rushthatspeaks | Don't Tempt Me, Loretta Chase (365 Books, Day 190)

Oh 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.

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.