What I read this May
Fiction
Mystic and Rider by Sharon Shinn.
OK, first line: "Kardon stood at the back of the tavern, surveying the night's clientele, and smiled with a brutal satisfaction."
Shinn's writing is clunky and cliched, and she cannot seem to handle nuance or subtlety. After a few chapters of reading about a mismatched band of adventurers out to save "Gillengaria" from "clouds of unrest," I gave up on the book. It's mediocre, and there are so many better things to do with my time.
False Colors by Georgette Heyer. After a disquieting feeling that his twin brother is in trouble, Kit Fancome rushes back to London. There, he finds that his brother Evelyn has disappeared, and no one has seen him for a week. Even worse, Evelyn has arranged to meet his fiancee's family the very next day--and if he doesn't show, the wedding will almost certainly be cancelled. Kit agrees to stand in for his flighty brother for a single night...but in fact, must continue the pretence for weeks. And as he spends more time as Evelyn, he finds he is falling in love with Evelyn's fiancee, the imperturbable Cressy Stavely...
This is a sweet story, but not much actually happens. Kit goes to one dinner party, then spends the rest of the book walking through gardens with Cressy and bantering with his coquettish mother. His relationship with Cressy is resolved about half-way through the book, and the mystery of Evelyn's disappearance turns out to be pretty banal. There isn't any real danger; at no point is Kit betrayed, or too poor or powerless to accomplish something. And there isn't much interplay between the lovers--Cressy and Kit's relationship feels real, but also develops into full-blown "let's get married" in a matter of days, and without much dialog betweeen them. I liked Kit, and Cressy, and Kit's extravagent mother, and although the servants left a sour taste in my mouth (must they all *always* be utterly devoted to their masters, and speak in "amusing" cant?) there isn't anything truly objectionable in this book. But I wouldn't bother to reread it, and I'll undoubtedly forget everything about this book in just a few days. A fun romp, but no substance.
Lucifer's Champion by Juliet Blyth. After her father dies and his home is left to a mercenary cousin, Vanessa flees to stay with her godmother in London. But along the way, a carriage-crash drops her into the lap of a notorious Duke of Lyndhurst. So notorious is he, in fact, that he is widely known as "Lucifer." Surprising himself, he offers to make her his ward--and she, having no where else to turn, accepts. But plots of love and money interfere with their burgeoning relationship. Can Vanessa teach "Lucifer" the value of steady, monogamous love?
Heh, it's very silly and id-riffic--Vanessa has delightful red ringlets and is immediately loved by everyone (except the eeevil antagonists), Lyndhurst is constantly drawling and raising one eyebrow. But Blyth spends time on their relationship, so that the progression of their banter into mutual trust and affection seems plausible. I found "Lucifer" laughably melodramatic (although everyone else takes him very seriously), but I liked Vanessa, who spends time visiting the Duke's tenants and helping friends with their love lives. She's the rare heroine who is actually *shown* to be friendly and generous.
My one big problem with this book (highlight to read spoilers) is that from the very start, Vanessa knows that "Lucifer" has made a practice of abducting women. In fact, a big plot point is that two years before, he'd forcibly abducted a woman he loved, and her fiancee barely "saved her" in time. And Vanesssa is totally fine with this! But then Vanessa herself is kidnapped and threatened with rape. The terror Lyndhurst feels while he's chasing after the kidnapper makes him realize how wrong he'd been two years ago. And so he makes a heartfelt apology to...the fiancee. Not the woman he abducted, oh no. Just the dude. And everyone is very proud of him for doing this! Scary stuff, and it made it very hard for me to root for Lyndhurst's romantic endevours.
Heart of Stone by C.E.Murphy. Margrit "Grit" Knight (ugh, the name!) is a public defender with too little time and too much courage. A chance encounter with a handsome stranger in Central Park entangles her in a web of lies, power games and revenge. And not all the people pulling the strings are human...
I'm torn in how I feel about this book. On the one hand, it's not well written. The plot rests on a precarious tower of coincidences, each more unlikely than the last. The dialog is like what middle schoolers think hard-bitten adults in the big city sound like. The editing is poor: a mysterious stranger is accidentally called by name by the text, pages before the big reveal of their identity. Plot threads go nowhere; dramatic minor characters are given splashy intros and then dropped from the narrative (I assume this is so Murphy can bring them up in sequels). The main character shifts gears so fast I felt like I had vertigo--one moment she's angry, the next she's humping a gargoyle in midflight, the next she's whooping with laughter. It's not that I want a boring character, but one with an understandable emotional life would be nice.
On the other hand, Murphy has tapped into what made the first few Anita Blake books so enjoyable. Margrit is wildly underpowered in a world filled with magic. She's good at her low-paying, high-stress career, but has trouble with work/life balance. She has issues with her family that are relatable. And her reactions are often a refreshing novelty: when a handsome and mysterious stranger accosts her in the park at night, she threatens him, runs off, and then reports him to the police.
And I have to note something that really impressed me: Margrit is mixed-race, and it's actually mentioned beyond physical description. She's incensed when her boss at Legal Aid asks her to take a specific case, knowing that he does so because having a black woman do so will look good to the press. And when her gargoyle pseudo-boyfriend tries to warn her against a vampire, reminding her that he isn't human, there's a great, unexpected moment: "'Don't kid yourself, Alban. In this form, you're a white man. Politically advantageous, economically powerful, socially acceptable. A hundred years ago if someone saw you and me standing here like this, you'd be the human and I'd be something less. A century before that, you and I standing here would've been master and slave. Or I might've been lucky. Two hundred years ago I might've been a free black, a placee. Know what that is? It's a rich white man's dark skinned mistress. Somebody my color would've been a quadroon, very exotic. Light enough to be almost acceptable.' Her heart hammered in her throat, thick and choking. 'So forgive me if I'm having a hard time with what makes someone human or not.'"
Did I like this book? I wouldn't say so. It was too clunkily written, I didn't feel anything for the characters, and the plot was a mess. I won't read the next books in this series. But if you're looking for some not-bad urban fantasy/paranormal romance, this is better than much of what's out there.
Non-Fiction
Evolution of the Human Diet by Peter Ungar. I mostly skimmed this overview of early hominids and how they ate. Basically, increased food sources (mostly in the form of energy and amino-acid-rich animal proteins) means increased brain size. Also, current Western modes of eating are mismatched to what we actually need, obviously enough. I never wanted to be Indiana Jones, so the analysis of *how* archaelogists made their discoveries was a bit boring to me. Far more interesting to me was Table 19.4, "Historical and Industrial Era Food-Type Introductions" which lays this out:
Refined sugar (sucrose) 500BC, according to Galloway (2000)
Distilled alcoholic beverages 800-1300AD, according to Comer(2000)
Refined sugar (widely available) 1800AD, according to Ziegler (1967)
Fatty, feedlot-produced meats ~1860AD, according to Whitaker (1975)
Refined grains (widely available) ~1880AD, say Storck and Teague (1952)
Hydrogenated vegetable fats 1897AD, according to Emken (1984)
Vegetable oils (widely available) 1910AD, say Gerrior and Bente (2002)
High-fructose corn syrup ~1970sAD, according toHanover and White (1993)
Food history ftw! Also, this book exposed me to the word "retrojection", which I intend to use daily from now on.
She Comes to Take Her Rights by Srimati Basu. Basu studied property rights in several neighborhoods in New Delhi in the early 1990s. Although legally men and women are now supposed to inherit equally in India, what Basu found was that the vast majority of the time, only sons would inherit from their parents. The daughters would relinquish their rights to any property. Basu delved deeper, and found that because daughters were considered to be part of their husband's family, and thought to inherit through his family, they were expected to let their brothers have any property from their natal family. Even women who were single or widowed were expected to give up their natal legacy, because they could possibly marry again. Women who tried to claim what was legally theirs rarely won court cases, and even the attempt cut them off from their natal family. So even if they won, and got a small portion of an estate, they no longer had family ties they could rely upon in times of difficulty. It's worth noting that according to Basu's interviews, most of the women thought that sons and daughters should both inherit--and that almost none of them did, nor did any of them make an attempt to claim their rightful property, for fear of alienation and failure.
Another rationale given for why women were not supposed to inherit was because their families paid dowries (though the money went to her in-laws, so she herself did not get it) and paid for much of the wedding (although again, only a portion of the money spent helped the woman in any material way). And in actuality, most families helped pay the weddings of both their sons and their daughters--and there wasn't much difference between how much they spent on them. Moreover, the money spent on dowry and wedding was almost never anywhere near the amount of money a woman should have inherited.
A third reason women weren't supposed to inherit was that by asserting herself, she'd start sibling fights. Ostensibly, brothers don't fight amongst themselves for inheritance--although in actual fact, of course they do. So the claim that women shouldn't inherit for the sake of family unity is pretty bogus. So to is the claim that sons took care of their parents or relatives more, so they deserve more--again, it's actually women doing the majority of the work, and even spending more of their money.
What all these assumptions and presumptions came down to was that women got less money and far less property from their families, whereas men got money and land/businesses from their families. There are a lot of interesting nuggets of information throughout--Basu does a great job of unpacking elder care, for instance, or doing a basic breakdown of required wedding gifts. She relies heavily on statistics, even though her sample size is small (often ~20 people) and her questions are qualitative, not quantitative. So I'm not sure one can trust all of her stats, but certainly her interviews and insights are valuable. My other problem with this book was the writing style, which I found difficult and dry. Here's an example: "I knew already that her affines were from Uttar Pradesh, and because ethnic group exogamy is so rare, suspected that the circumstances of her alliance with the affinal family might be atypical. Indeed, her life story turned out to be a vivid example of the articulated effects of gender and class subalternity." Reads like a dissertation, and I kinda assume that's what this was originally.
To sum up, in Basu's words: "The prime fate envisaged for women, that they could only be 'saved' through marriage and should take their chances with marriage roulette, thus screened the other registers of their dependence: their relative disadvantage in the labor market and their alienation from inheriting whatever common resources the family possessed."
The Light of the Home by Harvey Green. Very readable, fascinating book about living as a white female in America during the mid to late 1800s. Green uses the advertisements, private diaries, and household goods as sources to flesh out his tale.
A few fave quotes:
"Thus the resistance of workers to the injustices and excesses of the late-nineteenth century economy were not seen as indicators of some weakness in the system, but as the result of some individual or collective failure among the populace."
"The separation of the economic (male) sector from the domestic (female) sector thus placed women in the position of culpability for societal ills, but denied them access to the real means of rectifying them."
"The two great women's political reform movements of the turn of the century--suffrage and prohibition--became law when advocates convinced opponents that maternal influence would halt the precipitous decline of WASP culture."