Jaran by Kate Elliott

When I try to think about what I want to write about in this review, I have to keep coming back to Roger Ebert's famous and useful maxim "it's not what it's about, it's how it is about it." He's talking about movies, of course, but it's just as applicable to books. And that's where my troubles lie. I will defend strongly the idea that science fiction and romance should not be mutually exclusive categories, although I have to admit that I haven't loved the couple of entries into that hybrid genre I've read so far. I do not, however, think that good romance science fiction books can't be written.

I just...I'm not sure this is one of them. In many ways, the romance part is fine, with some major quibbles about tropes it embraces wholeheartedly instead of interrogating. But you bill a book as science fiction, it somehow makes it more difficult to turn my brain off and just float along in romancey goodness. (I'm not that good at floating along in romancey goodness anyway, but for a select few authors, I can manage it.)

If it's science fiction, I want to be engaged with the universe being built, with the underlying ideas, and how they're used, and whether the author is exploring the boundaries of their creation, or is content to build science fiction dressing on older tropes based on race, civilization, and what my husband aptly dubbed "simplicity porn," and ignoring anything problematic in favour of a passionate tale of love across cultural lines.

Uh...yeah. I guess that previous paragraph sets out many of my problems with this book. There are a lot of ways in which I feel like I'm being too critical. It's obviously supposed to be fluffy and fun, and I really wish I could treat it that way. But once I started to notice the similarity in narrative to colonial/race-based tropes of finding freedom from the horrible cities in the simpler, purer culture of the natives...I was sunk. You start to see it, you can't unsee it.

And here is my primary problem with it, and why I dragged Roger Ebert into it. I do strongly believe that there might be a story to be told with science fiction, and maybe even with romance, that tackles these kinds of issues in ways that are engrossing and powerful. A book that takes its "how it is about it" in incisive ways to write something really interesting. But that's not the "how it is about it" that happens here. Here, we pretend that it's okay to play around with the tropes being used without ever considering issues of race and/or discourses of what is "civilized" and what is "savage" because science fiction gives you the freedom to just make everyone white.

This is an answer that is not okay.

(To be fair, everyone in the tribes the main character ends up with is very white and if I remember correctly, blonde. Tess, the main character, coming from off-world, is a brunette. I believe she is also white, but I will admit that I am not entirely sure, because I read this digitally, and in that format, it's a hell of a lot harder to flip back through quickly and look for a description. I will concede that she might not be white, but even so, I'm not sure that would make anything better. Using science fiction to make it so that white people are the tribal people without ever really engaging in any thought about the historical and cultural baggage wrapped up in stories of the freedom of the plains and the tribes who ride there is not clever. It's simplistic, and it tries to use cultural tropes without dealing with the history or weight of those tropes.)

So, what's the story about? Humanity has long spread to the stars, but ran smack into a race, the Chapalii, who already control most of it. After hundreds of years, one human led a rebellion against them. He failed, but was rewarded with a dukedom in the highly hierarchical society of the Chapalii, in which deviance from hierarchical norms is perverted and unthinkable. (I'd have to go into a very deep read to parse out why the way in which they are talked about made me think uncomfortably about late nineteenth-century North American ideas about Chinese culture, so I'm not going to pursue it at the moment.)

His sister and heir, Tess, is coming home after a failed relationship at school, and she hates the responsibility she's going to have to assume as his heir, and doesn't seem too fond of intergalactic "urban" culture. On her trip, she becomes aware of some shadiness on the part of Chapalii on a world that is part of her brother's demesne, and follows them down, finding herself adrift in a vast plain, where she is picked up by a horse-riding nomadic clan.

Does she become accepted into the clan with open arms because they're less suspicious of outsiders and frankly a little naive? Of course.

Does she find lots of freedom in their gender norms, more than she would have found out in the stars? It seems so, even though what the intergalactic gender norms are is more than a little sketchily drawn.

Does she break the gender norms in the tribe she's adopted in ways no woman ever has before, becoming more proficient than any woman before her in horse riding, sabre fighting, and travelling, while still being totally accepted? You bet your sweet bippy.

In other words, does she Dances With Wolves the shit out of this?

Oh, and because this is a romance, does she fall in love with the hotheaded leader of the nomadic tribe and he with her, even though they are both too damned stubborn to admit to it for most of the length of the novel?  Do you even need to ask?

The writing is not bad. The romance is not bad, if you could truly divorce this plot from the stories that we have told over and over again in our culture about the decadence of civilization, and the purity of the uncivilized life. Which you can't. You really, really can't. Or rather, you shouldn't. This draws so heavily on familiar stories from Earth that are so steeped in racial and cultural assumptions that to use them while trying to ignore those assumptions made me so frustrated, again and again.

It's not that a book can't be written about these themes. But how this book is about it, or rather, how it tries to have its cake while ignoring it too, is the problem. You want the cake, you've got to deal with the history of the cake, and how it tastes, and what the cake does to people.

The Seduction of an English Scoundrel by Jillian Hunter

Honestly, sometimes I wonder why I even bother. I don't really like romances very much. And yet, every once in a while, when one crops up on a list by an author who hasn't utterly disgusted me yet, I pick it up. I think I'm trying to prove I'm not a book snob. See, I'll read anything! Even romance!

As much as I do like to try to read a few popular books at any given time, though, my rate of return on romances has been lamentably low. There are very few I've enjoyed, and none that I can even remember what they were named. It might be time, finally, to admit that romances, they just aren't for me.

Or at least, not when they're done like this one. This has formula written all over it. Not in the specifics, but the part where smart, spunky young woman (in some era of British history, but history isn't this book's strong point) meets alarmingly masculine rake who discovers to his alarm that this particular spunky smart young woman might just have him thinking of marriage....

Haven't I read this book before? Oh yes, I did. It was set in a school. And was more entertaining and had an actual subplot. Still wasn't great, but maybe it's not just the genre. Maybe it's just that the characters in Seduction of an English Scoundrel are paper thin. (And I keep spelling that as seducation, for some reason.) And the story started off diverting, but then became just the same "former rogue can't believe he's falling in love" that I've read before, even with my remarkably limited background in romance.

Oh, and, Jillian Hunter? When your main character is musing about what the opposite of a sensible woman is, the antonym he's looking for is foolish. Not insensible. Unless she just fainted.

But here's the part that sticks in my feminist historian craw (and I swear, I try not to evaluate this type of book by that alone.) This book tries to hide power imbalances by making it a one-upmanship game between two equals. Except that the woman is exercising the one power she does have, of not saying anything, to gain a small advantage for herself. In return, when he discovers this, the man uses his substantial power to kidnap her, take utter control of her life and promises to do so forever. Doesn't matter that it's a trick. There's a serious control issue here you're trying to pass off as sexy lovin' times.

And as soon as my brain gets involved, you know I'm going to have trouble with a book like this. Romances, I think I might stay away in the future. I'm sorry. It's not you, it's me.

Outlander by Diana Gabaldon

I was working in a bookstore when this book first started to be hugely popular. I have had friends who loved it practically swoon when they heard I hadn't read it. I've heard other people dismiss it out of hand. So, eventually, in absolutely no hurry, I had to check it out myself.

And the verdict? Meh. It's okay. Parts of it are interesting, but other parts (particularly the ones that are supposed to be suspenseful) are far too repetitive, and the narrative dwells on sexual violence in much more detail than I have any interesting in reading.

It is mostly a light romance, and I did enjoy that Gabaldon avoided the route of having Claire fleeing from an unhappy marriage. But you know what I enjoyed most about the book? The moments when not much of dramatic significance was happening. Or at least those moments when peril-to-life-and-limb was not the focus of attention.

The moments of jockeying for power, of the running of a castle or an estate, the quieter moments - those were the ones I enjoyed. I thought the characters were well drawn and intelligent at those moments, and I wished the book were a) shorter or b) had more of those.

Because every time the author worried that there wasn't enough tension, someone got captured by the goddamned English. I can't even count the number of times this happened. Find some other way of creating tension, or have it happen once or twice, and cut your narrative in half. Because around the time we got to the seventh or eighth capture, I was so fed up. Claire or Jamie were captured by the English and threatened with rape or actually experienced torture and rape. Over and over and over and over. And then, at the end, after the most horrific events, it gets recounted. Once. Then twice. Then thrice. And I think even a fourth time, in increasingly horrific detail, and this starts to feel like torture porn.

While I'm glad the author wanted real consequences, as opposed to the lightweight vague threats most romance novels have, I don't need to hear about it in such loving detail. I just don't.

And what was with the Geillis subplot? It seemed like there was something interesting there, but which the author decided to keep to herself instead of sharing. Without any kind of payoff, why include it? She's obviously a complex character, but we got so little in return for so many hints.

So, yeah. The political intrigue stuff was interesting, the quiet moments of life were good, the capture by the English was overused, and the details of sexual violence far, far too complete.