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rushthatspeaksOh dear.
I figured out on about page five of this that it is a piece of offensive, cliched, trite, dull, and overwrought Orientalist fiddle-faddle. I kept reading it because I have liked other work by the author and because I wanted to see how bad it could get.
If I had been planning ahead, I could have written a list of the most annoying cliches that could possibly have turned up in this, and taken a drink every time one of them appeared, and then I would have been too smashed to write this review, or possibly remember having read the book, a prospect which at this point sounds fairly appealing.
Let this be a lesson to me: start reading back covers again. As a general rule, I don't, because they tell me more than I want to know, or misrepresent things egregiously, or are just simply bad summaries. However, the back cover copy for this would have told me... uh, look, I'll just type out the first paragraph from the back cover here, and explain to you that the book is exactly and precisely this bad.
This book was published in 2009, people! 2009.
Pat yourself on the back if you have correctly predicted that despite having spent twelve years in somebody's harem fantasy, Our Heroine emerged from said harem still a virgin. Although knowing how to do massage therapy. And the Dance of the Seven Veils. And talk about sex in public, because this is one of those books where the culture of another area is simultaneously much freer and less uptight in expressing their emotions than the Folks At Home Who Need To Learn Some Honesty, and is also immensely more restrictive, uncaring about human rights, etc. etc..
As for Our Hero, his name is Lucien and my cat's name is Lucien and I feel vaguely bad for my cat.
They wind up married because, and this is actually how the book describes it, nobody ever taught her how to say no to sexual advances while she was in the harem, so he has to marry her to keep her from accepting anyone's advances but his. Because clearly she could not be taught to defend herself, clearly women need to be taught how to say no in the first place because I guess it does not naturally occur to us or something, clearly a woman in a state such that she can't defend herself ought to marry someone she couldn't bring herself to turn down (and the heroine is not represented as particularly traumatized most of the time, meaning that the whole lack-of-self-assertion-in-this-direction thing, well, the book does not see it as a problem).
Rrrgh.
Okay, look. The thing is, the thing that is making me see red here, is that this is not as bad as this sort of thing gets. This is a book written by a writer who can write a grammatical sentence, who has written work with wit and interest in the past, who even in this terrible, terrible book has a grasp of things like the fact that eighteenth-century English clothes were fundamentally different from those now and caused people to relate to physicality differently. This is a book written by a writer who is taking the book off from thinking, and what happens when a writer does that is that the writer falls back on the cliches and tropes of the genre, the things that come first into the mind. And I personally, as a reader, usually try to read fiction written by people who are trying to think, so that I don't read fiction put out by factory much. I see these cliches and how damaging and horrible they are most clearly when they turn up in the work of a decent writer failing, because with a writer who is as bad as the cliches the sentence-level badness is distracting.
There are very few romance novels where I don't have to do that mental thing one does that is the equivalent of sticking fingers in one's ears and going la, la, la, I can't hear that; and if it's not about race it's about gender, and if it's not about race or gender it's about race and gender. I think one can learn a lot about a genre by what its decent writers reach for when they fail to think. God knows, I don't like what I see when that happens in science fiction and fantasy, or mystery, or other genres also, but this particular set of problems, they are screamingly blatant here in this book.
But I do have hope for things changing, you know, I have read some books that make me not want to throw things or at any rate not as hard, and I've seen over time more diversity coming into it and less outright sexual assault as romantic gesture, and so when a writer I don't particularly trust but have never had cause to be really annoyed at does this sort of thing, well. I read romance novels. Because I like them. And have hope for them, now and in the future. It is therefore possible that I am more annoyed about this book than I possibly, under other circumstances, would be. As Joanna Russ says, though, you may as a critic sometimes reach an overload of your ability to put up with it all anymore, at which point you take a stick and beat the nearest book which contains the problem to death, and this keeps that representative book from doing the reverse to you.
So. This particular book, this harem fantasy with extra British aristocracy and occasional terrible things to say about the lower classes and-- for extra bonus points-- nasty repeated bitchiness about the amount of weight women gain while pregnant? This is a dreadful book. Its better qualities, such as grammar and period historical detail, only serve to point that out. This sort of thing does harm. I wish people wouldn't write this way, and I wish Chase hadn't.
I hated this book, and I don't think you should read it. There are better things to do with your life. I recommend Laura Kinsale's Shadowheart, or something by Jennifer Crusie.
I figured out on about page five of this that it is a piece of offensive, cliched, trite, dull, and overwrought Orientalist fiddle-faddle. I kept reading it because I have liked other work by the author and because I wanted to see how bad it could get.
If I had been planning ahead, I could have written a list of the most annoying cliches that could possibly have turned up in this, and taken a drink every time one of them appeared, and then I would have been too smashed to write this review, or possibly remember having read the book, a prospect which at this point sounds fairly appealing.
Let this be a lesson to me: start reading back covers again. As a general rule, I don't, because they tell me more than I want to know, or misrepresent things egregiously, or are just simply bad summaries. However, the back cover copy for this would have told me... uh, look, I'll just type out the first paragraph from the back cover here, and explain to you that the book is exactly and precisely this bad.
Spunky English girl overcomes impossible odds and outsmarts heathen villains.
That's the headline when Zoe Lexham returns to England. After twelve years in the exotic east, she's shockingly adept in the sensual arts. She knows everything a young lady shouldn't and nothing she ought to know. She's a walking scandal, with no hope of a future... unless someone can civilize her.
This book was published in 2009, people! 2009.
Pat yourself on the back if you have correctly predicted that despite having spent twelve years in somebody's harem fantasy, Our Heroine emerged from said harem still a virgin. Although knowing how to do massage therapy. And the Dance of the Seven Veils. And talk about sex in public, because this is one of those books where the culture of another area is simultaneously much freer and less uptight in expressing their emotions than the Folks At Home Who Need To Learn Some Honesty, and is also immensely more restrictive, uncaring about human rights, etc. etc..
As for Our Hero, his name is Lucien and my cat's name is Lucien and I feel vaguely bad for my cat.
They wind up married because, and this is actually how the book describes it, nobody ever taught her how to say no to sexual advances while she was in the harem, so he has to marry her to keep her from accepting anyone's advances but his. Because clearly she could not be taught to defend herself, clearly women need to be taught how to say no in the first place because I guess it does not naturally occur to us or something, clearly a woman in a state such that she can't defend herself ought to marry someone she couldn't bring herself to turn down (and the heroine is not represented as particularly traumatized most of the time, meaning that the whole lack-of-self-assertion-in-this-direction thing, well, the book does not see it as a problem).
Rrrgh.
Okay, look. The thing is, the thing that is making me see red here, is that this is not as bad as this sort of thing gets. This is a book written by a writer who can write a grammatical sentence, who has written work with wit and interest in the past, who even in this terrible, terrible book has a grasp of things like the fact that eighteenth-century English clothes were fundamentally different from those now and caused people to relate to physicality differently. This is a book written by a writer who is taking the book off from thinking, and what happens when a writer does that is that the writer falls back on the cliches and tropes of the genre, the things that come first into the mind. And I personally, as a reader, usually try to read fiction written by people who are trying to think, so that I don't read fiction put out by factory much. I see these cliches and how damaging and horrible they are most clearly when they turn up in the work of a decent writer failing, because with a writer who is as bad as the cliches the sentence-level badness is distracting.
There are very few romance novels where I don't have to do that mental thing one does that is the equivalent of sticking fingers in one's ears and going la, la, la, I can't hear that; and if it's not about race it's about gender, and if it's not about race or gender it's about race and gender. I think one can learn a lot about a genre by what its decent writers reach for when they fail to think. God knows, I don't like what I see when that happens in science fiction and fantasy, or mystery, or other genres also, but this particular set of problems, they are screamingly blatant here in this book.
But I do have hope for things changing, you know, I have read some books that make me not want to throw things or at any rate not as hard, and I've seen over time more diversity coming into it and less outright sexual assault as romantic gesture, and so when a writer I don't particularly trust but have never had cause to be really annoyed at does this sort of thing, well. I read romance novels. Because I like them. And have hope for them, now and in the future. It is therefore possible that I am more annoyed about this book than I possibly, under other circumstances, would be. As Joanna Russ says, though, you may as a critic sometimes reach an overload of your ability to put up with it all anymore, at which point you take a stick and beat the nearest book which contains the problem to death, and this keeps that representative book from doing the reverse to you.
So. This particular book, this harem fantasy with extra British aristocracy and occasional terrible things to say about the lower classes and-- for extra bonus points-- nasty repeated bitchiness about the amount of weight women gain while pregnant? This is a dreadful book. Its better qualities, such as grammar and period historical detail, only serve to point that out. This sort of thing does harm. I wish people wouldn't write this way, and I wish Chase hadn't.
I hated this book, and I don't think you should read it. There are better things to do with your life. I recommend Laura Kinsale's Shadowheart, or something by Jennifer Crusie.
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no subject
Date: 2011-03-08 12:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-08 04:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-09 09:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-11 08:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-09 01:22 am (UTC)has a grasp of things like the fact that eighteenth-century English clothes were fundamentally different from those now and caused people to relate to physicality differently.
Would you mind expanding on that? I've done a good deal of study of 18th century England and I've never really thought along these lines before.
no subject
Date: 2011-03-09 09:54 am (UTC)Take skirts, for instance-- the kind with the large hoops, or the court ones that expand side-to-side. It requires assistance for a woman to get into and out of that. Therefore once it is on, it is on for the day, and that means that instead of taking it off to use the chamberpot, have sex, try on new underwear, change shoes etcetera it gets hiked up and pushed to the side, and it's a serious weight of fabric. A chamberpot goes under it, for instance, which is how in Amsterdam about this time you can have mixed-sex retiring rooms because the ladies are perfectly decent and the gentlemen face the wall. Infinite bawdy cartoons about how you can't tell whether any woman is wearing drawers-- there could be anything under there.
If you're having daytime sex, and again we know this from cartoons, you're having it standing up to keep from smothering under all that fabric. Generally at least one of the lady's hands is being used to keep it out of the way. This is just automatic, this is what people did by default. Taking the things off was reserved for night or for putting on a different one.
And those skirts required a much larger personal space radius. Managing them gracefully was a learned skill. In a crowd one could be much more thoroughly pinned to the spot than nowadays; a sad crush is a party that crushes your dress enough to damage it, with the implication that you were standing there for quite a while in a cage of your own clothes. Even just sitting down needed a particular sort of half-hitch-step with hand-sweep and associated billowing.
Or gloves. This particular novel, execrable as it was, was the first one I have seen note the detail that with the kind of glove that is elbow-length and buttons all the way up, a person who wishes free hands in a hurry is going to unbutton the two or three buttons closest to the wrist, slip hand out of glove, and push glove length up arm instead of unbuttoning everything. Which is in fact what one does with this kind of glove, I have only ever owned one pair but I reinvented that wheel in a hurry. You find yourself doing this casually, but in the back of your mind always: will it soil my fingers or my gloves in a way that's more difficult to get out? Because gloves are expensive and hard to clean. So you slip a hand out of them sometimes to touch things that are really dirty, which is the exact inverse of modern-day thinking about gloves.
Breastfeeding children, you just come right out the top of the gown because the lines are low enough, again there are paintings.
Infinite little things like that. And that's just the women. Rare to see a romance writer noticing. Rare to see it in some historicals. People write about this time period as though they moved the way we do, thought about clothes and fabric the same, as though fashion meant the same things. Not remotely, not even a little bit. I mean this was still a time when it was a thing to pass pieces of fabric, and clothes, to your descendants in your will. Because they would use them. Because they would last, reworked. An entire generation of aristocracy that century shaved their heads for wigs. It really is another country.
no subject
Date: 2011-03-09 11:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-10 07:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-09 03:24 am (UTC)Bras aren't perfect, but they don't cause nearly the amount of trouble corsets did.
no subject
Date: 2011-03-08 10:41 am (UTC)I really enjoy Loretta Chase's work generally, but that is I think the only book of hers that I haven't read a second time, and you've hit the nail on the head as to why, though I hadn't consciously looked at it that way (I was unhappy / uncomfortable in the book, and didn't really know why, though the hero did annoy me no end. I'm not very good at recognising orientalist tropes in fiction).
(I did notice, however, that the Evil Harem Prince was extremely overweight, which I thought was an unnecessarily cheap shot)
no subject
Date: 2011-03-09 09:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-08 04:01 pm (UTC). . . eeeeyeah.
My condolences to your cat.
no subject
Date: 2011-03-09 12:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-08 04:07 pm (UTC)*sends snuggles to Lucien-the-cat*
(and applause to Rush-that-speaks, because. This book I have not read, but books like this, oh yes. I think you pin it. And the need to pin it, indeed to nail it. With a hot and furious nail.)
no subject
Date: 2011-03-09 09:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-08 05:10 pm (UTC)Aside from the ridiculous and evil misogyny, this fails to even represent internally self-consistent logic. Why the hell would that matter to her?
[edit: I is can talk good.]
no subject
Date: 2011-03-08 05:50 pm (UTC)Being the living incarnation of the madonna/whore fantasy does not sound fun at all.
no subject
Date: 2011-03-09 09:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-09 12:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-09 02:58 pm (UTC)---L.
no subject
Date: 2011-03-09 09:24 am (UTC)So much I hate this book.
no subject
Date: 2011-03-08 05:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-08 06:15 pm (UTC)(Though the rest of us do get to revel in the joy of snark.)
Nine
no subject
Date: 2011-03-09 12:37 pm (UTC)I get the sense that a lot of romance writing it designed to appeal to sexual fantasies, which don't always hew to people's more advanced social thinking, and depending on the novelist and the novel, it'll do this with either more or less obliqueness--so, rape fantasies or harem fantasies, or Forbidden Other fantasies, clothed in greater or lesser degrees of distance and respectability. But when you try to combine those fantasies with elements of approved social thinking--and especially with contradictory elements of approved social thinking--you get CRAZY SOUNDING results (so, for example, a spunky girl heroine is approved social thinking in one milieu and virginity is approved in another--but then this novel gives us this spunky girl heroine who can't say no and who is a virgin because otherwise she won't code as "good" for the readers, and yet she's also open about sex--I mean it's nonsensical in the extreme, but fascinating for the contortions it involves. Fascinating from the remove of this review, anyway.)