Archive for the 'Duelling/Joint Reviews' category

Joint review: The Italian’s Future Bride, by Michelle Reid

Feb 02 2011 Published by under Duelling/Joint Reviews, Reviews

Tumperkin read this one and asked me to chime in. I did, with my usual brevity.

First, Tumperkin:

Jessica, don’t take this the wrong way, but when I read this book, I thought of you.

Before I say more, let me contextualise the comments that are going to follow a little bit:

* Whilst Michelle Reid is not an autobuy author for me, I’ve read and enjoyed a number of her books in the past;
* She writes a particular brand of angsty, contemporary category romance (squarely within the HQPresents-paradigm) that I rather enjoy;
* This book suffers from “camel-back-breaking” syndrome i.e. the things I am going to complain about crop up in lots of other romances but sometimes, as a reader, a particular issue will come to a head when you read a particular book.

So what was the issue here, for me?

It started, when I read the following passage that takes place after the H/H have had a one night stand and realise they have not used a condom:

“Marriage comes before babies in my family,” he enlightened.

Marriage – ? “Oh, for goodness’ sake.” It made her feel sick to her stomach to say it, but – “I’ll take one of those m-morning after pills that – ”

“No, you will not,” he cut in.

She stood up. “That is not your decision.”

His silver eyes speared her. “So you are happy to see off a fragile life before it has been given the chance to exist?”

“God, no.” She even shuddered. “But I think it would be – ”

“Well, don’t think,” he said coldly. “We will not add to our sins if you please. This is our fault not the fault of the innocent child which may result. Therefore we will deal with it the honourable way – if or when it comes to it.”

Do I even need to say why I find this passage so objectionable?

Firstly, there’s the positioning of the morning after pill as equivalent to cold-blooded murder. Clearly there’s a whole debate about the morning after pill that segues into the debate about abortion. However, it’s not really that that I want to address. The thing that offends me here is the positioning of this complex issue, on which there are different views, as something which is essentially a “no-brainer”. Whilst the heroine raises the possibility of taking a morning after pill, it made her feel sick to her stomach to do so.

As if that’s not enough, we get a patronising, oppressive hero who decides that the heroine oughtn’t to have a say in what happens to her own body. Well, don’t think, he tells her, charmingly. And “We will not add to our sins if you please” … a prissy, paternalistic statement that made me want to eviscerate him.

For me, this strayed beyond the vocabulary of the standard domineering hero. This was the hero as a figure of authority (high status, older, male) and he was saying: don’t think, you have no say in what happens to your body, you will do as I say. To say it was a clear affirmation of the patriarchy circa 1956 would not, I think, be far off.

I want to emphasise again that this is not precisely an unusual passage to read in a romance of this type. And I don’t want anyone to infer that I am projecting particular views onto Ms Reid. I have no idea what Ms Reid makes of this particular issue. Further, many category romance plotlines (particularly in the Presents line) depend on core notions/ values that aren’t consistent with the social mores of the real world the reader lives in. (See this recent post on Teach Me Tonight, in which Laura Vivanco explores the divergence between reader values and book value ).

The passage above was extreme enough to prompt me to tweet about it, but even then, I think I’d have forgotten it had there been nothing else of note in the book As it was, however, the particularity of the morning after pill scene then proved to be just one example of a wider issue: the alarming control exercised by the hero over the heroine’s physical body. He has her followed when she goes out, telling her when she returns “I know where you have been… Tony works for me, not you”; When he takes her out to meet his friends and she strikes up a conversation with them, he takes her chin in his hand and turns her to look at him to say “You are here with me … don’t ignore me.” He acts as though he owns her:

His scrutiny paused right there and suddenly something else was adding to the turbulent mix. Rachel knew what he was thinking. She felt the muscles around her womb clench tightly as if it was acknowledging that it already belonged to him.

But if the heroine is a uterus on legs, at least she’s an attractive one. The H/Hs mutual lust in this book is – as is again typical in this paradigm – extreme. If only it wasn’t so completely rooted in the body, I might be able to believe there was something between them that might last more than five minutes.

So those were my thoughts.

Jessica?

************

Hey T!

Well, the scene you started with — the morning after pill — jumped out at me as well. In later passages that view of the morning after pill is concretized:

She felt like screaming! He really, truly and honestly believed that she was ruthless enough to calmly take something to rectify the wrong they had done, his wonderful fatalist attitude giving him the right to believe that his morals were superior to his own.

Why not tag her off as a woman who was capable of seeing off a baby before she was even sure there was one?

Later, the couple uses condoms, but this is inconsistent. If it is morally wrong to “see off” one possible (nonexistent, potential) baby, why is it not morally wrong to use condoms, which, like Plan B, attempt to “see off” another possible baby? In fact, it may be her moral duty not only to not attempt to prevent a contraception, but to have as many pregnancies as possible, a position memorably satirized by Monty Python.

Every sperm is sacred
Every sperm is great
If a sperm is wasted
God gets quite irate.

Perhaps they believe, wrongly, that Plan B not only prevents contraception, but prevents implantation in the uterus after conception, which would make it not a contraceptive but an abortifacient, at least under Vatican law (but not according to the AMA, which considers anything that prevents pregnancy in first 7 days after intercourse, regardless of whether conception and implantation has taken place, contraception). They would be wrong, by the way, on that. But characters can be factually wrong, as real people so often are.

And of course, characters can be conservative. Rachel is definitely very conservative sexually, at least when not actually having it, several times, with a complete stranger. For example, after their first conception-free interlude, Rafaelle — sensibly — asks Rachel about her sexual history, and she thinks, “she now had to endure the kind of conversation that belonged in a brothel!”.

Also, characters can be logically inconsistent, just like real people. Sometimes this makes for great reading.

Finally, also, as you say, none of this necessarily reflects the writer’s actual beliefs, and it wouldn’t matter to me if it did. The author’s actual beliefs are not relevant for reasons I set out in some detail here.

While I agree with you completely on the chilling and probably illogical nature of the ethical assumption in the Plan B scene, I think the failure of the hero and heroine to even consider Plan B was also problematic from a literary point of view in two ways, the first of which is minor, and the second of which goes to the major problem I had with this book.

First, these two do not know or like one another. Put aside their failure to use or even consider contraception. The big question is: how likely is it that a sexually experienced American woman of no discernible religious conviction, who is comfortable enough to sleep with a stranger, would feel this way about Plan B? And that the hero would as well? Very unlikely, but they have to feel this way for the plot to unfold. So, as a reader, it feels very forced.

Second, as you say, he takes control of her body and mind from the get go, and never gives it back. When they first meet, she kisses him (as part of an elaborate plan which I won’t go into) and just that one public kiss apparently licenses kidnapping her (“she’d never felt so afraid in her entire life … the panic had not subsided”), holding her hostage, and surveilling her for the rest of the book. After he literally drags her back to his apartment, they talk, and then she finds herself “being dragged down the hallway… her wrist still his prisoner … she had to follow where he pulled…”.

This woman gets nowhere except by being dragged or otherwise compelled by a man:

How did she get to Europe in the first place?

“No wonder Mark [the brother] dragged me back here.”

Rachel’s old boyfriend Alonso shows up at one point, and he, too takes immediate physical control of her: “Rachel found herself engulfed by the pair of arms…then found herself being kissed … She tried to pull back but he was not letting her. … And it was, just like old times, when he had used to sweep up in one fast car or another without a care while he waited for her to scramble in next to him. … Now it just scared her witless…”. And on and on.

You have already pointed out she is not allowed to think. He doesn’t let her speak, either. As you pointed out, mid book, he asks her if she enjoyed her day without him, and when she tries to answer, he interrupts her:

“I know where you have been,’ he cut in. “Tony works for me, not you.”

This takes place well after we are told that their relationship is now based on more than sex. Um, yes, it is also based on his power and control of her. Even in the last scene, he interrupts Rachel as she is trying to explain something, and instead of being annoyed, she thinks, “What a waste of breath.”

Rachel is constantly off balance, literally and figuratively. Reading about Rachel’s adventures was like reading about a bowl a bowl of jello, not a human being (these quotes span the entire book):

“the little tremor he could see happening with her lips”
“tense, apprehensive big blue eyes.”
“her legs had gone hollow”
“Rachel tensed … a strange little laugh”
“beginning to feel disturbingly hollow”
“taking a few shaky steps away from him”
“Rachel bit down hard on her bottom lip to keep it from quivering.”
“Rachel found herself coming to a trembling halt in yet another doorway.”
“Rachel’s stomach started rolling sickly.”
“…she tossed out helplessly”
“Her pink upper lip gave a vulnerable quiver.”
“… leaving her trembling and shaken…
“Rachel hovered, wanting to go to him but still too scared to move.”

She can’t even decide how she feels:

“She was too busy trying to decide if she was dizzy with relief because he hadn’t thrown her out to face the paparazzi alone, or if she was dizzy with fear over what was still to come.”

“Rachel stripped off her clothes and walked into the bathroom, not sure if she wanted to throw things or cry her eyes out.”

The woman cannot even pick a drink, answering “I don’t know — anything” when he offers one.

When Rafaelle forcibly kidnaps and confines her, she thinks: ““He had every right to be angry. She had no right to be anything at all.”

Rachel does eventually gain one active desire, that Rafaelle “want her for herself, and not just because she was here for the taking.” But she never questions why she is “here for the taking.” Why does this modern woman believe that one stolen kiss allows him unlimited access to her body?

And yet, in Rafaelle’s eyes, Rachel is not scared, uncertain, or worried. She is a femme fatale. A seductress who holds all the cards. He refers to her as “a fantasy siren most men would kill to possess”, “the sex nymph”. And how’s this for a good example of the double bind: “He’d been tempted by sirens far more adept at their craft.” If she’s bad at seduction, she’s bad, and if she’s good at it, she’s worse.

Another example of the double bind, and of twisted thinking, while I’m at it: in the opening scene, Raffaelle looks around at the women at a party, and thinks “Expensive tarts in expensive dresses were ten-a-Euro to buy in this room.” He mocks the women with “breasts implants and carefully straightened and dyed blond hair. They circled the room eyeing up victims…”.

And yet, Rafaelle, disgusted as he is with women, is obsessively interested in how they look. When he first meets the heroine, Rafaelle looks her up and down and wonders if the carpet matches the drapes. He checks out her cleavage. He even wonders about his stepsister, “Were Daniella’s breasts her own?”

Gee, why do some women expend so much effort on their appearance? Attracting a male partner has no bearing on anything in a woman’s life. And besides, men do not even care about these things. So inexplicable! Must be because they are greedy and vain. Ayuh.

But the main thing is really that this heroine begins and ends as a non-person, a trembling, reactive, rudderless ball of mush. A ball of mush who is supposed to be grateful that a handsome hero takes any interest in her at all, no matter how controlling and autonomy-defeating that interest is. And, because she appears in the romance genre, I am supposed to at least cheer for her, if not identify with her. I know that it is cool to like Presents. I know I am supposed to be clever and hip and ironic enough to read this thing as a coded fantastical message of female empowerment. But I just couldn’t.

21 responses so far

Review: The Graveyard Book, by Neil Gaiman (Mother and son joint review)

Sep 11 2010 Published by under Children's Books, Duelling/Joint Reviews

On the right is the US cover. I prefer the UK cover, left, which showcases Dave McKean’s wonderful artwork.

My 10 year old son and I enjoyed the movie Coraline, based on a 2002 book by Gaiman, but neither of us had read this author. So we read The Graveyard Book to see what all the fuss is about.

Jessica: How would you describe this book to someone your age?

David: This book is pretty advanced. It is scary and emotional. I wasn’t very enthusiastic about reading this book at first, mostly, well entirely, because I started this book last year but put it down. I was quite scared of it at first. It starts out with a man murdering an entire family, a notorious killer named Jack, not the ripper, just Jack. It’s the prospect of immediately jumping into a story where you look at the book and think, “what the,” that scares you.

Jack still has one more person to kill, the baby. He walks in to the baby’s room, but the baby has escaped.

The baby ends up in the graveyard. The ghosts see him and argue, but eventually take him in as an orphan and, more importantly, give him The Freedom of the Graveyard (the book will tell you more about that). They name him Nobody Owens, but he goes by Bod. The killer is still tracking Bod down, yet at the same time he has to cope with the fact he is not a regular boy.

Jessica: Was this an exciting book?

Yes. It started right at the beginning with action, and stayed action-packed all the way through. I really like that. I don’t like to wait a long time in a book for the action to start, like in the The Cargo of the Madalena, which I didn’t finish reading.

Jessica: What was the best part of the book?

The Ghoul Gate, the area where the ghouls get in to the graveyard from their own world. The ghouls end up taking Jack through the gate, and it’s a very scary place and a very exciting part of the book.

Jessica: Did you know the ghouls took the names of their first human victims?

No, but that’s irrelevant.

Jessica: In what ways was Bod’s life unusual?

He was raised by ghosts, in a graveyard. I already said that. He did not go to school (except for a little bit). He didn’t have homework. Lucky. He didn’t have a younger brother. Lucky. He didn’t have anything that humans that are regular would have. He didn’t even have clothes. He wore a sheet.

Jessica: In what ways was Bod’s life like a regular boy’s life?

He is alive. He has parents. He played like a kid.

Jessica: Which characters did you find the most interesting?

Jack, because he didn’t seem human. Silas was interesting. He was a protector of Bod. He was different from the graveyard ghosts. I didn’t get him that much. He wasn’t dead like the ghosts but not alive like Bod.

Jessica: Did you know Silas is a vampire?

No, not until you told me. I just thought he was a regular guy, but weird.

Jessica: Were there any parts of the book that you didn’t like?

Well, there was a big sort of festival or parade in the town. I thought it was irrelevant.

Jessica: Would you recommend this book to others?

David: Yes, of course. I really liked it. People who don’t like ghost stories may not like it, though. And I think you should be about ten years old to read it because of the scary parts.

Jessica: David has run off to play soccer, so I will just add a few of my own impressions:

1. It’s amazing how many different emotions Gaiman can evoke, even just in the first chapter, which veers from terrifying to cozy. I was shocked by the beginning, but then I remembered that many children’s stories begin with the orphaning of the protagonist. And the violence … well, we’ve been reading Grimm’s and this was nothing compared to some of those stories.

2. I spent a lot of the book wondering — and fretting over –  how nonphysical beings interact with the physical world. Perhaps nonphilosophers who read this book will not have quite that problem. Then again Descartes didn’t solve it, so why should I expect Gaiman to?

3.  I knew immediately that Silas was a vampire when he erased Jack’s memory in the first chapter.

4. In some ways this book reminded me of Buffy the Vampir Slayer (the TV show) or Harry Potter in the sense that the story works so effectively on two levels: the supernatural and the literal. Bod is a regular boy with many of the same problems that any real boy has — fighting for independence from his protectors, making friends, making impulsive bad decisions, etc. — but his situation is completely fantastic.

5. The Graveyard Book is episodic, sometimes to a fault. I agree with David about the festival chapter, and there are a few other subplots that seemed not to fit in all that well, as enjoyable as they were to read.

6. The writing is lovely. Gaiman’s voice is very unique, at least to my reading ears. Kind of comforting and horrifying at the same time. Here’s an excerpt from the fist chapter:

The toddler’s room was at the very top of the house. The man Jack walked up the stairs, his feet silent on the carpeting. Then he pushed open the attic door, and he walked in. His shoes were black leather, and they were polished to such a shine that they looked like dark mirrors: you could see the moon reflected in them, tiny and half full.

The real moon shone through the casement window. Its light was not bright, and it was diffused by the mist, but the man Jack would not need much light. The moonlight was enough. It would do.

He could make out the shape of the child in the crib, head and limbs and torso.

The crib had high, slatted sides to prevent the child from getting out. Jack leaned over, raised his right hand, the one holding the knife, and he aimed for the chest . . .

. . . and then he lowered his hand. The shape in the crib was a teddy bear. There was no child.

The man Jack’s eyes were accustomed to the dim moonlight, so he had no desire to turn on an electric light. And light was not that important, after all. He had other skills.

The man Jack sniffed the air. He ignored the scents that had come into the room with him, dismissed the scents that he could safely ignore, honed in on the smell of the thing he had come to find. He could smell the child: a milky smell, like chocolate chip cookies, and the sour tang of a wet, disposable, nighttime diaper. He could smell the baby shampoo in its hair, and something small and rubbery – a toy, he thought, and then, no, something to suck – that the child had been carrying.

See how Gaiman evokes the wonderful smells of a baby– cliched smells, really, in fiction, with all the comfort those cliches provide the reader — within a horrifying context?

We enjoyed it very much and will certainly read more by Gaiman.

18 responses so far

Joint Review: Cry Wolf, by Patricia Briggs

Sep 30 2009 Published by under Duelling/Joint Reviews

353-1crywolf

Tumperkin’s Take:

Alpha & Omega/ Cry Wolf by Patricia Briggs

Although Alpha & Omega and Cry Wolf are separate works, I’m going to review them together.  A&O, a novella, introduces the reader to Charles and Anna, the eponymous Alpha and Omega respectively.  CW picks up where A&O left off and takes us to a point where Charles and Anna commit to one another as mates.

My reading experience of these two books was somewhat unsettled by the fact that I read CW first, then A&O (my fault) which was rather like starting at chapter 4, reading to the end then going back and reading chapters 1 to 3.  The reason for this was that I decided to read this book after reading Janine’s comments regarding this series on Dear Author.  However, I didn’t pick up one bit of crucial information which was that the first bit of the story was in a separate novella.

Although I don’t read a lot of paranormal romance, a number of werewolf books have found their way into my hands over the years and as it happens, I find the werewolf the most appealing of the kitchen-or-garden-variety-paranormal-creatures out there.  I like the conceit of there being a pack and rules of behaviour that the characters have to negotiate their way round.  I like the animalistic stuff, both the horror aspect and the liberation-of-nature aspect.  One aspect I’m less keen on (though this is by no means limited to werewolves) is the fated mates trope.  The lack of free will can (doesn’t always, but can) detract from the romance for me.

I can also get impatient with external/non-romance plots. Undoubtedly that is because I am first and foremost a romance reader.  So whilst some readers may primarily appreciate the urban fantasy aspects of a book like this and find the romance of subsidiary appeal, for me, the non-romance aspects are essentially setting, against which I want to see the romance play out.

The story: Charles is the son of The Marrock, the leader of all werewolves a.k.a. Bran.  Charles is Bran’s enforcer, a strong alpha werewolf who essentially deputises for his father.  In A&O, Charles is sent to Chicago to investigate irregularities in Anna’s pack, following a call Anna made to Bran in defiance of her own Alpha, Leo.  Charles discovers that not only was Anna changed against her will, in defiance of werewolf laws, but that she has been brutally abused by her pack – and she is not the only one.

Anna believes herself to be a submissive wolf, ‘the lowest of the low’ as she describes herself.  But in fact Charles recognises her as an Omega, a wolf that is outside the normal pack structure and hence does not feel compelled either to fight or obey dominant wolves.   Instead, her presence has a calming effect on the whole pack.  Anna’s ignorance about her true nature and her brutalisation at the hands of her pack have, however, convinced her that she is submissive and she acts towards Charles accordingly. Charles recognises that Anna is his mate and tells her, letting her know that he wants to court her.

A&O is a pretty short novella, and the story moves along swiftly towards a final showdown with Anna’s pack during which Charles is wounded with slow-to-heal silver bullets.  At the end of A&O, 36 hours after their first meeting, Anna agrees to go back to Montana with Charles.  CW picks up the story at that immediate point.  Coming into the story at this point as a new reader, I was immediately frustrated.  I was unaware of the existence of the A&O novella but quickly realised that a crucial part of Charles and Anna’s story was missing.  At first I wondered if this was going to be told in flashback until I finally visited Janine’s post again and discovered A&O.  By that time, however, I was well into CW and ended up finishing it before A&O arrived.

The first few chapters of CW referred back to the events of A&O a fair amount so I was aware of the salient facts, but not the emotional journey the characters had been on.  This resulted in a fair bit of ‘had’-toned exposition at the outset that gave the story a static feel for me initially.  However, about a quarter of the way in, this stopped, and the story got going properly.  On the one hand, this meant that I could understand where the characters were coming from despite not having read A&O; on the other hand it struck me as unsatisfactory even if I had read A&O first.  To me, A&O and CW read like one book that had been artificially separated.

At the start of CW, Anna and Charles head back to Montana.  We see their first hours together as a couple and get a sense of two people who are strongly drawn to one another but whose natures and experiences make it difficult for them to overcome their barriers.  Anna has been abused and believes she hates sex.  Charles has cultivated a serious, silent persona and doesn’t get close to anyone because he knows he may one day have to take action against them.  He is used to going it alone and shutting others out.

Very soon after their arrival, Bran sends Charles on another mission, into the mountains of Montana in winter after what Bran thinks is a rogue werewolf killing hikers.  When Anna insists on accompanying the still-wounded Charles, Bran encourages her.  The rest of the novel is taken up with Charles and Anna’s investigation into the murders and what they find in the mountains.  In the midst of that, they become closer and the barriers begin to come down between them.  The novel closes with them marrying, albeit their relationship is still in its early days (and I gather, also the subject of the next book).

The external plots of both A&O and CW are decent enough.  However, as I said, I tend to concentrate on the romance arc.  This is one of the reasons I’m reviewing A&O and CW together – whilst there are two distinct external plots, there is a single romance arc.

I liked Charles a great deal.  He is strong and dominant without being overbearing.  He is kind too but because his kindness is hidden behind an cold mask, it is easily missed.  There are frequent references to his being impassive and difficult to read and we see other characters reacting to him quite negatively at times.  But Anna seems to understand him very well and not in a way that came across as facile.

Anna is a very raw character.  She’s been badly treated and she needs just what Charles is offering.  I quite liked the fact that whilst Anna’s natural character is clearly not submissive and subdued, she has been beaten down by her experiences.  One of my pet peeves is characters who don’t seem to be affected by bad experiences, as though it’s somehow weak to react in a natural manner to such things.  Briggs lets us see Anna (very gradually) build up her confidence and I had a smile on my face at the end of CW when she and Charles are playing together as wolves in the snow.

Which brings me to the fated mates thing.  This is never going to be a favourite trope for me.  Having said that, it worked fairly well for me in this book.  Charles and Anna did feel right for each other.  He was like a harbour for her, strong against the big bad world; and she was like the one person capable of really understanding him, partly because of her omega nature which didn’t react in the usual way to such a dominant wolf.  What I missed though – and what I look for in my romance reading – is that sense you get from the characters about why they have fallen for this particular person.  And that wasn’t something I got a strong sense of A&O/CW.  There are brief physical descriptions of the characters in A&O (though, frustratingly, not so much in CW) – Anna has ‘whisky-coloured’ curls and is ‘pretty’; Charles has long black hair and native-American features – but there is no sense of them taking delight in each other’s person, and I missed that.  I suppose the answer to that might be that it’s not necessary because Charles and Anna’s love goes deeper than the merely physical, but given that the mate bond seems to arise without consideration of physical or spiritual issues, that’s not an answer that fully satisfies me.

Briggs’ prose I found rather somewhat understated.  As I was reading, I was slightly disappointed by that.  However, later, when I reflected on it more, I came to think two things.  The first was that the dominant character in CW is Charles, and the flattish prose seemed to suit his silent, monosyllabic character.  The second thing was that I wonder if Briggs is one of those writers for whom the prose is a pure vehicle for the story.  I’ve found a few other authors’ prose to be like this – straight and almost journalistic in its effectiveness.  It can be slightly underwhelming as you read but then you realise that it’s delivering the story effectively.

All in all, I didn’t love this book but I did like it.  It’s a competent, enjoyable read that strangely grew on me more with hindsight.  And I liked the characters.  In the end though, I craved more romance and that’s more a question of reader preference than a criticism of the book itself.

Jessica’s Rejoinder:

I agree with pretty much all that Tumperkin says. Ironically, I downloaded the novella without realizing it was not the novel we had agreed to read. So quite by accident, I read them in the proper order! I did enjoy them, but I think my personal tastes run to other kinds of stories.  I’ll add a few observations:

1. It is a matter of personal taste that I tend not to like werewolf romances, or actually any romances which utilize the “two natured” trope, be it demons, shapeshifters, or groundhogs. It’s just very hard to do this well. In this book, much like the daemons in Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, or Rhage, the dragon-vamp in J.R. Ward’s Lover Eternal, the wolf is really “other”, and not just an aspect of the human self. The characters refer to their wolves in the third person, or possessive, and seem to have trouble not only controlling their wolves, but sussing out what their wolves are “thinking” and feeling. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out things, like, why is the wolf mind still present when the wolf body is gone? And why does Anna think like human Anna when she is in wolf form (shouldn’t those pages be a series of grunts and barks?). Nevertheless, the dual identity creates a very concrete metaphysically real kind of internal conflict with the…

2. Mating concept, because two wolves can recognize each other as mates without their human counterparts agreeing. Like Tumperkin said, we all hate it when “mating” takes the place of “relationship”, and that did not happen here. I think its function in the paranormal universe is similiar to functions in many other romance genres: it keeps the couple together long enough to become a couple. In that sense, it is like an arranged marriage, or a wounded h/h who has to stay at the h/h’s house, or, in contemps, any arrangement that has them pushed together for a long period. The mating concept also allows authors to explain and explore intense sexual attraction between the h/h’s at a very early point in the relationship.

3. Charles was grievously injured by silver bullets in the novella and continued to be in a weakened state throughout the novel. I discovered that I find a wounded hero deeply unsettling and stress inducing. It really works for me to ramp up the suspense.

4. From a feminist point of view, Anna’s status as Omega is almost like an androgynous ideal. In the heydey of 1970s feminism, some folks thought we should do away with the two genders and adopt what came to be called mono-androgyny, one type of gender that blended the best of both. All of this has gone by the boards, historically, but I liked it that Anna was strong in a uniquely feminine way. I also liked it that Charles was not the Alpha. It is unusual to have a hero who is not the top dog.

5. I agree totally about the writing, which felt sort of “flat” or monotone to me, and reminds me of Anne Stuart and, in a way, some books by Nora Roberts/J.D. Robb. I love T’s observation about how it might function for a certain kind of writer.

6. The Native American aspect of Charles’ identity puzzled me: he got it from his mother, who was also a werewolf and a witch. So… what, if any, is the relationship between being a werewolf and being Native American? Or, for that matter being a witch?

7. I will say, that on paper it looks like so many of the things we love to hate or hate to love about paranormals are here — mating, possessiveness, the heroine rising like a phoenix from the ashes of sexual abuse, etc. — but they felt very fresh to me as Briggs wrote them. That was a major achievement, I thought.

17 responses so far

Joint Review: Bound By Your Touch, by Meredith Duran

Aug 15 2009 Published by under Duelling/Joint Reviews

Bound By Your Touch

Tumperkin’s Take

I read Meredith Duran’s debut, Duke of Shadows last year and could tell that Duran was going to be an author I’d enjoy.  I meant to review it but it was one of those books that I miss the boat on (about 70% of what I read I never review despite the best of intentions.  I tend to find that if I don’t review something within about a month of reading it, it doesn’t get reviewed.  How the likes of Jane from Dear Author can review practically every book they read, I just don’t know).

Anyway, when Jessica suggested we jointly review BBYT, I was happy to agree.  And it did not disappoint.  It’s a better book than Duke of Shadows, a more accomplished and confident book altogether, with a stronger structure and a defter touch.

The hero is James Durham, Viscount Sanburne, heir to the Earl of Moreland.  The heroine is Lydia Boyce, the oldest daughter of an Egyptian scholar and a scholar herself, a graduate of Girton College, Cambridge.  This circumstance, along with a plethora of other details, place the book in a richly-observed late Victorian period.

This is a setting I like.  My favourite historical settings are Regency and Georgian but this later Victorian period is also one that resonates with me.  It’s a society on the brink of true modernity with fast, efficient railways and mechanised industry.  The modern world with its looming changes: universal suffrage, the women’s movement etc. is within glimpsing distance.  Within a few decades, the privileged world of the aristocracy supported by its vast pool of underpaid servants, will begin to wither.

The main part of the book opens with James interrupting a lecture Lydia is giving in her father’s stead.  He is oblivious to Lydia and set upon creating a scene with his father.  We come to learn that James nurses a deep anger with his father and that he has made it his mission in life to goad and embarrass him.  As the book wears on, we learn the reason for the anger but at this early stage, we are allowed to judge James as Lydia does, as a spoiled, excessive wastrel.  James has purchased what he believes to be a piece of genuine Egyptian antiquity, a stela, that his father will covet.  But Lydia – irate at James’ interruption – publicly (and correctly) pronounces it to be a fake, thus setting off a chain of events that will bring her own beloved father’s reputation into question and indeed her very life into danger.

James’ raison d’etre is the animosity he feels towards his father.  By contrast Lydia treasures her role as her father’s right hand, idealising both him and his achievements.  Despite her own academic interests lying elsewhere, she devotes herself to being her father’s assistant.  Duran neatly contrasts how James and Lydia’s views of their respective fathers develops, and explores the idea of faith – Lydia’s unerring faith in her father, James’ complete lack of faith in his and then, ultimately, the faith they place in one another – to great effect.

Despite a few reservations which I mention later, I very much liked the character of James.  But then he is that archetypal romance rogue that I am a sucker for: he is beautiful and damaged; he is a self-loathing wastrel bent on destruction.  How many times have I written such a description of a hero?  Why is it so endlessly appealing?  Maybe it’s the healer complex that so many female romance readers have.

Lydia, by contrast, I struggled with a little.  She too is a ‘type’ that romance readers will be familiar with.  She is the brave/ forthright/ capable type yet vulnerable inside.  She is the academic heroine with a prickly skin and a passionate soul.  Do I find her harder to like because she is a heroine and I just give heroes an easier ride?  (I do find myself falling in love with heroes regularly but heroines only rarely).  Or is it because we demand our heroines to be less archetypal and more real than heroes?  I’m not sure.  But heroines will always find it harder to win me over.

Duran uses these very familiar types but she breathes life into them too.  Lydia, for example, shows herself in a quite unflattering light on a few occasions in her ongoing bickering with her middle sister.  I enjoyed that untypical facet of her character.  Duran managed to make it both unattractive and understandable.  The other thing that was good about Lydia was how she ‘read’ her encounters with Sanburne.  She will think he likes her, then worry that her instinct is wrong and that he is merely playing her.  These vacillating worries of Lydia’s felt authentic and won my sympathy.

I did have a few reservations about BBYT.  Neither the underlying reason for James’ anger nor how he expressed it against his father completely convinced me.  Similarly, the ease with which that issue was resolved disappointed me.  It made the whole thing feel manufactured and convenient.  I also rather wished that Lydia’s own scholarly endeavours had been made more of.  At one point, she objects to being referred to as a bluestocking – the implication being that she is self-educated – when she is a graduate of Girton.  I would liked to have seen this ‘professionalism’ demonstrated.  We got a little taste of it at the outset of the book when she denounces the stela as a fake and I would have loved a little more of that.

But really, these are quibbles.  BBYT is a quality read and I enjoyed it greatly.  I have great hopes for the next book featuring Phin and Mina.  We met Mina briefly in this book and she is very much more to my taste as a heroine.

In fact, I think I might just be able to fall in love with her.

Jessica’s Rejoinder

Isn’t Tumperkin smart? Love that review, and agree with pretty much all of it. So I’ll try to add a few different observations.

Like T, I had read Duke of Shadows last year and really enjoyed it. And I also think this is a better book. It’s very well written — beautifully, soaringly written in many places — and James and Lydia are intelligent, sympathetically flawed, and very interesting characters.

I admit I was reluctant to start this book. Yet another rake/spinster story?  But as soon as I read the first page, I was hooked. We begin with an incredibly gripping and heartbreaking scene in which Lydia comes to realize that the man she thought she’d marry wants another woman.

Duran does something in this book that very few authors of rake romances manage to do: she conveyed what the partying life was like among the rakish nobility. I have a secret fondness for the film Marie Antoinette. It fails on many levels, but it succeeds in three ways: the soundtrack, the cinematography, and finally, the way Sophia Coppola manages to convey the totally alluring, drifting quality of the privileged party set on the verge of dislocating downfall, giving you the feel that you are there, and, despite the dangers, want to be.

In BBYT, I thought the early scene when James emerges from drug induced fog at his own party captured it beautifully, and a later scene at the races also completely conveyed the odd mix of boredom and excitement, easy privilege and self-conscious unease, breaking and relying on social conventions at once, and friendships forged in a shared ironic attitude to nobility that are somehow both totally casual and very deeply felt.

Tumperkin mentions the feel of the threat of oncoming societal changes. I think this was a very important theme in the book. Here’s James thinking about his long friendship with Phin:

“Eggheaded dolts spoiled into uselessness: thus, at the tender age of ten, had [Phin] dismissed the majority of Britain’s future leaders. Eyeing James, he’d added Really, I have no idea how you turned out so interesting. I do hope you manage to keep it up.

James had tried. For years afterward, whenever he found himself in a situation where his position gave him advantages, he tested himself with Phin’s rule: Is this interesting? — which soon came to mean, Is this original? It turned out, far too often, that the answer was No.“

Lydia, too, has an emerging class consciousness — “He behaved very stupidly, and people adored him for it. Ah the wonders of a title!” she thinks of James — but, like James, her attitude towards privilege is informed not only by social consciousness but by her personal history, her experience of being an educated, strong, competent woman in a world where that makes her even more dependent and vulnerable than an ignorant, weak, but married one.

I wanted to point this out because I think, like their attitudes towards their fathers, this is another example of a kind of mirroring in the book, that worked very well to both say something interesting about the times and provide internal and external conflict between James and Lydia.

Like T says, there were a lot of hallmarks of the era, not just in the technology or clothing, but the emerging mass media, new awareness of sexuality — James’ every move is reported on by the press, Lydia thinks to herself that the male powers that be want her body to remain a stranger to her, for example.

I found the sensual scenes especially well done (and we all know how easy it is to go wrong here). Like this one:

The fit of their bodies startled her. It felt like an answer to some question she yet hadn’t thought to ask.

Or this one:

He praised her for doing exactly what she should not do, and the fit of his body against hers was causing something within her to unfold, to grow stronger and clearer as it developed. Like an anagram unriddling itself, or a maze slowly straightening.

You know how the heroes are always so much taller than heroines? And the only way you know this is the constant references to something hard prodding the heroine’s belly? I am happy to report that Duran actually uses the height difference beautifully in a scene where Lydia finds herself level with James’ throat and cannot stop herself from opening her mouth on his skin.  (although it must be said, given my last post, that Duran is a smell offender, when she has Lydia think James once smelled “civilized and predictable”).

I absolutely loved it that Lydia’s sexual awakening was a coming into personal power. I think every romance writer claims to do this, but far fewer manage it.

Did he like it? Oh, she did not care. This restless, breathless feeling knocking through her might have been desire, but it could as easily be anger. The only thing clear to her was that she’d had it wrong, worrying about what she revealed of herself of what he or anyone else might think about her. It was not their opinions that mattered. ‘I do not do this for you,’ she said. I do it for myself.

This sets James back in a way that romance readers expect and enjoy:

She had warned him, once. I possess a talent for a memorable exit. But he hadn’t listened. His opinion of her was much like a sand castle: it stood in constant need of repair.

As in all the best romances, James and Lydia need each other to become capable of loving each other. Duran reminds us that love requires a mature, resilient, open-eyed kind of faith, something neither has managed alone. As Lydia thinks in yet another wonderful passage:

Faith. She knew better than anyone what it was. More durable than any substance science had discovered — and when it shattered, more violent and cutting than glass. She would walk across its shards for the rest of her life. At every step the pain would be with her.

Like Tumperkin, I can’t wait to read Phin’s book, which I already own. The sequel baiting was pretty blatant in a late scene where we meet Mina, one of my few criticisms of the book, but it was also quite effective, so what do I know? I can say I ended up with seven pages of Kindle notes, every one of them a reminder of a turn of phrase or bit of characterization or setting that moved or awed me. It’s so nice to have another autobuy author for my very short list.

And for anyone who made it to the end of this post and would like a copy of Bound By Your Touch, I happen to have an extra copy. Make a comment by Monday at midnight EST to be entered in a drawing.




16 responses so far

Duelling Review: Kiss of a Demon King, by Kresley Cole

Apr 16 2009 Published by under Duelling/Joint Reviews

Tumperkin and Jessica review KOADK to the death.

Whose death? Yours, dear reader: it’s very, very long.

On the plus side, before your mortal coil completely unravels, Tumperkin will reveal KFC’s (the “F” is for “fantastically fungible”) Top Secret Recipe for cooking up another addictive installment of Immortals After Dark, and Jessica talks about Cole as a Master Muffin Tease.

women-pistol-dueling

TUMPERKIN’s TAKE:

So Jessica, it might fairly be said that your suggestion that we jointly review Kiss of a Demon King by Kresley Cole is timely for me. I’ve been glomming Cole’s books insanely for the last couple of months. I read No Rest for the Wicked at the recommendation of Meriam and that was it. I glommed the whole Immortals After Dark series (with the exception of the Myst and Nikolai novella) and KOADK was the last of that lot. Then I decided to try one of her historicals and plumped for If You Deceive on the basis of the plot description. After finishing that, I promptly ordered the other two in the If You… trilogy plus The Price of Pleasure, her second novel which predates both the IAD and If You… series.

This is almost embarrassing.

In fact scratch that. It is embarrassing. All the more so because I am hopelessly aware that I am being expertly played when I read a Kresley Cole. (This awareness is perhaps, admittedly, heightened by the fact that I’ve read so bloody many of them over the last couple of months). Ms Cole follows a distinct formula in her books. But perhaps I shouldn’t use the word ‘formula’ given its negative connotations? Perhaps recipe? A successful, brilliant recipe that I admire and that produces a story that appeals to me greatly:

Kresley Cole Book Recipe

Ingredients:

One (1) huge great moody brute of a man, preferably a Highlander

One (1) delicate-appearing but nonetheless tough cookie of a heroine

Large amounts of extreme conflict

Method:

1. Roughly mix the hero and heroine into a situation with lots of the conflict

2. Gradually allow the hero and heroine to work up to a full sex scene. You should aim for at least 4 or 5 sexual scenes of some variety before full consummation is allowed at (nod to Meriam) approximately page 200-250.

3. Post consummation, subject heroine to some unspeakable horror, the object of which is to make her suffer extreme physical pain/ death (e.g. immolation, cholera) and the hero experience inconsolable loss and heartbreak.

4. Allow hero to save heroine whilst endlessly self-acknowledging his ‘need’ to ‘protect’ her.

The thing about a formula (or recipe) is that there’s a certain addiction to getting the fix of it over and over again. I know – I acknowledge freely – that as a romance reader there is something that I am looking to experience repeatedly.

So what is it with Cole for me?

Confession time. I like romance novels in which the heroine really suffers. The worse it gets for them, the better I like it (gosh I sound awful, don’t I?). And (this confession gets worse) I have a particular weakness for books in which the hero is partly culpable for the suffering. I’ve really not got round to thinking about trying to puzzle out the whys of that one. That may be a post for another day.  Or perhaps a course of therapy.

I hasten to add that there is a condition to this particular preference of mine. The heroines must not be made abject by their suffering. They must meet the suffering with -well not with recklessness, I am not a fan of futile gestures – but with strength and a certain courage. They must survive it.

Ms Cole’s books deliver on this for me in a Very Big Way. Her heroines really go through the mill and they survive. And perhaps, in KOADK she gives us in Sabine, the ultimate survivor heroine.

Ok, so the story. Rydstrom is a 1500 year old rage demon. (I’m not actually so big on the demons. I prefer the weres and the vamps *shrugs*) He lost his crown to Omort the Deathless many hundreds of years ago and has been trying to get it back ever since with his brother Cade (who was the hero of the last book in this series).

Omort the Deathless is an evil despot given to acts of spontaneous brutality and general meanness. He is a sorceri and presides over a fairly unpleasant sounding court of other evil personages, including the heroine, Sabine, one of his hundreds of half-siblings. The Sorceri are interesting – they exhibit a vast range of magic powers and have the ability to steal each other’s powers and transfer them to others at will. I imagine that if you were child, it would be fun to play at being Sorceri, since you can pretty much have the power to do anything.

Sabine’s power is casting illusions. Her sister Lanthe’s power is ‘persuasion’. In other words, Lanthe can get anyone to act as she wants them to against their will by mere command. However, it is a power that is easily exhausted and she has all but depleted it ‘persuading’ Sabine to live since Sabine has a habit of getting murdered.

It has been prophesied that Sabine will bear Rydstrom a child who will unlock a powerful magical well. Despite being in love with Sabine (so far as an Evil despot can love) Omort encourages Sabine to use her illusions to capture Rydstrom and try to seduce him.

Sabine is the ultimate Cole survivor heroine. She’s been killed heaps of times and clawed her way back from each death. And it’s not as though all these murders give her a free pass from stage 3 of the recipe. She still has to go through the inevitable unspeakable suffering and be saved by Rydstrom.

One thing I liked about Sabine is that she’s not unaffected by all the suffering she’s undergone in her life. She’s beyond a being a mere tough cookie. She’s cunning and mendacious and self-seeking. But – and this is always the case with Cole heroines – she’s basically lovable. I suppose this is where my main quibble with the book arises. There is a bit of a Gap between how Sabine sees herself and how I the reader saw her. Sabine refers to herself throughout the book as being an evil villainess but I could never have seen her in that light. Evil villainesses don’t worry about their servants or get annoyed when others inflict pain upon their prisoners.

There are various ways you can deal with this Gap as a reader. You might put it down to her culture (the Sorceri see themselves as the baddies) or her self-esteem after hundreds of years of nerve-wracking attendance at Omort’s court.

But for me, it just basically didn’t entirely work. I’d have preferred her to be more in tune with who I felt she really was.

Which is not to say I didn’t like Sabine. I did. (Survivor you see). Rydstrom I was less keen on. I think of all Cole’s heroes, he is the one I have liked least. In the previous books, he has been presented as a logical rage demon who – uncharacteristically – never loses his cool. Yet he spends most of this book in a rage. Perhaps the point of this was that Sabine was the woman to finally make him lose his cool. Unfortunately, I’m not keen on H/H conflicts that have anger at their core. Where there is a core of unadulterated anger, I just worry about how things will work out between the H/H in the longer term. And Rydstrom spent a lot of this book being angry at Sabine.

KOADK delivers on the classic Cole recipe and it’s entertaining.  To be picky, I didn’t find it quite as pacy or quite as much fun as some of the others. Definitely not the best in the series. However, in fairness, I should acknowledge that this was sixth IAD book I’d read in just a couple of months. And in light of that, reading it was bit like eating a sixth slice of chocolate cheesecake.

I wish I could say that I will stop glomming Ms Cole now. That I will put the two If Yous… and The Price of Pleasure that arrived yesterday to one side and ration myself a bit more.

Are you going to make me give a grade, Jessica? If I must, a B-.

JESSICA’S RIPOSTE:

Tumperkin, I love your KFC Recipe, but, like those annoying Epicurious.com commenters who are so sure they can improve a master chef’s recipe by adding a cup of sugar and some Cheez Whiz, I am going to boldly add a couple of steps:

1.5 Hero, after token resistance to the idea (she’s so obviously wrong for him), realizes heroine is his fated soul mate and commences trying to convince her of this fact for the entire book

2.5 Raunchiness and frequency of sex talk inversely proportional to amount of sex actually being had (earning her the appellation, Master Muffin Tease)

2.5.5 Consummation includes recognition by heroine that hero was right all along about this “fated mate” thing.

This is the 4th in Cole’s Immortals After Dark series that I have read (I skipped the ghost one — you can thank JR Ward for my allergic reaction to THAT plotline), and, like Tumperkin, I have enjoyed them all.

Something unique about Cole is the way she mixes very old school elements with a very 21st century take on gender. In all of the IAD installments, you have a sexually inexperienced heroine paired with a hero whose ability to give orgasms is so powerful he fears he may literally break the heroine in two, and this is no less true in KOADK. But Cole overlays that traditional matchup with something very modern that destabilizes the expected balance of bedroom power: the heroine has the hero chained up in her bed and sexually torments him, while the hero, for all his thousands of conquests, had been celibate for centuries and can only have an orgasm with his One True Mate.

I agree with you completely, Tumperkin, about the way Cole builds sexual tension and only allows her hero and heroine to consummate their relationship once they are in love. This is very Old School. But having them tie each other up and spank each other on the way to the Big O is not in your grandma’s romance novel.  Cole’s heroes in particular, can be very graphic, even crude, from page one, about their desires for the heroine, but like gentlemen of yore, they withhold themselves until everything is safe and everyone is emotionally ready (hence, the book’s status for its female readers as a Muffin Tease).

Further, you have the traditional sexy, tiny heroine, and big strapping hero. She’s talky and he’s taciturn. He’s all about honor and principle and she’s Freud’s view of women sprung to life: narcissistic, manipulative, and deceitful. All very Old School. But now reverse it: deep down, he’s lonely and wants a spouse more than anything, he is insecure at not having found his mate, while all his friends are paired up, he’s incapable of orgasm, he’s embarrassed by sexual fantasies that do not become him, and he’s a powerful career person who secretly wants to be dominated in the bedroom. Sounds like a common species of the contemporary heroine, doesn’t it? For her part, Sabine is ruthless and gets what she wants, only wants Rydstrom to advance her career, she pries into his mind to discover his sexual fantasies and uses them to gain power over him, etc. Sounds like a billionaire CEO doesn’t it?

Cole plays around with gender expectations not just in the H/H. relationships but all over the book. One of my favorite examples is the scene when Rydstrom comes home to his mansion in Louisiana and finds the place trashed.  Empty kegs, underwear hanging from the chandelier, pornographic magazines laying around. Except instead of beer-soaked Hustler’s, it’s beer-soaked Playgirl magazines: yes, folks, it’s the witches and Valkyries, not the men, who have been partying in the King’s absence.

And this juxtaposition of Playgirl and Lordly Lore reminds me of something else, which is not unique to Cole, but is such a strong feature of the series I wanted to mention it: the mix of 21st century (middle class) American life with ancient/fantasy cultures. Sherrilyn Kenyon, Laurell K. Hamilton, JR Ward also do this sort of thing, of course. I enjoy entering the world of the IAD, mainly because I like the people in it. However, I find that the quick switches in tone and setting (from a bloody death battle to pop culture laced girl gossip between Sabine and her sister Lanthe, for example) detract from my ability to tale any of the “Lore” seriously.

SPOILERS

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When I think about KOADK, the moment in the book when Sabine runs away into the Lousiana night and Rydstrom runs after her, and then, back in the mansion, slumps down and realizes he can’t live like this, was much more memorable and powerful than the moment when he decides to give up his kingdom for her.

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END SPOILERS

To me, the paranormal and fantasy elements add to the fun, but not as much to the drama.

Tumperkin, you mention that Sabine’s self image doesn’t match what we know of her, and I agree. I note that this type of low self-image is very common among heroes, so I view this as another example of Cole’s gender bending. But, following along with your observation, there is a vast difference between a bitch and a badass, a selfish woman and an evil sorceress, a snarky person and a cruel person.  Sabine never really crosses that line, in my opinion.  I, too, enjoyed Sabine, unlike some other reviewers who felt she “wasn’t good enough” for the hero: she certainly made me laugh out loud more than once (I loved the scene when she argued that “fighting solves everything”).  It was enough of a conflict for me to have morally upstanding hero and a selfish deceitful heroine, so while the Sabine’s self image as “Eeeeeeeebil” didn’t work for me, it’s working also wasn’t necessary for me to get wrapped up in the relationship.

I do wish more time had been spent on their divergent moral views. Did Sabine have a point when she defended cunning, deceit, self-interestedness, and violence as a first resort? To take just one example, it was a very powerful moment in the text when Rydstrom lied to Sabine, but the ramifications of that lie on his character and on their relationship were not given their due.

Like you, Tumperkin, I will absolutely continue reading the IAD, and you may also have convinced me to give a Cole hisoptrical a try.

I leave you with two totally unsupported subjective opinions:

1. I respectfully request that the phrase “feed me into you” when spoken in reference to the hero’s penis be banned from all of romance for ever more. The connotations are ALL WRONG. Shudder.

2. Enough with the horned heroes. There’s a reason none of the heroes on demon romance novel covers are shown with their horns. And that reason is this: horns are gross. (I don’t find rhinos or goats sexy, either, by the way.)

In conclusion, who wins this duel? Clearly, it’s a TKO for Kresley Cole.

21 responses so far

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