reading a romance?

Me (in a warning tone): Yes.

Him: Hunh.

Me (pondering chucking my Kindle at his head. Deciding against it. After all, it’s a pretty expensive little toy): Yes, and the descriptions of the siege of this British fort are really chock full of details, and intense, yet easy to follow. Having read both of your books, I can say with authority that she gives you a run for your money.

Him: Let me see that. [Grabs my Kindle and reads several pages of the siege]. I’m impressed. She’s got the bit right about the rebels using older weapons with black powder against British soldier using breech loading weapons and smokeless powder. That would be an easy detail to miss. And look, the hero’s reference to the Russians — the competition between Russia and Great Britain for control of Central Asia was referred to as “the Great Game.” Kipling wrote about it in Kim (1901). [Hands Kindle back to me]

Me [Thrusting Kindle back to him]: Keep reading.

Him: Well…. it’s really very accurate, as far as I can tell. Remember this is not my area. I would think you only need to read one or two primary sources to get it right.

Me:  She has.

Him: Hmmm. Well, here’s one thing that strikes me. The way she describes it, it’s as if soldiers are firing all the time. That could have happened. But it would have been unlikely. Until the mutiny there was an Indian army run by a private concern, the British East India Company, but afterwards power over the sub-continent was transferred directly to the government in London.  A government appointed viceroy ruled locally for the cabinet and later the Queen in 1876 was crowned Empress of India. The Indian Army became part of the British army. You find white officers but you don’t find many other whites in the army. The army was predominantly an army of Sepoys, a term used for native soldiers.  Upon India’s very large and disparate population, the British attempted to impose a kind of order that made sense to them, by elevating certain groups or “races”, like Sikhs, which they deemed to possess “martial” qualities above other more “feminine” races.  But still the army was predominantly a native army.  This was always a concern for both civil and military authorities.  So in 1897-8, the British, relying on soldiers who they often under-valued, utilized very traditional square tactics in which the officer would give the order to fire. This way the officer could control the movement and the fire of their troops. Kind of like in the movie Zulu.

[He totally typed in about half of that last comment after the fact. Sheesh. Never let a source review your interview.]

Me: Here’s something that struck me: the heroine thinks that using Dum-Dum bullets violates the Geneva Convention. I thought the Geneva Convention came later?

Him: You’re not asking me to go through this and find errors? And then blogging about it? This isn’t history. It’s fiction. And I’m not a jerk. Usually.

Me: No no no. I heart this book. We’ll talk about other things in a minute.

Him: Did you just use “heart” as a verb?

Me: Yes, but I reserve it for very special books.

Him: [Looking at me with worry.]: Ok, there was an early Geneva convention, in 1864, but it covered mostly the care of wounded soldiers and prisoners of war. The Geneva convention we talk about today is, of course, largely the creation of the post war (World War II) world. At any rate, the Geneva Convention did not regulate weapons. That would have been the Hague Conventions, the first of which was 1899, two years after the action is taking place in the novel. Although certainly there were legal discussions in the 1890s about acceptable weapons in combat.  But I would have to double check to be 100% positive. She has done a lot of good research.  By the way, Winston Churchill, whom you say she relied on for this book, ironically was caught with Mark IV, or dum-dum bullets, during the Boer War.

Me: How about race relations? Why would Indians have agreed to do all of this scut work for the British travelers?

Him: Well, like everywhere, people need money.  The British imposed a rigorous tax system over much of India or utilized systems which were in place prior to their control.  Many Indians even sold themselves into indentured servitude. They ended up all over the world, in South Africa, the Caribbean, and elsewhere. Perhaps some viewed this as a better option.

Me: What do you think of the word “coolies”?

Him: The English would have referred to most Indians (and Chinese as well) as “coolies” but a historian today would never use that word, at least not without scare quotes. It’s like the n word. Also, the author suggests, when she writes, “The Swatis don’t have much of a reputation as fighters — the other pathans look down on them”, that ethnic and class divisions were inherent among Indians, but it’s very complicated.  British rule helped establish these distinctions and hierarchies. As I mentioned, the British had a very strong belief in the idea of “martial races”, that some Indians were capable of doing certain things, like fighting, others not so much. The British themselves had a sense of who was a better fighter.

Me: You have read and taught a lot of postcolonial literature and historiography. From that perspective, what do you think of a book like this?

Him: Well, someone like Chinua Achebe would say she is using the Orient merely as a backdrop to tell a story about white people that will engage white readers. It is a colonial narrative. She’s writing for a certain audience.

Me: Yes, I think that’s how it functions as well. I think a lot of romance writers start with the characters and then put them somewhere. The focus is on the romance, and the romance is normally between white characters. On her blog, Thomas talks about choosing among three different dramatic settings for her story, one of which was South Africa during the Boer War. She says that it didn’t meet her needs for a dramatic landscape. Care to comment?

Him: Well, no, there’s nothing as dramatic as the base of the Himalayas in South Africa. But the Kalahari desert, the coastline, the Drakensberg mountains – these are certainly very dramatic. The kopjes (hills) and the number of passes the British tried to control during the war could be an interesting setting.

Me: Ah, yes, kopjes. Are you still mad at me for summarizing your first book as “They ran up the hill. They fired. They ran down the hill. The end.”?

Him: Until just now, I had forgiven you for that.

Me: Moving on. Give me some ideas for a romance set in South Africa during the Boer War.

Him: You should write one. I’ll help you. And we can test out the love scenes. [Leers.]

Me (witheringly): You clearly have no respect for the craft. Answer my question.

Him: Well, you don’t want to have a stereotype of the dashing cultured British officer sweeping rural hick Afrikaner off her feet by his charm. The Boers were a very tight knit old community, with very set morals.  A Boer woman may have gone off with a British man, but it would have been very rare. The thing to do would be to have a dashing young British officer — of which there would have been many because they were volunteers — and you could have an English nurse or an English colonial, or [really getting into it now. Shit. He looks like he's about to write a synopsis. Help!!] a Frenchwoman who was traveling through to go on a safari and then the war broke out. In Zulu they stuck some Swedish missionary woman in to the mix. There are plenty of ways to do it. It could be set in one of the besieged cities (Kimberly, Ladysmith or, the most famous — because it is the longest siege — Mafeking).

Me: Thank you for not waggling your eyebrows when you just said “missionary”. That’s a lot of self-control from you. One last question. You read historical fiction, when you are not reading bios of hippie musicians. What do you think about the issue of historical accuracy in fiction in general?

Him: Well, take this book. It is very unlikely that you would have a female surgeon, that she would be traipsing as a single woman throughout India, that she would know the things she knows about the political situation, and international law, and that her ex-husband would be not only a famous mathematician but also….. [mild spoiler] ……….. a spy who just happened to take aerial photos from a balloon of the very region they are in. …………..[end spoiler] But it works because (a) all of the background details are right (landscape, technology, warfare, clothing, etc.) and (b) nothing impossible is posited. There likely was at least one actual case of each of these people or events.  Sure, there’s only a very remote chance they would all happen this way, but you don’t get thrown out of the story because everything else feels right, it hangs together.

Me: Thank you for giving me the time  you would otherwise have used to watch Dr. Who edit your article. One last question. Do you remember this?

Wedding June 2006

June 1996

Him (smiling): Yep.

Me: Happiest day of my life.

34 responses so far

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