Books!

[wolffyluna]

Books

The Silent Blade by RA Salvatore

I'm back on the Drizzt grind. This one was a bit of a mixed bag. On the one hand: a major character who is male rape victim! Portrayed sensitively! In a pulpy fantasy book! (Salvatore never uses the word 'rape', but I get the impression that's less because he doesn't know what he wrote and more because he had to be pg-13.)

On the other: Surprisingly little Drizzt! And also some truly impressive whorephobia and fatphobia, culminating in someone being mercy killed for being fat???

Yeah. Uh. That was a reading experience?

The Ladies Rewrite the Rules by Suzanne Allain

It's a Regency romance about a young wealthy widow who discovers she's been put on a list of marriage wealthy women, for the purposes of fortune hunting young men to court them. She informs the other women on the list, and they realise: what if they used this opportunity to use their power to get the men dancing to their tune for once?

It's very much a Fluffgency, revolving around the idea of "but what if a bunch of (relatively) powerful women got together and pushed back against the social mores? and it straightforwardly worked?" but it was a very charming example of the type. The relationship between the female lead and her best friend was very fun. (But, alas, the male lead was a little bit of a chivalrous nothingburger.)

Vengeance of the Pirate Queen by Tricia Levenseller

A DNF, because I realised I could not appreciate it on the correct level. It's part of a series of fantasy romance books, centering around fantasy pirates.

And I kept finding it unintentionally funny. Because the setting was filled with, for lack of a better phrase, Social Justice Pirates. Everyone kept having very earnest discussions about rape culture. People knew about trauma, and even the least emotionally intelligent characters could identify someone in in need of grounding and knew grounding techniques.

Which lead to a beautifully hilarious scene. The female lead notices the male lead going spacy, and thinks "Hmm, I need to ground this guy. No, I can't shout his name, that would startle him in a bad way. I better draw a weapon instead." and proceeds to draw her sword to distract him with how shiny it is.

And it works!

After that I just. I just couldn't. I could no longer read it with the lens that was intended to be read. (Also not helping: I have accidentally developed opinions about media representation of PTSD, and the standard fanfic way of portraying it makes me, for lack of a better word, cringe, because I used to write it like that before I developed further opinions. And. Uh. This story matched the Standard Fanfic Model to a T.)

Comments

[lb_lee]

the setting was filled with, for lack of a better phrase, Social Justice Pirates.

OH NOOOOOO I KNOW EXACTLY WHAT KIND OF STORY THIS IS HAHAHA (and have probably written many)