The Duke and I

The Duke and I, by Julia Quinn

Despite my earlier post on romance, I keep TRYING to like the books recommended by Smart Bitches, Trashy Books. However, not even for free could I persist past the second chapter or so of this Regency. Quinn's prose is flat and her ear for dialog tin.

Three by Dick Francis

In the wake of consolidating my and my mother's mystery collections, I discovered some appalling gaps in the collection and promptly set about replacing some cherished favorites via BookMooch. Among these were some of the best titles in Dick Francis's oeuvre.

Nerve is the story of Rob Finn, an up-and-coming young jockey, who learns that someone is systematically destroying jockeys' careers and takes revenge. Francis is never really at his best when delving into psychology, but the point where Rob understands exactly how alike he and the villain are is riveting. I also really like the romance in this one; unlike in some of his other books, it feels central to Rob's character.

In Forfeit , racing reporter James Tyrone discovers a cheating bookmaker who makes money through hyping horses and then preventing them from running. Ty takes extraordinary measures to protect the latest horse in the string and his wife, crippled from polio. Ty's relationship with his wife -- complicated by a guilt-ridden affair with the biracial Gail -- and the minute depiction of their domestic economy are truly touching. I always think of Francis as adding sex to his books much later, and reluctantly (I envision his publisher saying, "Dick, horses running around in circles is all very well, but can't you throw in a few naked girls?"), but here he tackles the subject with some frankness and without the embarrassment that seems to characterize later efforts.

Daniel Roke, in For Kicks, owns a successful stud farm in Australia, has three loving younger siblings, and is bored to tears. It takes an undercover investigation of a novel form of horse doping in England to teach him what he's made of and what he really wants in life. Villains in Francis's books are often soulless and creepy, but this pair are serious contenders for the worst in show.

2/3 of the Tummy Trilogy

American Fried and Third Helpings, by Calvin Trillin*

Trillin is one of my favorite food writers, and these books were just what I needed to wash the sour taste out of my mouth from some of the other terrible things I had been reading. A foodie before there was even a word for such a thing (his wife Alice politely referred to the species as "food crazies"), Trillin writes humorously and passionately about his constant quest for something to eat -- not the most trendy, most expensive, most organically-grown-and-locally-sourced item of the day, but something that tastes good. Whether he's discussing his friend Fats Goldberg the pizza baron, daydreaming about the Italian West Indies, or assiduously eating his weight in baked duck and dirty rice in a valiant attempt to trace the origin of the recipe, Trillin always makes me laugh and leaves me hungry.

*Edited to ask: Can anybody help me find a free or cheap copy of Alice, Let's Eat? Mom's has disappeared, and BookMooch has been disappointing on that score.

Movie Quote of the Day #5

Well, I feel for you, but I'm consumed by apathy.

Walter Brennan, Bad Day at Black Rock

Daughters of the North

Daughters of the North, by Sarah Hall

A young woman runs away from a city run by an oppressive authority that controls every aspect of its citizens' lives, including their fertility. She heads into the mountains in search of a place she's heard about that has rejected the regime, living off the grid in a self-sustaining agrarian community. Close to her destination, she's attacked, from behind and without warning, by two soldiers who knock her down hard enough to whack the hell out of her knee and break her arm, then hold her down and search her possessions. Her captors march her to their headquarters, where their leader has her thrown into a metal dog box for three days, without medical treatment or food, only a little water.

Who are these brutal captors? Tools of the fascists she's trying to escape? No, this is Carhullan, the group of women she's come looking for. These are THE GOOD GUYS.

This is an intensely disturbing, even horrifying, book, not because of its depiction of a totalitarian, post-disaster England, but because its imagined alternative is so bleakly inhumane. Even after Sister (we'll get to the name issue in a minute) is let out of the box and more or less patched up, including having her IUD removed, no one apologizes for her treatment. No one introduces her to the community or tries to make her feel welcome. Instead, they just let her blunder around and try to insert herself into the hitherto hostile group.

I have rarely read anything that put my back up as much as this, when Sister enters the kitchen for the first time and everyone begins banging on the table:

I knew then that I was nothing; that I was void to the core. To get here I
had committed a kind of suicide. My old life was over. I was now an unmade
person. In the few days that I had been at Carhullan nobody had called me
anything but Sister, though they had seen my identification card and knew my
name, and I had shouted out my story over and over from behind the metal walls
of the dog box, trying to engage their sympathies, trying to tell them who I
was. The person I had once been, the person who had walked out of the safety
zones and up the mountain, was gone. She was dead. I was alive. But the only
heartbeat I had was the pulse they were beating through me.

It was not until the first of them left the table, came forward and took
hold of my neck and kissed my mouth, while the others continued to knock their
cutlery, and when the woman next to her followed suit, and the next, and the
next, that I began to understand what was happening. I realised what the noise
was. It was not a clamour intended to drive me out or to let me know I bore some
kind of stigma. It was the sign of acceptance I had been waiting for. It was
applause.

So: brutalization, isolation, deprivation, and depersonalization, followed by inappropriate and overly personal bonding. Isn't that classic cult induction behavior? And just like a cult victim, Sister not only doesn't resent what's happened to her, she thinks it's only natural. She thinks it's great.

The cult-like nature of Carhullan is reinforced by the presence of its founder, Jackie Nixon, who leads both through her ownership of the farm and the force of her charismatic personality. Sister -- and the author -- hero-worship Jackie, but to me she comes across very clearly as a psychopath, brilliant and charming when she wants to be, but totally manipulative and utterly without conscience or remorse. One community member realizes this too late, and winds up dead. Yet we're not supposed to hate Jackie, just to think that she's made a hard choice for the good of the community. I can only say, bullshit.

The casual cruelty and militarism of Carhullen depresses and, yes, offends me. I know that women are strong and capable; I know they can fight and sacrifice to meet their goals; I know that institutions run by women aren't all tea-drinking and group hugs. But Carhullan is not my idea of what women's strength must, or should, look like. The way to counteract oppression is not to become more vicious and soul-dead than your oppressors.

As for the setting of the story, I try not to be one of those genre readers who tell non-genre authors, "You can't play in our sandbox." That said, if you're GOING to play in our sandbox, take some time to learn the rules. Hall's world-building fails for me on a very fundamental level. I simply don't believe that any repressive totalitarian society, given the existence of a large body of otherwise useless conscript labor, is going to decide that it's cheaper and more efficient to abandon all farming and depend completely on imported foodstuffs. If there's one thing American slavery taught us, it's that farming with slave labor can be very productive and profitable; furthermore, the Chinese Cultural Revolution proved that you can transform an educated urban population into peasants if you're determined and callous enough. If Hall had tried to justify these conditions through some other device, such as pollution or radiation levels that made growing food unsafe, I might have bought that; but then she couldn't have had her little pocket "utopia."

The other thing that doesn't ring true for me about Carhullan is its sexuality. The main community at Carhullan is all female. A few men in a satellite settlement do some work on the farm, but it's clear the women could function without them; as Sister later explicitly states, they're essentially prostitutes and sperm donors. She first discovers their role when she and her workmates take some peat for fuel down to the men. As the women choose men and go off with them, she realizes that the true purpose of the trip is a mass booty call. Awkwardly declining her "share" of the men, she is left alone with another woman, Shruti. The sounds of the others coupling all around her start to turn her on; instantly, she's on fire for Shruti and the two of them have sex.

My problem with this is not Teh Gay; it's Teh Stoopid. I can accept that a woman who's never given any indication of previous lesbian or bisexual feelings (Sister had been married, and all her previous lovers were male) is suddenly attracted to another woman. I can't accept that she would just start making love to that woman as though she had decided to change brands of toothpaste. Sister displays no hesitation, no nervousness, no self-doubt or vulnerability; and neither does she have any great epiphany that this is what she's been waiting for all her life. I'm not asking for deep angst here, but some moderate soul-searching, some ACKNOWLEDGMENT of the issues, would be normal.

If I can drag in another medium here, consider the behavior of Dr. Callie Torres on Grey's Anatomy. Like Sister, Callie had been exclusively straight until she met cardiothoracic ace Erica Hahn. Callie reacted to her growing interest in Erica first with obliviousness; then with nervous laughter, denial, and sexual athleticism with the nearest available man; and finally with fear of social stigmatization, realization of what was really important to her, and acceptance. This is not the most realistic show on TV, and quite often drives me crazy, but Callie's working through the stages of the process strikes me as a thousand times more plausible than Sister's failure to even have a process.

The bizarreness of Sister's sexual on/off switch is even more apparent toward the latter part of the book. After she is with Shruti for more than a year, they break up when Jackie decides to turn the community into a fighting force and the women divide into factions. Sister immediately picks up with Calum, one of the men from the settlement, again without any indication that she finds it strange or even note-worthy to change her sexual focus to the other sex again.

This part bothered me for another reason as well. In the scene where Sister realizes the men's role for the first time, she seems uncomfortable with their marginalized status. But when she starts sleeping with Calum, it's not out of any sense of caring: he's simply a male sex object for her own gratification, and there's no indication that she finds the arrangement demeaning. Again, yes, women are sexual, they have needs, blah, blah, but the way to compensate for thousands of years of sexual exploitation is not to turn men into whores.

In a way, Sister's attitude reminds me strongly of Nicola Griffith's Ammonite, another widely admired novel I hated. In that book, a plague has killed off all the men on a colony world, and that means that all the space personnel and visitors who come to the world must be women also. It's a stretch, but not an entirely unreasonable one, that all the planet's inhabitants become lesbians within a single generation. It's entirely less reasonable to say that all the women coming from Earth in the present generation also instantly "convert" without any problem whatsoever. Just as some fundamentalists seem to believe that, deep down, all gay people are REALLY straight but just stubbornly refuse to admit it, Griffith and Hall seem to harbor the conviction that all straights are REALLY bisexual if they would just let go of their inhibitions. I'm heterosexual and I'm here to represent: it doesn't work that way.**

Speaking of other books that reviewers have mentioned in the same breath as Daughters of the North, I'm quite willing to accept comparisons to The Handmaid's Tale and The Children of Men*. (It also contains echoes of those dystopic classics 1984 and Brave New World, which nobody seems to have gotten around to mentioning.) But only a person who had never actually read The Dispossessed could link Sarah Hall with Ursula K. LeGuin. Anarres isn't perfect, but everybody's trying. I would love to live on Anarres; I couldn't tolerate a second in Carhullan.

I try to make it a policy never to buy a book online whose only user review is from Harriet Klaussner. I should have stuck to it.

*I've never read the book, but I admired the movie a lot.

**Edited to say that I don't think I fully expressed my thought. In fact, I agree with those people who have said that human sexuality lies along a spectrum, and that many individuals might harbor the potential for bisexuality or homosexuality but have never expressed it. However, even for those who do, deciding to act on that potential takes more than a shrug and an "oh well, no guys available, I better start lovin' on the women."

Summer of the Big Bachi

Summer of the Big Bachi, Naomi Hirahara

There are certainly some interesting aspects to this book. It never occurred to me, for example, that there had been American-born Japanese living in Hiroshima when the atom bomb fell on the city. Nor was I aware of the lingering tensions in the Japanese-American community between those who cooperated with the Government and served in WWII and those who refused to sign loyalty oaths and were jailed. And the whole subculture of Japanese gardeners in southern California is also intriguing to this Easterner.

But as a whole, the novel doesn't work for me, mainly because I didn't like the hero, Mas Arai. One quote on the book jacket calls him "complex and honorable," and I didn't find him either. He's a selfish, emotionally inaccessible man, unable ever to tell his wife and daughter how he feels, although the truth seems to be that he doesn't feel much. It's no wonder that his daughter fled to New York as soon as she could and never even told him that she got married.

There are several crimes, kicked off by people's sudden desire to obtain a certain piece of land, and there are multiple villains running around with assorted motives. But it's Mas's very emotional insensitivity that makes the solution of the mysteries especially implausible. Mas is a guy who hardly knows anything about people; yet he puts together several very subtle clues to uncover the reason everyone wants the land and identify the killers.* Maybe Columbo could have pulled it off, but Mas is no Columbo.

Edited to add: Of course, he's got a big head start on everybody else, because he's the only one who knows the truth about the guy everyone is looking for.

Grimspace

Grimspace, by Ann Aguirre

Not terrible, but after 50 pages or so, failed to hold my interest. Since those pages covered a jail break, a dangerous cross-galaxy jump, and a firefight, I think that gives a fair indication of the author's inability to dial up the excitement.

Aguirre also tripped over two of my science fiction pet peeves:

• If you're going to make up a swear word, don't make it sound just like a substitute for "fuck" and then use it as though it were "fuck"
• Do not, for the love of God, label common animals, events, and sayings as "Old Earth" or "Old Terra." If you really NEED to convey the idea that horses, say, are now extinct or otherwise unfamiliar, at least do it with a little dialog: "I could eat a horse." "What's a horse?" "Oh, you know, that riding animal they used to have on Earth? Big, four legs, ran really fast?" Otherwise, just accept that your characters know these things and move on.

Kristi Wins! Like That's a Surprise

I've never watched Dancing With the Stars [be warned; if you click, video starts playing automatically], and would be hard-pressed to find a show or concept to which I am more indifferent. But really, without knowing anything about her competitors, the level of competition on the show, or ballroom dancing in general, how astounded can I be by the announcement that Olympic figure-skating champion Kristi Yamaguchi has won the latest title? I mean, she's a professional athlete in a sport whose basic core skills include graceful movement in a set pattern in time to music.

I mean, I don't think you had to be Nostradamus to predict that one.

Thistle and Twigg

Thistle and Twigg, by Mary Saums

Buying a new cosy mystery is always something of a risk, since they more than other types of mysteries tend toward the overly cutesified. And buying one online is even more of a gamble, because you don't get the warning signs you can pick up by holding a book in your hands and scanning the first few pages.

Case in point: Exhibit A. On the one hand, we have a polite, genteel little old English lady, who just happens to be a highly trained CIA operative. (She's like Mrs. Pollifax, except Mrs. Pollifax was fun.) On the other hand, we have a rootin', tootin' Southern belle who paints her semiautomatic apricot blush and names it "Smokahontas." Really, does much more need to be said?

But there is more, including the incredibly lame shenanigans about covert militia groups and an untouched wilderness full of Ancient Mystic Indian Secrets. And of course, the ghosts.

See, this is where actually holding the book would have helped me, because the ghosts would have been a dealbreaker. Rule of Thumb #47: Ghosts in a book that's not a ghost story = pathetic and contrived plot device.

How to Marry a Ghost

How to Marry a Ghost, by Hope McIntyre

OK, I was already starting to hate this heroine when she began telling me how neurotic and special and needy she was. But when she explained how she made her perfectly innocent fiance take up jogging in the mornings so that a) she could have her precious alone time and b) even though she *totally* loved and accepted him just the way he was, so he could lose 10 pounds to fit into his wedding suit AND described it as a noble compromise on HER part -- that was when the book hit the wall.