Along Came Trouble, Ruthie Knox

Note: I received this book from the publisher for review. That fact in no way affected my opinion of it.

Ruthie Knox is one of my favorite contemporary romance authors and Along Came Trouble, while not quite awesome as Ride With Me or About Last Night, is still pretty great. And it could just be that I have high standards for Knox’s work, too–I expect a lot from her books because of her track record.

Along Came Trouble is the first book proper in Knox’s Camelot series, which began with an amazing novella, “How to Misbehave”. It’s set a number of years later in the same small town in Ohio and the main characters here are Ellen and Caleb.  Caleb is Amber’s brother, recently out of the military and trying to establish his own security business in town.  Ellen is a local lawyer, divorced and with a young son.  Her brother, Jamie, is an international superstar and he’s taken up with Ellen’s pregnant neighbor, Carly–bringing the paparazzi to the wholly unprepared small town.

This is a book about interdependence and independence both–this provides most of the tension in the book, in fact. Caleb has been hired by Jamie’s security company to provide security to both Ellen and Carly. Ellen wants none of it and Carly isn’t particularly enthusiastic either. And, in both their cases, it’s completely understandable: Carly and Jamie are on the outs and Ellen has fought hard to be her own person outside her brother’s shadow and with a detour through an abusive marriage.

I’d been putting off reading this because I wasn’t sure it would live up to Knox’s other books. I shouldn’t have been worried about that because it does. All the characters are thoroughly believable and a major part of that is because Knox gives them all lives outside the pages of the book–it’s obvious that they’re each the heroes of their own stories even if we don’t know what that story is.  I found this most apparent in Caleb’s parents, Janet and Derek. Between the events of “How to Misbehave” and this book, Derek Clark has had a stroke which has had far-reaching impact on his ability to maintain the apartment complex owned by him and Janet.  This is a source of contention between them and Caleb tries to help where he can–the main reason he moved back to Camelot after his stint in the military was to be able to help his family out.

Relationships between parents and children (and grandchildren) is a major theme of this book. Ellen is so fiercely independent in part because her mother focused all her energy on her brother. Carly was raised by her Nana, who is one of my favorite characters ever (I am firmly on the Nana needs a story of her own bandwagon–are you listening, Knox?).  Ellen’s son, Henry, spends several days a week with his paternal grandmother but only a few hours a week with his father (due to Richard being an emotionally abusive alcoholic with a pathetic leather vest). Being able to see the characters in community with each other, in their other relationships makes them feel so much more real which then makes them more sympathetic and believable.

This is also, in places, a very funny book. Knox has a knack for capturing the little moments between characters. I especially liked the following passage:

“I know, but we skipped all the early dates, and I could really use one of those third-date neck massages.”

“The kind where we watch a movie and then I move back behind you on the couch and rub your shoulders, and you offer to take off your shirt to make it easier, and then before we know quite what happened, we’re making out?”

“Exactly. But don’t skimp on the massaging. I have to be seduced slowly, like I don’t really want it.”

There may have been audible and knowing snorting when I read that bit. Knox is also good at cutting to the heart of emotional matters, as she does when Ellen is thinking about her and Jamie’s father, who they never knew:

Theirs had died before they were old enough to remember him. It was a phantom-limb situation: you got used to the absence, but you could always feel it, and sometimes it itched.

This might be the best description of what it’s like to have a dead parent that I have ever read. Ever.

The only real flaw in this book, for me, was the compressed timeline (although the week or so that this book covers does not end in an engagement or even anything more definite than “let’s try to have a relationship”; there is an epilogue that takes place a few months later). Caleb and Ellen seemed to move incredibly quickly from meeting to realizing that they could have something really great together, especially considering the degree of stress they’re under due to Jamie’s stormy relationship with Carly.

I also tend to have problems with books where there’s a book-world celebrity in it–it always feels really contrived in a way that I have a hard time explaining.  However, in this book it made perfect sense–and it was made clear that Jamie’s celebrity was the result of a lot of hard work on his part as well as natural talent. I liked seeing Jamie chafe at the restrictions his celebrity put on his life and the way his actions were shown to have repercussions on people outside his bubble of famous–again, this is a character in community with others.

So to sum up: Great characters and great relationships, and the only real flaw is the really fast development of the relationship between Ellen and Caleb.  This is a wonderful book.

Strongylodon macrobotrys
Andrew Zuckerman :: flowerthebook.com

• The Circles of Literary Hell As far as I’m concerned, people who judge other people’s reading choices are the same kind of people who loftily claim they don’t watch television. Or they only watch educational programs.
  
• More on the so-called “death” of historical romance: Can a Genre Die?
• Aim for the Middle (Oh, and Also, There Is No Middle) This is wise and wonderful.
• An Equal Right to Fail
• The Fragility of the Everyday
• Escape Has A Destination But It’s Never Far Away (via) Interesting read, inspired by Foz Meadows’s piece at A Dribble of Ink from a couple of weeks ago.
• Break the YA Monopoly — Give Us Female Heroes for Adults and then there’s this rebuttal: On the Non-Existent Lack of Katniss Everdeens in Adult Fiction So many thoughts! Still mostly half-baked! (Clarification! My ideas are half-baked! No one else’s!) Also very interesting that the original post is nearly a year old–why the sudden response?
• The Truth Of Wolves, Or: The Alpha Problem
• Remembering a geek feminist ally: David Notkin, 1955-2013
• The Xenogenesis Trilogy by Octavia Butler – Many Thoughts I wish I were going to WisCon so I could go to this panel.
• Just How Far Will She Go? Nicole Wolverton’s The Trajectory of Dreams Wonderful review of my friend Nicole’s book.
• What if people told European history like they told Native American history?
• Being white is awesome, so how could we be racist?
• Alice E. Kober, 43 – Lost to History No More
• Mummified Body of Author Found in Home Over a Year After Her Death
• River of Souls, What If? Beth Bernobich talks about what Therez’s life would have been if she’d decided to stay instead of running. I’m so looking forward to Allegiance, the last book about Ilse and Raul in this particular incarnation.
• Ask N. K. Jemisin Anything – The Interview
• Please, don’t make fandom look bad.
• The Hawkeye Initiative – Special Guest Edition: The Hawkeye Initiative IRL!
• My Little Brony: ‘I will tolerate the crap outta you’
• Years later, cop reunites with suicidal man he saved on Golden Gate Bridge
• Stealing beauty – the curator who took priceless piece after priceless piece
• DOJ Places E-Book Price-Fixing Blame on Apple
• If you build it and they don’t come, then what?
• Love this so much:

Finally but certainly not least: this was Donna’s last week as a regular here at the Radish. I am going miss her posts and I know I’m not alone. I couldn’t have asked for a better partner than Donna in this particular endeavor. And thus, for her, a lighthouse. She knows why.

Cape Neddick Light

Off To Be The Wizard, Scott Meyer

Most people who are familiar with Scott Meyer’s name know him as the author of the webcomic Basic Instructions. Off To Be The Wizard is Meyer’s first novel, a time-travel fantasy that leaves the heavy lifting to other writers and sets out to offer the reader nothing much beyond a good time. For the most part, Meyer succeeds at this goal.

I feel compelled to start by pointing out that this book is self-published, and Meyer might want to make use of a professional editing service for future books—it’s riddled with misspellings and missing punctuation, mostly in the form of quotation marks missing around chunks of dialogue, which drives me bananas. Also problematic, to me, is the hand-waving away of sketchy plot points within his premise—there are vague explanations for these, but they’re deeply unsatisfactory. I don’t demand my fantasy novels have a factual basis in general (because, hey, fantasy), but when you start explaining away some things, you have to explain them all away in order to maintain some internal consistency.

So here’s the deal: a 20-something geek working a dreary, dead-end job (unspecified past the dreary and dead-end parts) who spends his spare time poking around in various corners of the internet stumbles upon a buried file. Out of habit, he pokes around in the unguarded file and discovers that it contains his name and basic info. On a whim, he adds two inches to his height in the file, and is surprised to find himself growing two inches. This leads to more poking around, and Martin Banks soon discovers that the human race is basically nothing more than a giant computer construct. From there it only takes a little computer, er, wizardry to figure out how to teleport and how to time travel, two skills he figures out how to manage by developing crude apps for his smart phone. Martin is smart enough to realize that he may, in the future, need an escape plan in case whomever oversees this file figures out that he’s messed around with it.

Martin decides the best place to escape to is the past, and chooses a benign time in the Middle Ages in England as his escape destination, figuring he can pass off his new crude skills as magic and himself as a powerful wizard. He’s forced to put his plan into action quite soon when all of his monkeying around with his bank account lands him in trouble with the Treasury Department. Dressed in Slytherin robes, Martin teleports himself back in time, landing outside the village of Leadchurch which, unfortunately for him, already has a wizard in residence. So the locals aren’t exactly impressed. Been there, done that.

As a premise, this has loads of potential, and Meyer milks it pretty well. He also doesn’t waste any time setting it up, which has positives and negatives. On the one hand, there’s not much in the way of info-dumping here. On the other, there’s not a lot of detail—one page, Martin is running from the feds and the next he’s hit his escape app and landed outside Leadchurch. But on the plus side, the swift removal of his character to the Middle Ages allows Meyer to get down to business and have a little fun.

See, it turns out ALL the wizards in his new time period are actually time-travelers who’ve come from various decades. Like Martin, they chose to escape to the Middle Ages thinking it’d be easy-peasy to pass their ability to manipulate the file off as magic. Eventually, they all created a shell file to standardize their wizardry. Leadchurch’s Wizard-in-Residence, Philip, takes Martin under his wing, offers to train him up in the use of the shell program so that he can pass the Wizard Trial, and shows him how to live a modern lifestyle in the Middle Ages. So Martin gets some snazzy robes and a hat, makes a staff, and eats a lot of stew while learning to pull burritos out of his hat, fly, and transport his bed from home to his hut in Leadchurch. He also meets a clutch of other time-travelers/wizards and begins to make friends.

The set up gives Meyers a chance to make zillions of funny pop culture references about everything from The Simpsons to Apple computers to Pontiac Fieros, and Martin’s adventures in learning his new trade are genuinely amusing. The problem, which you’ve no doubt figured out by now, is that these people all need computers to access the shell and make their tricks actually work because in this world, wizardry is actually nothing more than a series of macros that are created to respond to vocal commands, and there was no electricity in the 1300’s to run the computers on. Meyer gets around this difficulty by letting them use the shell to create certain fields around themselves and objects to preserve a constant, which is actually fairly clever—they can create fields to maintain their body temperatures at a constant level of their choice, and, more important in the world-building sense, they can create fields that will allow their computer batteries to forever remain at a full charge. Because Meyers is working from the premise that all of life is basically a computer construct, he can get away with this—manipulate the program to get whatever you want, be it a burrito or fully-charged computer battery.

Where it all gets a bit hand-wavy is with the use of cell phones and cell phone apps to control things. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how their smart phones could actually work in the Middle Ages. Because they can carry them back and forth, and they can conserve the battery charge at a permanent level, but it’s a fact that my cell phone, full battery or not, will not work if I’m in a dead spot. And I can’t think of a bigger dead spot than the 1300′s. I finally just gave up and waved my hands too. It was easier than imagining cell phone towers dotting the landscape of medieval England, and Meyer at no point described how they might make this work.

Martin has more adventures once he becomes a fully-trained wizard, and Meyer leaves himself enough room that he could easily make this into a series if he’s so inclined. I found this a fast, entertaining read. It’s not going to win any points for style, but it’s told in an engaging, undemanding fashion. My biggest issue with it was that the characters never really bloomed: they each seemed to have an assigned character trait (Martin, for example, is impulsive, while Phillip is very steady and conservative) and didn’t ever grow or change along the way; the result is that they’re not really driving the plot, just walking through it. If he does carry on with these characters in a series, he’ll need to work on that. But he has a very promising foundation to build on.

TBR, 5/15/13

This is, of course, not all of it. There’s also an electronic component as well as books stashed in other bookcases throughout the apartment.

So what are the top five books on my TBR? Not necessarily the five I’ll get to first–I am too scattered to make a reading plan and stick with it when I’m reading for fun–but the five I’m most looking forward to reading eventually? In no particular order…

Shattered Pillars, Elizabeth Bear. This is the second book in Bear’s epic fantasy set, more or less, in a fantastic cognate of Central Asia. There are horses and magic and terrible sacrifices and I really loved the first book. There’s something about Bear’s writing which really connects with me and she seems to be getting better with each new book that she writes.

Grail of the Summer Stars, Freda Warrington. The third book in the Aetherial Tales trilogy, this is just the kind of urban fantasy I love. Not the new definition where there’s a kick-butt woman in leather pants, but the earlier kind typified by the writing of Charles de Lint and Emma Bull. I suspect that this sort of thing is called contemporary fantasy and I also suspect that it doesn’t sell particularly well these days which is why there’s not a whole lot of it.

Untamed, Anna Cowan. Holy crap has there ever been a lot of discussion about this book in Romancelandia. People seem to either love it (with caveats) or loathe it (I have not read any of these reviews, so really don’t know what they say apart from the general opinion). From what I can gather, there are some serious issues with Cowan’s interpretation of gender roles in the period as well as with her understanding of the Corn Laws–and since my knowledge of the period is gleaned mainly from other romance novels, I suspect that I will fall into the love it (with caveats) crowd.  I am planning on reviewing it here sometime soon, so I’ll be sure to let everyone know what I think. One of the reasons I’m so excited to read this particular book is that, from where I am in a not-having-read-it-yet perspective, Cowan appears to be pushing at the boundaries of what romance is and even if her attempt isn’t wholly successful, she gets points from me going in.

Annie Sullivan and the Trials of Helen Keller, Joseph Lambert. I can’t remember where I heard about this one, but I’ve had a fascination with Keller and Sullivan for many years and I am interested to see how Lambert translates Keller’s disabilities into graphic novel format. Based on what I’ve read about this, though, it doesn’t talk about Keller’s social activism and perhaps centers Sullivan’s story over Keller’s. I also find the title problematic–Keller was so much more than just a trial. But nonetheless, I am looking forward to reading this.

The Steerswoman’s Road, Rosemary Kirstein. I have heard so many good things about these books from lots of different people. And I have started reading this volume but it’s been so long since I’ve picked it up I’m going to have to start over again. I am, however, totally happy that there will be e-book editions of these soon! Maybe I’ll throw this in my bag for my Memorial Day weekend trip to the Blue Ridge Mountains (I’m taking a train–I’ll have plenty of time for reading).

What’s in your To Be Read pile? Or what are you looking forward to reading? Let us enable each other!

Hi there.  You don’t know me, but you’ve certainly taken a lot of my money over the last 45 years—ever since I was old enough to receive an allowance and smart enough to spend most of it on books instead of candy at the corner store.  You can think of me as a long-running repeat customer.  I read.  A lot. And I want to talk to you about a growing issue in the books and other printed material I read.

Grammar.

That’s right.  You remember grammar, yes?  Punctuation marks, spelling, things like that?  You used to hire people as copy editors and proofreaders to catch mistakes and correct them before unleashing your books, magazines, and newspapers on the general public.

I realize that publishing has taken some financial hits lately.  People get more of their news online, for example, instead of on paper.  Is this really an excuse for allowing your standards to go to hell in a handbag?  Do you think that your online audience is less likely to notice the misused apostrophes, the run-on sentences, the incorrect forms of there, their, and they’re?  Sure they’re all on their social media sites, where internet-speak is more lenient and the audience more forgiving.  That doesn’t mean they don’t want to see things done right elsewhere.  I’m not going to recommend an article or opinion piece full of typos.  And I certainly am not going to finish reading one either.

As a writing teacher, I used to make it clear to my students that while it was certainly important that they have good solid ideas backed up by solid evidence in support of those ideas, they could have the best idea EVER and it wouldn’t be much use if no one could understand it because they were hacking their way through a forest of grammatical errors to get to it.  You might keep that in mind the next time you rely on spell-check, auto-correct, and Microsoft’s execrable grammatical suggestions.

I can’t be the only person annoyed by missing quotation marks around paragraphs of dialogue in a novel I’m reading.  Or by newspaper headlines where half the letters of a word are missing or transposed.  Or by an article headline that reads “Improvements Okd at Twon Meeting” (that last one appeared just like that in my local paper).  Or a published novel filled with random typos ranging from “teh” for “the” to my current favorite, “Buenos Aries” for “Buenos Aires”.  I paid money for a pleasant reading experience, not for the experience having to sit and mentally correct typos or grammar in order to actually understand what I’m reading.

I think computers are amazing things.  Mine certainly makes my life easier in so many ways.  But to rely on an algorithm to catch and correct very human errors is foolish and cheap.  My computer doesn’t know the difference between to, two, and too.  It only knows whether or not I’ve spelled them correctly.  It has no means of figuring out if I’ve used the correct form in that particular instance.

When these types of errors are passed on to the public for consumption, it makes the consumer mad and the publisher look lazy, sloppy, and unconcerned about the impression being made on the consumer.  So I implore you: give a recent English graduate a job and hire real people to proofread your product.  Consider it your contribution to boosting the economy if you like, but take my word for it—you’ll boost your sales, too.  I know I’m not going to repeat a bad experience with a product that I’ve repeatedly found to be shoddy.  If nothing else, have some pride in what you’re sending out to the public.

Please.

The Seduction Hypothesis, Delphine Dryden

Based just on the blurb, Delphine Dryden’s The Seduction Hypothesis, should be right up my alley.

A bunch of nerds are headed to a convention by way of a road trip and there is geekery and costumes galore and…it just did not work for me.

I’ve been trying to think about why it didn’t work for me and I think it comes down to the fact that I simply did not buy into these characters. They just…didn’t feel real. I can often suspend my disbelief when it comes to the physical perfection of romance novel characters but I just couldn’t do it here–I know too many people who go to conventions and very, very, very few of them are the perfect physical specimens described in this book.

And this is not to buy into the fake geek fallacy–obviously, all kinds of people can be geeks. That goes without saying. But there are six in the group that goes to this con and the four that the narrative interacts directly with are Hottie McHottersons.  It seems a bit unlikely, especially since other convention attendees were described in ways that made it clear that not everyone there was a Hottie McHotterson and the snideness about an unfortunate costume on a “hefty” man really rubbed me the wrong way.

But anyways, on to the specifics of the book. Lindsay and Ben had been dating but broke up, somewhat messily a few months before BeastCon–which they’d committed to roadtripping to with a few of their friends. Ben though Lindsay had a crush on their friend Ivan, newly partnered with Cami.

Lindsay doesn’t actually have a crush on Ivan. What she has a crush on, if it can be called a crush, is the relationship dynamic between Ivan and Cami. It’s something she wants for herself and when she tried talking about her needs with Ben, he basically blew her off.  Lindsay, see, is interested in exploring BDSM and when she broached the subject by way of a comic she enjoyed she was subjected to a lecture about feminism and how that stuff is degrading, etc. (Not to get too personal, but I had a very similar experience with my former fiancé nearly two decades ago and that part really rang true to me.)

Once they get to the convention, Lindsay ends up working in the booth for the comic–as Sub Red, a submissive character who wears next to nothing and the pieces start to fall into place for Ben–and after some missteps and a hilarious trip to a very pink sex toy shop, they get their freak on and things seem to be working out.  Right up to the point where Lindsay decides that Ben isn’t serious and breaks things off with him, much to Ben’s chagrin. He then–of course–has to prove to her that he is serious.

This is a very, very brief synopsis of the book–the BDSM parts were clearly well-researched and felt authentic to me (although there was a bit about “official” positions and a reference to John Norman that just made my face go all squinchy) and I did like the way the characters used their words–which is important for all kinds of relationships.

I think, ultimately, that it all comes down to voice–the book was more than competently written, the characters were interesting  and did, despite all being Hottie McHottersons, seem realistic but I just couldn’t buy into it. There was something missing from this book for me and I think that if the voice had been more compelling, I would have been more willing to suspend my disbelief than I was.

Girl’s Hair-Do Reveals Love Life: A signal and a challenge.

Due to massive link overload, this week’s linkspam had to be broken into two posts! Enjoy!

• WTF, Plus Size Clothing Manufacturers?
• Game of Thrones: death, destruction and a whole load of relationships visualised (spoiler alert)
• Multiplicity
• Dear Diary ”I protected his vanity in my own diary.”  Mary Ann is such a beautiful writer: “Perhaps the diaries would allow our ships to pass the other close enough to clasp our hands across the railings, just for a moment.” Cannot wait to read her book.
• English May Have Retained Words From an Ice Age Language
• This might be the best obituary I have ever read.
• Today in what’s wrong with the economy: full-time writers at a hit TV show who make $500 a week and enjoy no benefits 
• From the BBC: how not to eat healthily for £1 a day
• The sun is at last setting on Britain’s imperial myth (via)
• So what do you think of my story where I made use of another person’s culture?
• American Indians in Children’s Literature on three of Francesca Lia Block’s books: Weetzie Bat, Pink Smog, and Cherokee Bat and the Goat Guys.
• In defence of the 1970s: Germaine Greer was there as well as Stuart Hall
• What Should We Call Girl Pain?
• Braving the Fantasy Debates – Not Only Epic, but Romantic
• Reading Order Lists This is amazing–must have taken so much time to compile these.
• Fifty Has Seldom Looked So Good Bared Such lovely lines in that building. I don’t think I ever made it to the Sheldon when I lived in Lincoln.
• John Scalzi on the RT Booklovers’ Convention While I am really glad that John had such a good time at a convention which is near and dear to my heart, I have to wonder about how this was framed–very often, men in predominantly female spaces get unconsciously special treatment from the female participants and it would have been nice if John had acknowledged this. On the other hand, my experiences at RT have also all been very good, too, and I’m not sure that my experience was typical, either, as each time I’ve been has been as a member of magazine staff.
• RT editor Mala Bhattacharjee has thoughts on this topic, too. I agree with her that the cover models are often treated like meat–which is not cool or okay at all.
• Jim C. Hines on Fandom, Conventions, and Race.
• It Is in Our Nature to Need Stories (via) ”Nature shaped us to be ultra-social, and hence to be sharply attentive to character and plot. We are adapted to physiologically interact with stories.”
• Sarcasm & Stars; The Lowest Form of Reviewing? This is absolutely fascinating, especially from my perspective as a former professional reviewer–I had a lot of reasons for moving on, but one of them definitely involved wanting to feel more personally invested in my reviews.
• Tobias Buckell has a theory about the fate of today’s book bloggers.  And I wonder if this is part of the conversation about historical romance, too. Most romance readers have read a lot of historicals and there’s a lot of talk about the sameness of the settings and characters and I think we’re seeing people doing this: “They seek out ‘artist’s artists’ and are not happy when those voices aren’t welcomed by the mainstream, because these are stories aimed at people who’ve simply consumed a terrific amount of fiction to be able to enjoy the work.”
• The only reviews that matter.
• The Best Author Letter Ever Seriously. The best.
• 50 Shades (to be a Lover)
• Writing the Next Great American Woman’s Novel ”Organization and labeling are supreme virtues, above most other less supreme virtues like equality and fairness.”
• Tor Books says cutting DRM out of its e-books hasn’t hurt business
• How to Kill a Vampire (Series) and As Charlaine Harris Ends Her Sookie Stackhouse Series, An Illustration Of Fandom Gone Too Far
• Think of Yourself as a Writer Great post on academic writing–and writing in general.
• By the Numbers: Parents, Children, and Libraries

As with Friday’s post, thanks again to Jessica for her assistance in collecting these links. Much appreciated!

Dome Houses in Florida

First, many thanks to Jessica for her wonderful guest post yesterday as well as her contributions to this week’s linkspam!

Second, we have so many links this week that I’ve had to break this into two posts–one for today and one that will post at some point during the weekend.

• Hyperbole and a Half: Depression Part Two Oh, this. So much this. So glad to see Allie Brosh posting again. Related: The Science of Feelings
  
• Mindscapes: The woman who can’t recognise her face
• What is Living on Robyn’s Makeup Brushes: A Horror Story …off to dunk all my makeup brushes in bleach, brb.
• Retwact: A Tool for Fixing Twitter’s Misinformation Problem (via)
• From an Anonymous White Woman to South Carolina: ‘Kiss My M’f*ckin’ Ass’
• The Troubling Viral Trend of the “Hilarious” Black Neighbor
• The Cleveland kidnapping could have been stopped
• Jay Smooth on Charles Ramsey, Humor and the Trouble With Memes ”Whenever a certain person is in the news, we have a certain compulsion to flatten out that person and immediately flatten out their personhood into this paper-thin, click-bait, Chappelle show, laughing-for-the-wrong-reasons viral joke.”
• On Behalf Of [BLANK] People Everywhere… I have no idea how long this particular NPR blog has been around, but it’s fantastic.
• Worcester Massachusetts And The Tsarnaev Brothers – A Plea From A Home Boy Charlie Pierce is a national treasure.
• Elizabeth Smart: Abstinence Education Teaches Rape Victims They’re Worthless, Dirty, And Filthy
• Female ‘Purity’ Is Bullshit
  

  So, Girls, Fuck All of It. If you want to. Or don’t fuck any of it, if you don’t want to. Fuck women. Fuck men. Fuck no one. Point is, you get to fuck what you like, when you like, and your worth is not determined by some golden ratio of extreme boner tantalization vs. minimal boner touching. BONERS ARE NOT THE BOSS OF YOU. You are the boss of you.

• It’s time to face up to the problem of sexual abuse in the white community
• Shakesville: Today in Rape Culture Probably triggery.
• The Business Of Diversity: Why Hollywood Needs Integration
• Seema Jilani: My Racist Encounter at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner
• Academic Men Explain Things to Me – Mansplaining with a Side Order of Racism
• That’s my secret. I’m always angry.
• Panel Parity – what we achieved, and how we did it
• Quote of the Day: Helen Keller on Privilege The comments were, as of yesterday morning, pretty great on this, too–especially the one from Naomi Kritzer.
• Kody’s Blog: Disability and Identity (via)
• Why I Don’t Diet: An Ode to My Father
• SFF in Conversation: Aliette de Bodard I am so excited about this new series over at The Book Smugglers!
• Journey to Forbidden Planet: Writing Speculative Fiction Set in Mexico
• Maureen Johnson: The Gender Coverup The coverflipped images are both telling and maddening–and a few are really fantastic, I especially love the one for A Clockwork Orange.
• How to Host a Genre-Reveal Party. Am sad that romance isn’t on the list–I propose that romance be hot pink.
• Deconstructing my favourite sex scene I totally want to read this book, now.
• Ain’t Evolvin’: The Cookie Cutter Self-Discovery Quest
• Wonderful interview with Kathleen Barthlomew, Kage Baker’s sister and co-conspirator.
• Lois McMaster Bujold debunking–in 1997–the assertion that the Vorkosiverse started out as Star Trek fanfic.
• A quartet of links about the historical subgenre. I am, in general, pretty cynical about the idea that any particular sub-genre is in danger of extinction. I mean, wasn’t it just two years that contemporary romances were on their deathbed? I’m just saying.
  • Why Historical Romance?
  • Where Have All the Historical Romances Gone?
  • We should let the historical genre die
  • Discovering the Good C+: How Readers Could Help Reboot Historical Romance
• Goodreads Alternative Riffle Goes Live
• Signal boost: Will Trade Words for Money Carrie Cuinn is having some health issues and is offering words for money to help pay for tests and treatment.
• I love this cover of “Du Hast” so much.

Note from Natalie: Donna and I are absolutely delighted to have our very first guest post here at the Radish, by the inimitable Jessica from The Hypeless Romantic. Enjoy!

New Life, Bonnie Dee

I had never heard of Bonnie Dee’s New Life, until a gift link appeared in my inbox, courtesy of a friend who thought I would like it. Well, she was right. New Life (Jan. 2013, self-published) is the love story of twenty-somethings Jason Reitmiller and Anna Stevens who meet in an office stairwell where new attorney Anna has taken teary refuge after a disastrous court performance. Jason, the building’s janitor, takes out his earbuds, turns off the floor buffer, and asks her if she’s ok. They have a sweet, funny, promising conversation, each aware of the other’s attractiveness. Later, they invent reasons to run into the each other — not easy, since Jason works second shift — and soon they are dating.

New Life has a somewhat unusual narrative structure: alternating first person perspectives. I happen to really enjoy first person, and this format gave me first person without the downside of never getting inside the other protagonist’ s head.  It’s not gimmicky: no replaying scenes from one point of view and then another, and I enjoyed viewing the development of the romance from two different, but complementary angles.

There’s no good romance without a good conflict or three, and you can probably guess at one of them: differing class status. Early on, Anna refers to Jason dehumanizingly as “the janitor” and fears her employers’ discovery of her growing friendship with him: “The last thing I wanted was for anyone to see me flirting with the janitor.” Although Jason works for a janitorial service, not directly for the law firm, Anna’s colleague orders Jason to do a menial chore that isn’t within his job description. And, later in the book, Anna hesitates to introduce him to her parents as her boyfriend: “Everything about him from his appearance to his job proclaimed ‘underachiever’— the biggest taboo possible in my parents’ book.”

Jason has internalized the low status of his occupation. He can’t seem to tell anyone he is dating a lawyer without seeming to brag, and, mirroring the incredulous response this apparent romantic mismatch elicits, he frequently asks himself “Why in the world would a successful career woman be interested in a janitor?” But Anna’s romantic interest in Jason has, at the same time, the opposite effect: it helps him to see himself in a more positive light, to feel good about himself. And now we’ve come to a second barrier closely connected to Jason’s class status: he experiences a host of cognitive and physical disabilities as a result of a traumatic brain injury he sustained in a car accident.

If having a hero who is a janitor isn’t unusual enough, here’s a list of the challenges Jason faces: aphasia (difficulty finding the right word), motor (stiff hip and leg), memory (both short and long term), impulse control, vomiting when anxious, depressive episodes, headache, fatigue, sensitivity to light and sound, and self-image issues due to scarring on face and torso. It’s not hard to see how these challenges generate smaller conflicts, for example, when Anna suggests a loud dance club for their first date, or when Jason is reluctant to disrobe during sex.

If this were a less ambitious book, Anna’s love would fix all of Jason’s health challenges, and his class status would amount to a temporary barrier, much like “surprise nobility” in a historical romance. But Jason’s accident occurred three years prior to the start of the novel, and his disabilities are unlikely to disappear.  Recovery is not the road his character needs to travel:

Anyway, that’s not the story I want to tell. Who really needs to hear about comas and thousands of hours of rehab? My story begins the night I was cleaning black shoe marks off the floor, which could be any night since my life became all about industrial cleaners and swabbing toilets. This particular night, I was buffing the corridor floor of the office building where I clean. I remember the Naked Farmers blasting through my headphones, when I saw a woman sitting in the stairwell, head down, shoulders hunched and shaking.

A third thing about Jason that is unusual in romance is, sadly, a potential deal breaker for many romance readers. He can behave badly. Without putting in a spoiler, I’ll just say quite badly, and you can picture both of my eyebrows raised as I do. I liked this, because the tendency to hold disabled heroes up as paragons of naive virtue is one not all romance authors have managed to avoid. Jason has little memory of his life prior to the accident (perhaps the least medically realistic feature of this portrayal of TBI, but very consistent with the literary genre), but discovers that he was not exactly a prince. One of the big challenges of recovery from TBI involves personal identity: is Jason the same person he was before the accident?  If not, which Jason is the “real” one? If he acts impulsively, is that “Jason” or “Jason’s disability”, and how would he know? Questions of personal identity, and especially the question of his moral character, preoccupy Jason:

I can admit when I’ve been a dick. I just can’t seem to stop doing crap like that. It’d be easy to call it part of the impulse control issues brain-damaged people are prone to, but my little sister, Katie, will tell you I’ve always been a douche.

Later, he wonders, “Maybe I’m a jerk at the core.” But New Life raises the question, not just for Jason but for Anna, and for the reader, what is anyone’s “core”? Is acting out of character a sign of our hidden “true self” or a deviation from it? What part of any of us are the unique circumstances, luck, and other aspects of our lives we don’t fully control?

Although Jason’s disabilities are made manifest throughout the text (and, actually, that is one criticism I would make: he rarely acts without being described in a way that brings to light the challenges he faces), the novel consistently normalizes them, or at least places them on a continuum with the challenges anyone without a disability might face. For example, in their first meeting, Jason evidences his halting speech pattern, while Anna describes how she lost track of what she was saying in court and babbles. Jason has his lists (“repatterning”), but Anna engages in “life mapping”.  Jason was only a 21 year old college student who had yet to shed his adolescent selfishness and lack of empathy when his life became focused on mere survival, then recovery. And although New Life is not marketed as “new adult”, the protagonists are younger than I tend to see in recent contemporary romance. They are both just starting out, experiencing their first intense adult romantic relationship, finding a career, and dealing with new financial and emotional independence from their parents. Although in some ways Jason’s journey is very unusual, in other ways his challenges are similar to Anna’s (especially apparent as Anna herself makes some impulsive and hurtful choices) and to any other 24 year old.

Eventually, the question of what part is core personality versus what part is brain injury becomes moot. Jason has to adapt, grow, and change if he wants to live a fully human life, which in a romance novel means developing a deep, meaningful romantic relationship. Many survivors of trauma would object to the way I framed the identity question in the last paragraph, insisting that identity is fundamentally relational, and that therefore rebuilding a self after trauma requires others to bear witness and to actively co-construct  a new narrative.  The way Jason’s relationship with Anna helps him grow in his other relationships — family, friends — is a testament to that idea.

Although there is a fairly high amount of conflict compared to happy moments in New Life, I think the author does a good job showing the attraction Anna feels to Jason.  If the development of her romantic feelings aren’t portrayed as fully as I might have liked, that may be because in general the character of Anna takes a back seat to Jason. The first chapter gives hints of some of Anna’s solo struggles: imposter syndrome, the worry that she’s become a lawyer merely to get to the next rung on the ladder of her parents’ expectations, etc., but none of these bear fruit, and as a result, her character was developed almost entirely in terms of her relationship with Jason. Because I didn’t have as clear a sense as I wanted of who Anna is, I did feel that the HEA while believable, was not, as Jo Beverley once put it at a conference, triumphant.

But New Life was a very rewarding read, with interesting facets I have not even touched upon in this already too long review. True, New Life is not a light fluffy romance. And although the bedroom door stays open, those who seek a lot of sex scenes in their romance should look elsewhere. I often think there is a line of “realism” romances just can’t cross and still work as romances. New Life pushed this line further than I would have thought possible.

Romance for Speculative Fiction Readers

I’m sticking with historical authors for this batch of recommendations because I think historical romance has a certain affinity for speculative fiction. Historical romances are, in my opinion, very much like fantasy novels and much like fantasy novels, the setting can and does inform the plot and characterization.

As in speculative fiction, historical romance relies upon an interlocking sequence of research and extrapolation that the story must rest upon–a strong foundation can hold up just about any kind of story. There are so many fantastic books in the subgenre that I had a difficult time picking just three writers to recommend!.

Loretta Chase: Chase is probably my absolute favorite romance author and I’m always recommending her–her books are smart, well-constructed, and thoroughly researched. I’d recommend either Lord of Scoundrels or Mr. Impossible–or both, if you want an idea of Chase’s range as a writer.

Lord of Scoundrels is one of her earlier novels–it was published in 1995–and yet it still feels fresh and revolutionary in so many ways. I can’t even imagine reading it when it was first published.  It must have been mind-blowing.

Jessica Trent is an intelligent and thoroughly self-possessed young woman and Sebastian Ballister, Marquess of Dain is a dissolute blackguard who has never been loved or loved anyone in his life. They have boatloads of chemistry together and it’s just fun to read their interactions. One of the key things about this book is that Dain is, on the surface, a stereotypical “alpha-hole” hero–but because the reader is given his backstory right at the beginning on the book, his alpha-hole-ness is subverted and the reader’s sympathy is gained. It’s a clever bit of storytelling and while it is a bit leaden, it’s also essential because otherwise Dain is essentially irredeemable. I’ve often been tempted to buy a copy of this book, remove the prologue, and hand it to someone who has never read it and see what they think. So much of the book’s success rests on the beginning.

Mr. Impossible is nearly the opposite: it’s funny and features a male protagonist who is basically a lovable and happy-go-lucky guy. Rupert Carsington is not book-smart, but he is emotionally intelligent and he basically falls in love with Daphne from the first moment he meets her. He is absolutely besotted with her intellect and he lets her take the lead on that front as they attempt to locate her kidnapped brother–the entire book is basically an extended rumination on how smart Daphne is and how very, very excellent that quality in her is. The villain of this book is, more or less, a standard issue British imperialist, but rest assured he does get his comeuppance in the end. There is also a completely ridiculous and over the top sex scene in a pyramid during a sand storm. It’s awesome. It’s also my very favorite romance novel of all time.

Cecilia Grant: A Lady Awakened was one of the best romances I read last year. There are many reasons for this but my favorite one is the truly epic bad sex and how it was absolutely right for the story and how, as the two protagonists came to care for each other their physical relationship transformed as well.

Martha is newly widowed and unless she is able to produce a boy child within the next 8 to 9 months, she will lose her home and become a poor relation. Theo is her new neighbor–the son of a minor nobleman, he’s been sent to the country to learn responsibility. Martha sees him as a possible solution to her problem and proposes that she pay him to try to get her pregnant in the next month–she knows this is unethical and it’s not what she wants to do but it is, literally, the only choice available to her. Watching Martha make this choice and still try to remain true to herself and her ideals is really something.

And Grant’s writing is simply gorgeous:

Her hands fell at random places on his back and stayed there, passively riding his rhythm like a pair of dead fish tossed by the sea. Or rather, one dead fish. The other still curled tight, like a brittle seashell with its soft sensate creature shrunk all the way inside.

That’s a sex scene. With dead fish. It’s wonderful. It’s such a perfect encapsulation of Martha at that point in the book–she is trying to be active but not being particularly successful at it–she hasn’t been taught how to be active in her own life: she’s all repressed and brittle and curled in upon herself. And the way she slowly, so slowly opens up is so very powerful. The ending is a bit rushed and didn’t quite work for me–there were too many coincidences–but for a debut novel, this was one hell of a book.

I also just love Grant’s take on romance as a whole, too.

Courtney Milan: I’m going to recommend the first two volumes in her current series, the Brothers Sinister. The first volume, “The Governess Affair” is a prequel novella that sets up the rest of the series–it’s not essential reading but it is useful background knowledge. The Duchess War is the first full-length book in the series and it’s fantastic. Milan is well aware of all the tropes in romance and she is explicitly playing with and exploding them while telling a compelling and moving story about people who feel so, so real.

Min is acutely conscious of her place in society–which is quite marginal, for reasons which are thoroughly explored within the text and which I don’t want to spoil here–and Clermont has bucketloads of unearned privilege that he’s very uncomfortable with. Milan is one of the few writers of historical fiction who is actively working within the restrictions on both women and those not of the upper classes–so often, characters in historical romances are able to move between social classes through the power of love (and buckets of money)–Milan’s body of work makes it evident that this oh-so-common genre convention is a fantasy and that while love is a powerful force, it cannot conquer all.

As for the trope-exploding, there are two very common things that occur in romance that drive a lot of readers up the wall. That would be the evil mother and the baby epilogue–Milan explodes both of them in The Duchess War, right down to the hushed dark room with a terrific amount of tension. And then when it becomes apparent what’s actually going on, it’s just a great ending to the book. And as for the evil mother–she has real motivations and isn’t just a cardboard character there for the purpose of causing trauma to her son.

There’s also a second novella in this series, “A Kiss for Midwinter” and it’s also wonderful–it’s about a couple of secondary characters and the theme of that one is knowledge and anger and horrifying Victorian medical practices. Good stuff. Can’t wait for the next one!

Speculative Fiction for Romance Readers

My recommendations here have a certain something in common with my romance recommendations–these all have a strong thread of romance and they also have fully realized settings that the characters move within.

All three of these writers are firmly grounded in speculative fiction and it is mostly from these tropes these series spring–the romantic elements are essential but the stories wouldn’t be what they are without the speculative elements.

Mary Robinette Kowal: Her fantasy novels are Regency novels but with magic–they’re set during the Napoleonic Wars, a setting that should be very familiar to romance readers In the first book, Shades of Milk and Honey, Jane Ellsworth has a rare talent with glamour–the manipulation of which is considered essential for any well-bred young lady. Along with her sister, Melody, Jane’s life revolves around eligible young men and hopes of marriage. Naturally, Jane’s skill with glamour plays an important role in this book–one thing I found very interesting was the way Kowal subverts the use of magic in her book. Typically, in fantasy novels, magic is a prestigious or desirable activity and yet, in this book it’s an activity fit only for women and men on the fringes of society.

These books are an explicit exploration of women’s roles in society both in and out of marriage and how, even when entering into a marriage that both partners have agreed will be egalitarian, there is still a lot of internalized expectations that need to be overcome.

Lois McMaster Bujold: Bujold is a favorite around these parts, but I’m going to be recommending a series we haven’t covered here and that’s the Sharing Knife quartet. These were written explicitly as an exploration of romance and, as such, the romantic element is explicitly foregrounded while the fantastical elements are much more subtle. There’s a lot going on in these books and I enjoyed them for what they were but many of Bujold’s core audience did not (warning: link contains a lot of “ew, girl cooties”) and wrote the series off after the first volume, Beguilement.

The heart of this book is the relationship between Fawn and Dag and how it develops while they are dealing with magical creatures called “malices”. These books take place in a society that’s trying to rebuild after some sort of magical apocalypse–the malices are a remnant of the catastrophe and the Lakewalkers, Dag’s people, are charged with dispatching them. Fawn comes from people who are more settled and there is a tremendous amount of tension and misinformation between the two groups–most of the tension and conflict in these books comes from the clash of these two (very essential) cultures, not from the fantastic elements.. These books are definitely an experiment on Bujold’s part and while I’m not sure they’re a completely successful experiment even a bad book from Bujold is head and shoulders above a good book from other authors.

Kage Baker: Baker’s Company series is about immortal time travelling cyborgs. Specifically, one named Mendoza who is bitter, prickly, and hates humanity (and for very good reason, i.e., the Spanish Inquisition). And yet they’re also gloriously romantic although it takes many books before Mendoza gets a happy ending. I will note here that the last few books do not work for everyone and even though they worked for me I can absolutely see how the ending is deeply unsatisfying and problematic for other readers. I’ll also note that Baker passed away in 2010 after a short and brutal battle with uterine cancer. She is, still, missed.

In the Garden of Iden is the first book and it’s wonderful–it’s a science fiction historical romance which ends badly (possible understatement of the year) but it’s such a compelling story and the way Baker writes a thoroughly unpleasant character like Mendoza in such a sympathetic way is incredible. Mendoza is made into a cyborg at the beginning of this book and she trains as a botanist–her hope is to be sent someplace far away from people for her first assignment but instead she’s sent to Elizabethan England where she meets Nicholas Harpole and falls in love. Note: things end badly here. There isn’t even a happy-for-now ending.

There is wonk and angst galore in these books and I can’t recommend them highly enough. There’s also a deep and evident authorial love for all the characters and the setting–these are books about California and secret histories and pop culture and nightmare dystopian futures. With immortal time traveling cyborgs.

So to summarize: there are awesome books in lots of different genres. It can’t hurt to try something new–at worst, it’s a DNF and at best you have a new favorite. I’m hoping to make this a regular feature here, so any and all suggestions will be considered for the future.