Reviews: Meljean Brook, Marie Rutkoski, Rose Lerner, Courtney Milan
The Heiress Effect (Brothers Sinister, #2), by Courtney Milan
There's a somewhat contrived setup, where the eponymous heiress has to agree that she will marry the first man to make her an offer, so she sets about making herself so ridiculous and unpalatable that no one will, so she can retain control of her fortune until her sister is no longer under her uncle's control. This part was probably supposed to be hilarious, but was only 'okay' for me.
I started to get really into this book about half-way through, when the couple agrees they probably can't make it work and separate to pursue their respective goals. I'm weird that way, I guess?
Other things going for the book: a really compassionate portrayal of someone mentally ill; an indian barrister studying in England who manages to navigate a society that regards him with the most insidious benevolent paternalistic racism, a second disabled character fighting to make her own choices about treatment, and a tense scene with a cactus.
The resolution is "I should never have asked you to change so you could marry me. I'm gonna change so I can marry you!" which in retrospect, is a bit um, but at the time felt well earned.
xpost of this review originally published on goodreads Sun, 01 May 2016.
A Lily Among Thorns, by Rose Lerner
All the things I loved in this book:
- Queer people exist, and have sex lives, and love lives, and get their own stories
- Brown/Black people exist (do not get quite their own stories? But you can see that they have their own story, even if the book does not tell it, only hints at it.)
- Sex workers exist, and have various experiences of it, but although sex-work is definitely stigmatised by society, the book does not.
- Het dude has 'unmanly' interests, isn't embarrassed
So Serena is a former sex-worker who now owns an Inn, which she is very proud of. Solomon is a young tradesman who needs to find the family earrings before his sister's wedding. Together, they fight espionage!
xpost of this review originally published on goodreads Sun, 01 May 2016.
The Winner's Curse (The Winner's Trilogy, #1), by Marie Rutkoski
Decent YA which deals a little (a lot?) naively with slavery, imperialism, and colonialism, but which does set out with the intention to deal with them. Reminds me a little of M.M. Kaye's books on those themes, although not dealing with a real culture.
Kestrel (One of the 19 approved YA protagonist names) is the daughter of the general that conquered the land they live in. She shares his skill with tactics, but not his like of battle, or his skill at hand-to-hand. Then she buys a slave because something about him catches her attention, and ...
Okay, listen.
I think this book deal... not terribly? with the slave/owner relationship, working under the constraints it's working under. But setting up Kestrel as the 'good slave-owner' made me hella uncomfortable. The book acknowledges that slavery is an evil, but wants Kestrel to be innocent of it: she freed her old nurse and maintains her on a cottage on the grounds, but cannot free any other slaves because they all belong to her father.
I'm almost more uncomfortable with her "innocence" than I would be with a deeper complicity, I think.
This dynamic abruptly ceases to be the case about half-way through the book, for spoiler reasons.
xpost of this review originally published on goodreads Sat, 30 Apr 2016.
Talk Sweetly to Me (Brothers Sinister, #4.5), by Courtney Milan
Both sweet and romantic, this novela manages to handle an A plot about the transit of Venus and B plot about a breech baby. Miss Rose Sweetly likes Stephen Shaughnessy, but doesn't trust him, or take him seriously. She's looking for a man who can handle marrying a black woman in Victorian England. Also she wants to do astronomical calculations. Shaughnessy seems to want to scandalize people, and she's pretty sure he doesn't grok how much her association with him imperils her, and he hasn't mentioned marriage, but if he did, does he really get what he's signing up for?
(By the end: yes.)
(Milan includes in her afterword: "By 1882, Britain had probably trained at least as many black doctors as there were dukes," which seems to be a pretty direct response to a very common line of criticism, and cracked me up a little.)
xpost of this review originally published on goodreads Sat, 30 Apr 2016.
Frozen, by Meljean Brook
This is fuck or die fic. If you know that is what you like, you will probably like this. If you are put off by the consent issues inherent in the trope, you will probably not like this. It's erotica more than it is a story, although for erotica, the story element is quite good. I got the ebook for free from Amazon, and it may still be available at that attractive price.
Fun fact: The book opens with a page telling you that the premise might be triggering to some people, and giving you a web page you can go to for further details. Cool!
Further detail: Brook does a good job of making the characters people who I could care about, which is a problem I often have with pro-erotica: it's hard for me to care about the boning if I don't care about the characters.
I liked that Olivia's job is with a construction firm. Often romance and erotica that wants to give a woman a 'high powered' job gives her a job with a law firm, a job I find both incomprehensible, intensely boring, and morally a bit luke-warm. I also liked that this was part of her character; she makes observations about the construction of buildings she encounters.
I'm going to spoiler-cut, not because of actual spoilers, but to talk about the way consent is dealt with. [spoilers removed]
xpost of this review originally published on goodreads Sat, 30 Apr 2016.
This post also on dreamwidth (
comments)
There's a somewhat contrived setup, where the eponymous heiress has to agree that she will marry the first man to make her an offer, so she sets about making herself so ridiculous and unpalatable that no one will, so she can retain control of her fortune until her sister is no longer under her uncle's control. This part was probably supposed to be hilarious, but was only 'okay' for me.
I started to get really into this book about half-way through, when the couple agrees they probably can't make it work and separate to pursue their respective goals. I'm weird that way, I guess?
Other things going for the book: a really compassionate portrayal of someone mentally ill; an indian barrister studying in England who manages to navigate a society that regards him with the most insidious benevolent paternalistic racism, a second disabled character fighting to make her own choices about treatment, and a tense scene with a cactus.
The resolution is "I should never have asked you to change so you could marry me. I'm gonna change so I can marry you!" which in retrospect, is a bit um, but at the time felt well earned.
xpost of this review originally published on goodreads Sun, 01 May 2016.
A Lily Among Thorns, by Rose Lerner
All the things I loved in this book:
- Queer people exist, and have sex lives, and love lives, and get their own stories
- Brown/Black people exist (do not get quite their own stories? But you can see that they have their own story, even if the book does not tell it, only hints at it.)
- Sex workers exist, and have various experiences of it, but although sex-work is definitely stigmatised by society, the book does not.
- Het dude has 'unmanly' interests, isn't embarrassed
So Serena is a former sex-worker who now owns an Inn, which she is very proud of. Solomon is a young tradesman who needs to find the family earrings before his sister's wedding. Together, they fight espionage!
xpost of this review originally published on goodreads Sun, 01 May 2016.
The Winner's Curse (The Winner's Trilogy, #1), by Marie Rutkoski
Decent YA which deals a little (a lot?) naively with slavery, imperialism, and colonialism, but which does set out with the intention to deal with them. Reminds me a little of M.M. Kaye's books on those themes, although not dealing with a real culture.
Kestrel (One of the 19 approved YA protagonist names) is the daughter of the general that conquered the land they live in. She shares his skill with tactics, but not his like of battle, or his skill at hand-to-hand. Then she buys a slave because something about him catches her attention, and ...
Okay, listen.
I think this book deal... not terribly? with the slave/owner relationship, working under the constraints it's working under. But setting up Kestrel as the 'good slave-owner' made me hella uncomfortable. The book acknowledges that slavery is an evil, but wants Kestrel to be innocent of it: she freed her old nurse and maintains her on a cottage on the grounds, but cannot free any other slaves because they all belong to her father.
I'm almost more uncomfortable with her "innocence" than I would be with a deeper complicity, I think.
This dynamic abruptly ceases to be the case about half-way through the book, for spoiler reasons.
xpost of this review originally published on goodreads Sat, 30 Apr 2016.
Talk Sweetly to Me (Brothers Sinister, #4.5), by Courtney Milan
Both sweet and romantic, this novela manages to handle an A plot about the transit of Venus and B plot about a breech baby. Miss Rose Sweetly likes Stephen Shaughnessy, but doesn't trust him, or take him seriously. She's looking for a man who can handle marrying a black woman in Victorian England. Also she wants to do astronomical calculations. Shaughnessy seems to want to scandalize people, and she's pretty sure he doesn't grok how much her association with him imperils her, and he hasn't mentioned marriage, but if he did, does he really get what he's signing up for?
(By the end: yes.)
(Milan includes in her afterword: "By 1882, Britain had probably trained at least as many black doctors as there were dukes," which seems to be a pretty direct response to a very common line of criticism, and cracked me up a little.)
xpost of this review originally published on goodreads Sat, 30 Apr 2016.
Frozen, by Meljean Brook
This is fuck or die fic. If you know that is what you like, you will probably like this. If you are put off by the consent issues inherent in the trope, you will probably not like this. It's erotica more than it is a story, although for erotica, the story element is quite good. I got the ebook for free from Amazon, and it may still be available at that attractive price.
Fun fact: The book opens with a page telling you that the premise might be triggering to some people, and giving you a web page you can go to for further details. Cool!
Further detail: Brook does a good job of making the characters people who I could care about, which is a problem I often have with pro-erotica: it's hard for me to care about the boning if I don't care about the characters.
I liked that Olivia's job is with a construction firm. Often romance and erotica that wants to give a woman a 'high powered' job gives her a job with a law firm, a job I find both incomprehensible, intensely boring, and morally a bit luke-warm. I also liked that this was part of her character; she makes observations about the construction of buildings she encounters.
I'm going to spoiler-cut, not because of actual spoilers, but to talk about the way consent is dealt with. [spoilers removed]
xpost of this review originally published on goodreads Sat, 30 Apr 2016.
This post also on dreamwidth (
comments)