(no subject)
Coincidentally I've been reading a bunch of stuff lately that is somehow related to the Opium Wars. I was not expecting Courtney Milan's latest series to join the collection, but I am excited by the discovery!
Taken by itself, Once Upon A Marquess is cute but not the strongest of Milan's romances. Our Heroine Judith is the daughter of a disgraced former member of the nobility who was convicted of treason in China, along with her beloved brother, and has spent the last nine years desperately trying to support her younger siblings and achieve for them the opportunities they've lost; also she makes clockwork. Our Hero Christian is her former suitor, who also happens to have been her brother's best friend, who also happens to be the person whose testimony got her father and brother convicted of treason; also he has a history of opium addiction and what seems to be some form of OCD; also he's incapable of not making jokes.
(I spent the entire book hearing the voice of Alistair from Dragon Age: Origins doing all Christian's dialog. I don't know if there's any evidence that Courtney Milan has played Dragon Age but if she does I refuse to believe there wasn't an influence.)
Christian and Judith, as mentioned above, are reasonably cute, and I tend to find romances with significant emotional backstory more plausible than lust at first sight. But honestly the weight of the book is not really on their dynamic so much as it is on Judith's relationships with her siblings (as we all know sibling stuff is my favorite stuff!) and on setting up SIGNIFICANTLY MORE ONGOING PLOT, and specifically geopolitical/worldbuilding/history plot, than I think Milan has ever really done in her romance series before.
This is probably in large part due to Amitav Ghosh, but the timing is really perfect, because right now I am SO INTO a 'let's go AU and fix the Opium Wars!' plot. YES OK LET'S. LET'S DO IT. I'M HERE FOR IT.
(I was also really into the whole 'Anthony is too moral to have betrayed his country!' 'um the thing is I think he is too moral NOT to betray his country if his country is morally ... the worst .....' thing. Bless Courtney Milan's anti-colonialist agenda.)
I am also very excited for a.) lots and lots of ongoing complex sibling stuff, MY KRYPTONITE, b.) what covers (and dropped hints) suggest will be at least one book with a Chinese protagonist, and c.) what covers suggest will be at least one book with a black protagonist. Basically I am ready to give Courtney Milan money for this series.)
Also I read Her Every Wish, the companion novella about Judith's friend Daisy, a flower-shop girl who's entered a competition for seed funds to open her own business, and Daisy's ex Crash, a mixed-race bisexual bicyclist and numbers man. I liked everything about the outlines of this plot, which is about how layers of toxic assumptions can work at cross-directions to hurt people who care about each other, and thought it needed about four times the page space to actually do the emotional arc justice -- like, there were enough real issues in Daisy and Crash's initial split that fixing all of their internalized prejudices and insecurities with one or two mildly anvilicious clue-bat conversations didn't quite feel believable or satisfying to me.
This entry is cross-posted at Livejournal from http://skygiants.dreamwidth.org/441612.html. Please feel free to comment here or there! There are currently
comments on Dreamwidth.
Taken by itself, Once Upon A Marquess is cute but not the strongest of Milan's romances. Our Heroine Judith is the daughter of a disgraced former member of the nobility who was convicted of treason in China, along with her beloved brother, and has spent the last nine years desperately trying to support her younger siblings and achieve for them the opportunities they've lost; also she makes clockwork. Our Hero Christian is her former suitor, who also happens to have been her brother's best friend, who also happens to be the person whose testimony got her father and brother convicted of treason; also he has a history of opium addiction and what seems to be some form of OCD; also he's incapable of not making jokes.
(I spent the entire book hearing the voice of Alistair from Dragon Age: Origins doing all Christian's dialog. I don't know if there's any evidence that Courtney Milan has played Dragon Age but if she does I refuse to believe there wasn't an influence.)
Christian and Judith, as mentioned above, are reasonably cute, and I tend to find romances with significant emotional backstory more plausible than lust at first sight. But honestly the weight of the book is not really on their dynamic so much as it is on Judith's relationships with her siblings (as we all know sibling stuff is my favorite stuff!) and on setting up SIGNIFICANTLY MORE ONGOING PLOT, and specifically geopolitical/worldbuilding/history plot, than I think Milan has ever really done in her romance series before.
This is probably in large part due to Amitav Ghosh, but the timing is really perfect, because right now I am SO INTO a 'let's go AU and fix the Opium Wars!' plot. YES OK LET'S. LET'S DO IT. I'M HERE FOR IT.
(I was also really into the whole 'Anthony is too moral to have betrayed his country!' 'um the thing is I think he is too moral NOT to betray his country if his country is morally ... the worst .....' thing. Bless Courtney Milan's anti-colonialist agenda.)
I am also very excited for a.) lots and lots of ongoing complex sibling stuff, MY KRYPTONITE, b.) what covers (and dropped hints) suggest will be at least one book with a Chinese protagonist, and c.) what covers suggest will be at least one book with a black protagonist. Basically I am ready to give Courtney Milan money for this series.)
Also I read Her Every Wish, the companion novella about Judith's friend Daisy, a flower-shop girl who's entered a competition for seed funds to open her own business, and Daisy's ex Crash, a mixed-race bisexual bicyclist and numbers man. I liked everything about the outlines of this plot, which is about how layers of toxic assumptions can work at cross-directions to hurt people who care about each other, and thought it needed about four times the page space to actually do the emotional arc justice -- like, there were enough real issues in Daisy and Crash's initial split that fixing all of their internalized prejudices and insecurities with one or two mildly anvilicious clue-bat conversations didn't quite feel believable or satisfying to me.
This entry is cross-posted at Livejournal from http://skygiants.dreamwidth.org/441612.html. Please feel free to comment here or there! There are currently
comments on Dreamwidth.