Reading Binge
Feb. 10th, 2014 01:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shipperxStill on my reading binge, and was awake entirely too late last night to finish a novel.
It was another Courtney Milan, so I guess I got my wind back up for angst again after having read several novels of the bubbly variety. At this point I think I'm going to have to say that I like the way this woman writes. It's not that her novels are without flaws. They are quite flawed. There are weak points in plotting and places where she is too aligned with genre tropes. And in the novel that I just finished (Unveiled) there are problems with both. It particularly had the soap opera problem of "For god's sake FINISH WHAT YOU ARE SAYING!!!" Secret interuptus. Time and time again, the heroine was going to confess her secret only for her to either chicken out or to be interupted or by the hero refusing to shut the hell up to allow her to finish her confession. Very frustrating, and a weakness in plot. Also a weakness was the heroine doggedly remaining loyal to people who did not deserve her loyalty (though on that score, I can see that as being a legitimate psychological flaw. It's frustrating as hell, but it is quite common for people to become so focused on gaining love from an abuser (and her family qualified as emotionally abusive IMHO) that they keep focusing on the love denied them while undervaluing the love someone else offers freely. It's a perverse psychological quirk, but one that happens too often in real life to outright dismiss.
And yet, despite the flaws, Milan manages to place a scene or two that hits so hard, and works for me so well emotionally that I'm willing to forgive even blatant plot flaws (and, in general, I'm a plot-loving kind of gal).
Unveiled had a scene that worked so perfectly for me that I want to go back and examine exactly how she pulled off the trick. She made me spontaneously -- and unexpectedly -- gasp then begin crying. Imean, it's one thing when it's The Hunger Games making me cry over a dead child or the WWII novel The Lost Wife making me cry over a Nazi death camp. It's hard not to cry over over the scope and scale of such injustice and tragedy. It's much more difficult to pull the heartstrings over something infinitely small scale, etching the pain of something personal treated so cavalierly that it takes you by surpise and makes you well up with tears of empathy. The scene made me love the hero (who wasn't even in the scene) and the heroine (because she, like myself, was blazingly furious with the perpetrators of it). It was about such a small thing in one respect, just the salutation of a letter and some brotherly teasing, and yet the way it was handled made my eyes suddenly well up with ushed tears and created a desire to bitchslap the hero's relatives while cheering the heroine for wanting the exact same thing.
Like Duchess War some of the best scenes are not the romantic scenes but familial. In Unveiled the scene that made me cry and love the leads was a scene between the heroine and the hero's brothers, where the brothers exhibit a profound lack of understanding of their sibling while the heroine's heart is breaking for him, all with her being unable to explain to the brothers just how incredibly hurtful their cavalier dismissal of something so small but precious (a simple letter salutation) might be.
Despite a slow start and some quibbles about what were most probably publisher guidelines, as well as trope problems of secrets not told when they damn well should have been told and characters sticking to plans that should have long been abandoned, that heartwrenching mid-book scene made the book a keeper for me. It made me love the leads despite their flaws (of which there were many) and their moments of willfuly blind stupidity (Seriously, if the heroine's secret had been any more obvious, the hero would have been buried under a pile of anvils. That said, I believe it's intended to come off as Buffy Summers-like levels of Herculean denial rather than outright stupidity. They know the truth, they just don't want to admit it to themselves (the scene where one brother asks the other doesn't he WANT to know and the hero says "only when she tells me" is the tip off to that, I think). So the hero willfully ignores every anvil that drops directly on his head (hell, it's not just him. I think every character in the book has serious issues with denial. That was my read anyway.) But because it read as the emtional hang-ups of the characters, I accept these problems not as evidence of a lack of intelligence but of employment of psychological coping mechanisms... probably because the characters made me love them (while wanting to shake them.).
The novel also did the job of making me go ahead and buy the sequel with the youngest brother that I would not have read otherwise (don't care for the blurb.) I want to know more about the family.
It was another Courtney Milan, so I guess I got my wind back up for angst again after having read several novels of the bubbly variety. At this point I think I'm going to have to say that I like the way this woman writes. It's not that her novels are without flaws. They are quite flawed. There are weak points in plotting and places where she is too aligned with genre tropes. And in the novel that I just finished (Unveiled) there are problems with both. It particularly had the soap opera problem of "For god's sake FINISH WHAT YOU ARE SAYING!!!" Secret interuptus. Time and time again, the heroine was going to confess her secret only for her to either chicken out or to be interupted or by the hero refusing to shut the hell up to allow her to finish her confession. Very frustrating, and a weakness in plot. Also a weakness was the heroine doggedly remaining loyal to people who did not deserve her loyalty (though on that score, I can see that as being a legitimate psychological flaw. It's frustrating as hell, but it is quite common for people to become so focused on gaining love from an abuser (and her family qualified as emotionally abusive IMHO) that they keep focusing on the love denied them while undervaluing the love someone else offers freely. It's a perverse psychological quirk, but one that happens too often in real life to outright dismiss.
And yet, despite the flaws, Milan manages to place a scene or two that hits so hard, and works for me so well emotionally that I'm willing to forgive even blatant plot flaws (and, in general, I'm a plot-loving kind of gal).
Unveiled had a scene that worked so perfectly for me that I want to go back and examine exactly how she pulled off the trick. She made me spontaneously -- and unexpectedly -- gasp then begin crying. Imean, it's one thing when it's The Hunger Games making me cry over a dead child or the WWII novel The Lost Wife making me cry over a Nazi death camp. It's hard not to cry over over the scope and scale of such injustice and tragedy. It's much more difficult to pull the heartstrings over something infinitely small scale, etching the pain of something personal treated so cavalierly that it takes you by surpise and makes you well up with tears of empathy. The scene made me love the hero (who wasn't even in the scene) and the heroine (because she, like myself, was blazingly furious with the perpetrators of it). It was about such a small thing in one respect, just the salutation of a letter and some brotherly teasing, and yet the way it was handled made my eyes suddenly well up with ushed tears and created a desire to bitchslap the hero's relatives while cheering the heroine for wanting the exact same thing.
Like Duchess War some of the best scenes are not the romantic scenes but familial. In Unveiled the scene that made me cry and love the leads was a scene between the heroine and the hero's brothers, where the brothers exhibit a profound lack of understanding of their sibling while the heroine's heart is breaking for him, all with her being unable to explain to the brothers just how incredibly hurtful their cavalier dismissal of something so small but precious (a simple letter salutation) might be.
Despite a slow start and some quibbles about what were most probably publisher guidelines, as well as trope problems of secrets not told when they damn well should have been told and characters sticking to plans that should have long been abandoned, that heartwrenching mid-book scene made the book a keeper for me. It made me love the leads despite their flaws (of which there were many) and their moments of willfuly blind stupidity (Seriously, if the heroine's secret had been any more obvious, the hero would have been buried under a pile of anvils. That said, I believe it's intended to come off as Buffy Summers-like levels of Herculean denial rather than outright stupidity. They know the truth, they just don't want to admit it to themselves (the scene where one brother asks the other doesn't he WANT to know and the hero says "only when she tells me" is the tip off to that, I think). So the hero willfully ignores every anvil that drops directly on his head (hell, it's not just him. I think every character in the book has serious issues with denial. That was my read anyway.) But because it read as the emtional hang-ups of the characters, I accept these problems not as evidence of a lack of intelligence but of employment of psychological coping mechanisms... probably because the characters made me love them (while wanting to shake them.).
The novel also did the job of making me go ahead and buy the sequel with the youngest brother that I would not have read otherwise (don't care for the blurb.) I want to know more about the family.
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no subject
Date: 2014-02-12 12:09 am (UTC)And...I'm realizing that this is why I looked twice when Ivory was mentioned above as a lighter, palate cleanser because it's true! Her plots are less angsty than Milan or Sherry Thomas, but no less "serious" in terms of craft.
no subject
Date: 2014-02-12 12:57 am (UTC)During his response, he provides an example of how feminine beauty can be the downfall of most men, and how beautiful women can be well "beastly" and shallow. The example he uses is the heroine, leaving her name out of it, but providing enough information - that she recognizes who he is talking about and is deeply wounded.
Her sister, Helena, suggests that when the opportunity arises the heroine should seek vengeance against him. Make him fall for her, then cut him.
It does, she wears a veiled hat...and takes on the identity of a German Baroness...he is not permitted to see her face. He falls in love with her, but never sees her face, and she with him.
You see the gender flip? She not only grabs the concept from Ivory and flips it. But she instead of doing the fairy tale, she sort of references the Greek myth - Cupid and Psyche, except the woman is cupid, and the male is psyche. Rather clever.
no subject
Date: 2014-02-12 01:42 pm (UTC)I've loved some of Milan's, Thomas' and Ivory's deconstructions. To me they've made them more interesting. And yet for each of my favorites works I can think of an Amazon review that just did not get it.
There were a couple of terrible reviews of one Milan $.99 novella. Complaints about certain aspects. Enough that I just didn't read it until recently. When I did, I was totally 'what the hell was that person talking about?!" (Had a similar reaction to reviews of one Ivory novel and a Thomas as well.) I can only think that the reviewer was looking for one thing and totally missed that the author was focusing on something else.
I love the aspects that deconstruct tropes or deeply delve into a psychological point. It raises those books to being better books. But its clear from some reviews that this isn't a universal point of view.
And your discussion of Beguiling the Beauty intrigues me (again, more than Amazon's blurb and reviews did.)
Though I think I'm back to needing a light book before delving back into the angst.
And have you ever read any of Roberta Gellis's reconstructed mythology? She re-did both the Minotaur myth as well as the Hades/Pesephone myth. (As mythology (meaning its still about gods). It's been decades since I read the Hades/Pesephone one, but I remember liking it. I wonder if I can trust my memory. Sometimes what we liked as a teen we don't like as an adult.)
no subject
Date: 2014-02-12 04:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-02-12 08:28 pm (UTC)How sexually explicit a story is is not a clean/unclean issue. I understand having preferences (frankly, I think that they should just go the fanfic route and have a rating system so that people know upfront. I personally enjoy a wide range, but it's perfectly clear that many people do not. They want what they want and that's fair. But the "clean" thing irks the hell out of me. (Just as the H/h shorthand that shadowkat mentioned the other day. I had noticed that too and it had bothered me also. Why is Hero the capital and the heroine lowercase? What kind of subconscious sexism is that?!)
And as far as the sex is concerned, it's not a matter of 'clean' or 'unclean'. Framing it in those terms gives me the wiggins. It doesn't matter if it's a fade to black or whether it's explicit in every detail. For me the difference between disturbing and enjoyable is about the power dynamics. There are perfectly 'chaste' novels that have incredibly ookie sexism and domination involved. THAT is what I'm disturbed by. That, sexism, and consent issues. One person's 'clean' and 'unclean' may mean a world of difference to me than what it means to THEM (often because the people who often make these 'clean'/'unclean' judgments are the same sort that love 'traditional gender relationships' translated into an overbearing, power-sucking, controlling hero infantilizing a heroine.
no subject
Date: 2014-02-13 12:20 am (UTC)I understand having preferences (frankly, I think that they should just go the fanfic route and have a rating system so that people know upfront. I personally enjoy a wide range, but it's perfectly clear that many people do not. They want what they want and that's fair. But the "clean" thing irks the hell out of me. (Just as the H/h shorthand that shadowkat mentioned the other day. I had noticed that too and it had bothered me also. Why is Hero the capital and the heroine lowercase? What kind of subconscious sexism is that?!)
EXACTLY. I've learned to read the bad and good reviews on these sites. Some books do warn you - the self-published ones do and the ones that are .99 cents. Which is interesting.
(often because the people who often make these 'clean'/'unclean' judgments are the same sort that love 'traditional gender relationships' translated into an overbearing, power-sucking, controlling hero infantilizing a heroine.
Found that out the hard way... I really can't abide those romances. Read a few of them...and found them cringe inducing. Most, weirdly, were in the contemporary/New Adult category. Which is odd. Also a lot of the chicklit books have that power imbalance.
While the historicals...that I've been reading such as the Countess Conspiracy (which I adored to pieces) and Beguiling the Beauty...don't or rather they comment on how the time period enforced a power imbalance, which the characters struggle against and refuse to give in to.
But a lot of the reviewers on Amazon and Good Reads - I've found, find the stronger women - to be self-centered or not supportive. It's very odd. And they seem to want the 18-21 year old and the older guy.
Thomas in Beguiling the Beauty plays with that trope - in an interesting way, her heroine is older than the hero, but the heroine's first marriage was to that older controlling guy who wanted her to be the pretty/traditional girl (which is the established trope). While the heroine wanted to dig up fossils, but her first husband was against it.
no subject
Date: 2014-02-13 12:44 am (UTC)LOL! So too are some of the Good Reads reviews. Honestly, I wonder about some of these people.
Seriously, there are reviewers who really do. not. get. how characters may be flat out lying to themselves and thus to the reader as well. I've seen confusion over that more than once in Amazon/Good Reads reviews recently. I love that Milan and Thomas do psychological POV things like that. It's one thing in GRRMartin books that I like, too. POV should matter.
Exactly. I've discovered this as well. POV is a major deal for me. It's actually one of the reasons I stuck with GRRM as long as I did - he does POV very very well.
I've loved some of Milan's, Thomas' and Ivory's deconstructions. To me they've made them more interesting. And yet for each of my favorites works I can think of an Amazon review that just did not get it.
Quite true. Judith Ivory's The Beast got ripped apart, as did Beguiling the Beauty. (I read the worst and best reviews.)
I can only think that the reviewer was looking for one thing and totally missed that the author was focusing on something else.
I sometimes think reviews tell us more about the reviewer than the work being reviewed. Not always the case. But sometimes.
A lot of readers get angry at a book for not being what they wanted it to be, ignoring what the writer was trying to do. (I've read a lot of the reviews that were upset that the writer didn't include an epilogue that showed the couple having babies and happily ever after. In fact that seems to be a huge criticism of Thomas' and Milan's novels.)
And your discussion of Beguiling the Beauty intrigues me (again, more than Amazon's blurb and reviews did.)
It has a reference to a same-sex relationship and handles it in a realistic and interesting way.
I can see why the book pissed a lot of reviewers off - it has some extremely strong and dominant women characters. (which personally, I prefer and find to be a breath of fresh air). A lot of female reviewers have issues with strong and assertive women in books - it's weird. I've even scene the term "alpha female" used and in a derogatory sense.
Though I think I'm back to needing a light book before delving back into the angst.
I'm thinking the same thing. I may jump to The Proposition before attempting either The Beast or the Milan trilogy. Or maybe Tempting the Bride - which is supposed to be lighter.
Beguiling the Beauty isn't that dark at the moment - but I'm only 36% of the way through.
nd have you ever read any of Roberta Gellis's reconstructed mythology? She re-did both the Minotaur myth as well as the Hades/Pesephone myth. (As mythology (meaning its still about gods). It's been decades since I read the Hades/Pesephone one, but I remember liking it. I wonder if I can trust my memory. Sometimes what we liked as a teen we don't like as an adult.)
No. I should try her. I loved to see a twist on those myths.
I remember reading Piers Anthony's take on the Greek myths as a kid. My favorites were the ones on "Death" and "Hades".
(Yes, I have a fictional bad-boy character fetish...but only in fictional narratives.)
True...I'm learning I can't trust what I liked as a teen either. I recently re-read a book I loved as a teen and thought it was ...well not that good.
no subject
Date: 2014-02-12 04:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-02-12 08:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-02-12 11:53 pm (UTC)I do. And thanks! But I need to wait until I finish reading the book. ;-)
But you've sparked my curiousity for Beast by Judith Ivory. Which is a wee bit controversial on Good Reads. But then so too was Beguiling the Beauty.
Nuance is, I've found, lost on a lot of Good Reads reviewers. And Thomas is a subtle, clever writer.
no subject
Date: 2014-02-13 01:16 am (UTC)(Books are really getting me through February that has no TV and is all Olympics. It's actually more enjoyable.)
And Good Reads savaged "The Proposition" also, which I found to be a really fun romp (with a wonderful alley love scene. I found it hilarious how the hero kept telling himself "I'll stop. I have to stop. I can't make love to her in an alley. You don't take a girls virginity in an alley. Especially if you love the girl. But...um... okay, one more sec. Just one more thing first..." Until he finally confesses to the heroine how close he is to doing just that with her saying, "No, you won't. I won't let you." and his being doubtful with "er... yeah, I kind of think you would" (she totally would've too.) Very funny and yet sexy scene. Because when ...er.. push comes to shove, she's the one who convinced him to finally make love to her.
no subject
Date: 2014-02-13 02:13 am (UTC)A couple of readers really could not deal with the strong female character, and a male hero who was not...what they were used to. (They were really turned off by his background.)
Smartbitches a while back, in one of their podcasts, discussed Good Reads Reviews and how they aren't really indicative of the readership at large, and that the reviewers there are geared towards certain novels.
Okay, I think I may read the Proposition first. Let me know what you think of "Beast" - it got weird reviews on both sites. I did find one decent review of it - that made it sound rather appealing. The heroine is smart.
(I require smart heroines, stupid heroines grate on my nerves.)
no subject
Date: 2014-02-12 02:57 pm (UTC)And I love light and fluffy ones, especially when there's substance to them. I also love the angsty ones as well, but after a few of those, I kind of need a fluff break. (I'm actually pretty close to needing a fluff break now, so I may check out Ivory's Beauty and the Beast take. There are some more Thomas and Milan's I want to read, but I think I need a breather from heartbreak novels. :)
no subject
Date: 2014-02-12 04:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-02-12 08:11 pm (UTC)In romances, it should probably be 'obstacles are easy, making a relationship work is hard.'
no subject
Date: 2014-02-12 08:24 pm (UTC)YES.
no subject
Date: 2014-02-12 11:58 pm (UTC)THIS is what I look for in romance novels. Where it shows the the difficulty of making the relationship work. Not just the following in love or of-times cliche "marriage plot", or the crazy obstacles, but how they make their relationship work after they fall in love, after the lust stage...or after they get married.
no subject
Date: 2014-02-13 12:04 am (UTC)Have the same problem. It's why I'm over here...finally can discuss this with someone.
no subject
Date: 2014-02-13 08:13 pm (UTC)After reading it, my conclusion is that it's basically like a Howard Hawk's screwball comedy, like the ones Carey Grant did with Irene Dunn such as "The Awful Truth" or "My Favorite Wife"