Less a Book Report than some extremely spoileriffic musings...

[leahbobet]

(Published in accordance with the Tenets of Book Reporting and the support of Viewers Like You.)


So far this year...
#1 -- M. John Harrison, Nova Swing
#2 -- Barth Anderson, The Patron Saint of Plagues
#3 -- Stephen King, The Waste Lands
#4 -- Stephen King, Wizard and Glass
#5 -- Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad
#6 -- Patricia McKillip, The Book of Atrix Wolfe
#7 -- Stephen King, Wolves of the Calla
#8 -- Stephen King, Song of Susannah
#9 -- Julia Alvarez, !Yo!
#10 -- Stephen King, The Dark Tower
#11 -- Melissa Marr, Ink Exchange
#12 -- Paul Melko, Singularity's Ring
#13 -- Sarah Prineas, The Magic Thief
#14 -- Sarah Monette, The Bone Key
#15 -- Marie Brennan, Midnight Never Come
#16 -- Michelle West, The Broken Crown
#17 -- Nick Sagan, Edenborn
#18 -- Karl Schroeder, Permanence
Not-#19 -- Joel Shepherd, Crossover
#19 -- Ilona Andrews, Magic Burns
#20 -- Nick Sagan, Everfree
#21 -- Jim Munroe and Salgood Sam, Therefore, Repent!
#22 -- Barth Anderson, The Magician and the Fool
#23 -- Patricia McKillip, The Moon and the Face
#24 -- James Ellroy, The Black Dahlia
#25 -- Caitlin R. Kiernan, Murder of Angels
#26 -- Michael Swanwick, The Dragons of Babel
#27 -- China Mieville, Un Lun Dun
#28 -- Cory Doctorow, Little Brother
#29 -- Caitlin R. Kiernan, Silk
#30 -- Sandra McDonald, The Outback Stars
#31 -- Iain Banks, A Song of Stone
#32 -- Mike Carey, The Devil You Know
#33 -- Naomi Novik, Empire of Ivory
#34 -- Robert Charles Wilson, Bios
#35 -- Mike Carey, Vicious Circle
#36 -- Lois McMaster Bujold, The Sharing Knife: Passage
#37 -- Jeffrey Ford, The Physiognomy
(REREAD) -- Lois McMaster Bujold, The Sharing Knife: Beguilement
#38 -- Mike Carey, Dead Man's Boots
Not-#39 -- Jay Lake, Mainspring
(REREAD) -- Shannon Hale -- Princess Academy
#39 -- Sean Stewart, Galveston
#40 -- Sean Stewart, Passion Play
#41 -- Susan Beth Pfeffer -- Life As We Knew It
#42 -- Patricia Briggs -- Moon Called
#43 -- John Crowley -- The Solitudes
#44 -- Scott Bakker -- Neuropath
#45 -- Patricia Briggs -- Blood Bound
#46 -- Charles Stross -- Saturn's Children


(I'm willing to make a bit of comment on anything up there if anyone's curious. Just haven't had time to be book-reporting good and proper this year.)


#47 -- Patricia Briggs -- Iron Kissed

I was skittish on this one because of buymeaclue's post on it back in January, but in looking for some candy books to break up the (lovely but dense) diet of John Crowley and Robertson Davies and Iain Banks I'm on currently, I came back around to this series. And it was solid enough, if embracing all those quirks of Paranormal Fantasy that somehow, in a very short while, because accepted canon: werewolves work like so. Vampires like so. The appropriate relationship between werewolves and people is thus. I have things to say about that, but I also have a way to say and explore them in fiction, and since I am a writer and not really a book reviewer I will save that for where I live.

What I do want to talk about is what happens to Mercy at the end, and the reactions around it: both fictional and those in the readership that were discussed on LJ last winter.

(Poor Patricia Briggs. All her reviews about one thing. I picture her sitting at her keyboard with her Google Alerts on, tearing her hair, going "but dammit, what about the prose!")

I sort of walked into this book with armor. I knew that a secondary character rapes Mercy, and I remembered there was squickiness around it -- I didn't go to refresh myself on the reviews until afterwards. So I was kind of looking out for it, a little more emotionally divorced from the proceedings; either way, this was not going to hit me like a hurricane. So my reaction was never going to be as strong as Hannah's (which is going to be our exemplar reaction for today, sorry Hannah). The things that bothered her weren't the things that bothered me. Well. Not precisely.

I can see the rape happening. In terms of character arc, it was about time for Mercy to either get a kick right in the eyeball or begin the long slow road to invulnerable Suedom. I can only halfway see Tim doing it, because when you are insecure about your social skills, betrayal is much worse than initial dismissal: you're always half-sure someone's playing you anyway, and when it's true, that's all your worst fears come to the surface -- you react hard. So I will tentatively buy that, even though I don't buy his effective nice-geek cover and the sudden revelation of/transmutation into a dude who already had a few murders under his belt. That profile doesn't scan by me. In general, though, I felt that whole characterization a bit sloppy, in that if you'd done that a bit neater it would have really tied into this thing you have going on here way. The hose works, but we could've had five times the water pressure out of that baby.

The other thing I believe the emotional logic of is Adam's initial reaction to it. I'm not sure it's necessarily a sign of domineering possessiveness. Because frankly, if I didn't have these cursed omnivore's teeth I would also rip the faces off people who hurt the ones I love. I do it with my words already. I half-jokingly call it my Mama Bear urge. The emphasis is on bear.

The note struck totally wrong, however, was Adam's reaction to her after he's been shit-talked about withdrawing.

Mercy, throughout, has had a tug-of-war going about agency and control: her agency versus the idea the werewolves in her life have about how one expresses love and care to women. After this three-book issue is brought to a head -- with the rape, which is the ultimate blow to agency and control -- and she's reeling, Adam's pep talk is basically "you've come looking for my help twice now, so you acknowledge we have an interdependence, so you're mine and I will come fetch you if you try to go."

And according to the narrative, she takes it as you have a place here.

There is, in a sort of fucked-up way, that emotional content in there. I will not let you amputate your life and lose things you don't have to lose for the shame of something that wasn't your fault. Except, that's not what he says. He says:

"Ben says you might run. If you do, I will find you and bring you back. Every time you run, Mercy. I won't force you, but... I won't leave or let you leave either. If you can fight that cursed fairy drink, you can certainly overcome any advantage being an Alpha gives me if you really want to. No more excuses, Mercy. You are mine, and I am keeping you."
My independent nature, which would doubtless reassert itself soon, would be outraged by this possessive, arrogant, and medieval concept. But... (265)

What he said is not what the narrative appears to hear. And that reassertion...it doesn't happen.

Fatal breach of three books' worth of characterization ahoy.

The neurosis of abandonment she's fighting right then -- the rationale under which Adam's purported emotional content works -- is widely acknowledged by that narrative to be an implanted one. We see it implanted by the force of deus ex machina magic, in real time, on the page. If her personality is not going to reassert, this calls for a fundamental and permanent change in her personality. If it does, later, this calls for one raging, furious, break-ties-and-drive Mercy once she gets her actual personality back in place. God knows if someone said that to me in a vulnerable place, in a place where my freedom of movement and choice had been restricted so severely? If someone said that to me while I was eating myself up with guilt over the idea that my inability to fight someone off me meant that I had somehow wanted it: "If you can fight that cursed fairy drink, you can certainly overcome any advantage being an Alpha gives me if you really want to"? I would go halfway across the world from that speaker and never come back.

So Briggs creates herself a serious choice: Mercy must change, or the consequences must also rebound and basically take a wrecking ball to Mercy and Adam's relationship.

But the choice doesn't get made.

What we get is neither: a sort of shadow-country wherein she tells herself to buck up and interacts with people approaching normal very quickly, notably acts with confidence very quickly in confrontations both verbal and physical. She's attacked a bit later by someone who tried to kill her, and she doesn't flashback. She reacts like Old-Mercy.

And that, gentle readers, is what makes me disappointed in a book.

You want to punch me? Throw the damn punch. And if the punch breaks your thumb, take your lumps. Hit me and make it count. Ducking the choices you yourself set up is authorial cowardice. And I do not read for cowardice.

Write brave, folks. Write brave or just don't go there.

Comments

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

which is going to be our exemplar reaction for today, sorry Hannah

If I wasn't willing to have it discussed, it'd be silly of me to put it on the internet. *g* Good thoughts!

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

Hee. See, that is the usual assumption, but it is not always so... *g*

(Thank you!)

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

And to be fair, even I have been known to get a little tetchy when the person holding me up as an example appears to not actually have read my post or says flat-out that she hasn't read it and then proceeds to argue with it anyway. So thank _you_ for not doing that!

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

No. It was the exemplar today because it was argued in a focused and clear way, and so I could reply all tidily! See my cribbing of people's post structure! Marvel at it! *g*

[ruthannereid.livejournal.com]

That's a real shame. I thoroughly enjoyed Moon Called, though Blood Bound was a bit messier. Still, forewarned is forearmed, as they say! Thanks for posting the review.

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

Thing is, I suspect I will read the next. Just...my expectations for it will be readjusted.

(And yeah, that's the value I think I get from picking apart other people's work. Finding which cliffs there are to fall off, and adding them to my map of Landmarks To Avoid If I Can. With a correlate of finding the opposite, Shit-How'd-You-Do-That Mountain. *g*)

[ruthannereid.livejournal.com]

*Grins* Well-said. That's the point of a good review, if you ask me.

[squirrel-monkey.livejournal.com]

"I can see the rape happening. In terms of character arc, it was about time for Mercy to either get a kick right in the eyeball or begin the long slow road to invulnerable Suedom."

I see what you're saying, but why oh why must writers always default to rape as THE traumatic experience for a female character? I'm really tired of this.

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

I'm tired of it too, yeah. I think for this particular character's priorities and conflicts, it works? Because it's not just Random Trauma!, it's three books of issues around agency, control, biological destiny, choice, things like that coming to a head. Rape's a good metaphor for that, in some ways.

My beef with rape-as-trauma is when it isn't that thematically apropos. When it's just there because that's the only trauma that happens to girls.

[jenfullmoon.livejournal.com]

Well, if I have to choose "character gets raped" versus "character gets dead," which usually seems to be the only options on the table...

That said, yeah, I agree.

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

It's unfortunate that, so much of the time, those two are presented as the only choices. I can think of so many more subtle and damaging things to do to people... *g*

[csinman.livejournal.com]

I know you said you're not really a book reviewer, but you're an awesome critiquer. I haven't even read any of that entire series and I understood what happened, why it would have been better if it was different, and what she did do correctly all from this post.

I actually learned something about writing from this post, so I certainly wouldn't be crying if I saw more reviews from you.

(Could you do something obnoxious or stupid so I can leave you a comment that doesn't sound like a groupie trying to worm his way into a rockstar's tour bus for the night? Perhaps post fifteen DIY LOLcats in a row, or a whiny post about how the industry is against you. Hahaha...)

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

Ee. Thanks. :) I'm glad it's done for someone.

(Oh, don't worry. I'm sure I will aaaaany second now.)

[ex-fandrogy.livejournal.com]

I haven't read these books, but I think you may have just saved me the effort. Not for the rape, or even the power dynamic, but for the beginning of this sentence:

My independent nature, which would doubtless reassert itself soon, would be outraged by this possessive, arrogant, and medieval concept.

Whenever I read a character talking about how great (read: enlightened, modern, independent, attractive, powerful, strong, skilled, or otherwise awesome) they are, I want to gouge my eyes out with a knitting needle. And I don't even knit. I think I'd have to buy a knitting needle for the express purpose of eye-gouging, just to accomplish my goal.

What that sentence is is a HANDWAVE to gender politics. A HANDWAVE. Not characterization.

...I should probably have my coffee now. No blogging without caffeine. That should be my new rule.

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

Yes. It is much like people talking about how enlightened, modern, independent, attractive, etc. they are. Talking big = can't hack it. And I did sort of figure that what she was doing was trying to...explain why the character would do something so out of character? Kick leaves over something that was an obvious problem?

I would, however, be interested to read the book in which it was true.

[jenfullmoon.livejournal.com]

See, this is the kind of thing that drives me nuts about were-animal books, because this stuff ALWAYS goes on. There's ALWAYS this S&M dominance thing, the male weres ALWAYS have to be superior to any and all females (even Mercy, who technically isn't even a damn werewolf). Mercy's options are possessive male or possessive male, period. She has to be possessed because she's a female who can reproduce, she can't just be free and single and oh, date a vampire or a human.

The only series I know of that doesn't do this is Carrie Vaughn's Kitty series, where a female actually takes over the local pack and nobody, not once, says "You're a GIRL and girls aren't ALLOWED to be in charge of werewolf men because they can't overpower them!" Thank god for Carrie Vaughn.

[littlebutfierce]

YES to your whole comment--I get soooo tired of the alpha dominance blah blah thing too, & yes, I find the Kitty books a refreshing exception (although I am a little yawn-y at the ending of the most recent book--do we have to go there, plot-wise? [vague in case you haven't read it]).

(Hi, OP--here via wanderings off my friends list. And yeah, this 3rd Briggs book irked me too, for much the same reasons.)

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

Hi. Welcome in! :)

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

Mercy's options are possessive male or possessive male, period. She has to be possessed because she's a female who can reproduce, she can't just be free and single and oh, date a vampire or a human.

Yeah. I find a lot of why I liked her was that she was free and single and not really even thinking about dating for a while. Her life didn't revolve around men, never mind dominant ones.

I wonder what this says about the subgenre.

And I also enjoy the Carrie Vaughn books, mostly because they have a regular habit of taking the piss out of their own selves. That's important sometimes. *g*

This was PRECISELY my (major) issue

[sarahwilder.livejournal.com]

Of course, I went in without any idea that there was a rape in it.

There is, in a sort of fucked-up way, that emotional content in there. I will not let you amputate your life and lose things you don't have to lose for the shame of something that wasn't your fault. Except, that's not what he says. He says:

"Ben says you might run. If you do, I will find you and bring you back. Every time you run, Mercy. I won't force you, but... I won't leave or let you leave either. If you can fight that cursed fairy drink, you can certainly overcome any advantage being an Alpha gives me if you really want to. No more excuses, Mercy. You are mine, and I am keeping you."
My independent nature, which would doubtless reassert itself soon, would be outraged by this possessive, arrogant, and medieval concept. But... (265)


Because I read that and thought - "That's not what you say to someone who's just been irrevocably damaged by someone TRYING TO CONTROL HER." And that at that moment (let alone when she got her bearings) THERE WAS NO PART of the Mercy in this and the previous books who would be OKAY with it.

I mean, I didn't love the whole rape plotline but I would have felt better about it if it didn't seem to have been thrown in there solely to put her in Adam's camp for good. That was the point I really stopped wanting to read the rest of the book and only did it to finish. I haven't decided if I'll pick up the next one or not.

Re: This was PRECISELY my (major) issue

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I think my first, not articulate thought was oh, Adam. FAIL. And what surprised me is this was taken by the narrative as okay.