Very useful review,thank you. I really enjoyed the premise and some of the ideas in the first book. The idea of a strong female protagonist stuck in the patriarchal tropes of the pulp scifi genre. I did however find Jane a bit crass and obnoxious. Though I agreed with her in her grievances about the world she found herself in, her responses eventually began to wear on me. As fun has hard-ass characters can be in fiction, they can grow tiresome after a few hundred pages. Often I find "tough and foul-mouthed" get assigned to a character to define them and they little other depth or development over the book. This made me hesitant to pick up the sequel, as things could easily get worse, or just as bad, stay exactly the same. If no one grows or develops through a series, there is little reason to follow their exploits. Did you find that the author gave Jane new things to just have the same greivances about? Is she given a chance to change or develop? Does she only fight angrily against the attrocities of her new world, or does the world,
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I wouldn't say Jane changes or develops a whole lot in the second book. She does eventually come to an accommodation of sorts with Lan, but yeah, most of the book is Jane being horrified at Waarian customs and then figuring out how to subvert them. There is a moment of self-awareness at the very end where I think the author tries to show her questioning her conviction that she's always right, but the story still tends to support her outrage to the end.
I'm sure it's a hard line to walk. If she wavered in her convictions that probably wouldn't come off well in the context of what she is objecting to. But to use the books it is obviously satirizing, Mars changes drastically because of John Carter's presence there, but so too does Carter change through his time on Barsoom. It isn't a major change, I mean we are talking pulp fiction here, where deep character development is not really the point. I guess it is more my dislike of dick-ish characters (I had similar problems with Andy Weir's The Martian). Dark complex characters who are far from the clean cut good guys in the white hats are my thing. I was raised on hardboiled detectives and dark fantasy, but there still has to be a complexity of character there. That either comes with change, or with the character realizing how truly messed up everything is, knowing full well that the choices aren't that black and white and then sticking to their guns completely aware of the consequences. I guess I felt that the character that Nathan Long
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Very useful review,thank you. I really enjoyed the premise and some of the ideas in the first book. The idea of a strong female protagonist stuck in the patriarchal tropes of the pulp scifi genre. I did however find Jane a bit crass and obnoxious. Though I agreed with her in her grievances about the world she found herself in, her responses eventually began to wear on me. As fun has hard-ass characters can be in fiction, they can grow tiresome after a few hundred pages. Often I find "tough and foul-mouthed" get assigned to a character to define them and they little other depth or development over the book. This made me hesitant to pick up the sequel, as things could easily get worse, or just as bad, stay exactly the same. If no one grows or develops through a series, there is little reason to follow their exploits.
Did you find that the author gave Jane new things to just have the same greivances about? Is she given a chance to change or develop? Does she only fight angrily against the attrocities of her new world, or does the world, ( ... )
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