The Romance Quest!: 'Tempest' by Beverly Jenkins

[wolffyluna]

Colton Lee has been looking for someone to help look after his daughter after his first wife died. Regan Carmichael is looking for an excuse to go on an adventure and go live in one of the new territories. Obviously, the solution for both of them is to get married, after an exchange of lonely hearts ads and letters.

Tempest is tricky to talk about. It's not actually that different from Forbidden in quality, but I don't like it as much as the latter. I think the main reasons I like it less is that it doesn't have some of my favourite tropes, and some patterns and quirks in Jenkins' writing went from amusing to annoying or side-eye inducing.

Turns out I really like romances with the big conflict being "We can't be together Because Reasons." Which makes arranged marriage stories like this one just not be as fun. The only thing stopping them from being more intimate is Colton's intimacy issues. Which is a conflict, I guess, but not necessarily one I find fun,

Also, Colton seems to be replaced by the Sexy Halloween Costume version of himself in the sex scenes. Which there are a lot of. Which is not a bad thing-- but I tend to read in public, and I was reading a large print copy-- so the sex scenes were scenes that I had to hurriedly skim through.

But I like a lot of the side characters. Honestly, I kinda ship Regan with Spring (Colton's sister.) Mostly because in the beginning of the book, Spring and Regan get along a lot more than Colton and Regan.

And I appreciate the way Jenkin's does HEAs. A lot of romance author's kind of crash into them, like a train running through it's barriers. They keep the last conflict going on for as long as they can, and then the characters run into each other arms and there is a paragraph or two of 'hooray, the conflict is resolved! Now they can live happily ever after.' And that resolution, because of it's brevity, is not always... convincing. But Jenkins tends to write a few pages of HEA, where we get to see the characters' new happy normal, and be like 'yeah, they are going to live happily ever after.'

And honestly, I can live with the characters' tendencies to know way too much about supreme court decisions, and tendency to make references to modern things ("Black people, voting for democrats? That'll never happen!") for those HEAs.

Now, this next section is not Tempest specific, it also applies to Forbidden. But it's a pattern that becomes more noticeable when you look at both books, and it's not a... great pattern.

I don't think Jenkins knows how to name Chinese characters.

This wouldn't necessarily be a huge problem, but it seems to be causing a kind of "Oh dear" pattern.

So, in these books, there's a big thing about how the wild west was diverse. It wasn't just white people and antagonistic native americans, there were black people and mexicans and chinese people. Which, yeah, sure! (Especially because Jenkins seems to like to use historical romance as a vehicle for teaching historical facts. She mentions it in her author's notes at the back.) There's also a big thing about these books being set in ~small towns where everyone knows everyone. Which is fine, especially because Jenkins does seem to love her large casts of side characters.

It just makes it really obvious that most of the chinese character don't have direct dialogue and don't have names. And it's kinda 'uuhhhhhh' inducing because literally everyone else has those things. I''m not sure "othering" is the word, but uhhh. Yeah. It's not good.

And I think this flows from her not knowing how to name the chinese characters for one reason.

So, out of the three* chinese characters, one of them has a name and direct dialogue. It's Dr Crane, who works with Colton (also a doctor) to treat victims of the Rock Springs Massacre. In the last conversation between the two, Dr Crane tells Colton "Oh, 'Crane' isn't my actual name, it's just an alias white people can pronounce. My actual name is..."

Now, that quote above is not an exact quote, but that ellipsis? Yep, that was there. Colton gets told Dr Crane's actual name, but not the audience. And the best reason I can think of is that Jenkins just didn't know how to name him plausibly. It's possible she wanted to give the characters some 'privacy', but that doesn't seem to be how she usually rolls. So. (Also, I'm pretty sure Jenkins is, in this case, well-meaning, and 'I don't know how to name these characters so I won't-- woops that's some not great implications' is the sort of thing a well-meaning person would do.)

Of course, I may just be jumping at shadows here, and nothing about this pattern is weird at all.

*Technically there are a lot more, but I'm just counting the character's that do notable things as individuals, and aren't just a group of chinese people.

Content warnings for the book: child abuse, racist massacres, people shooting each other with guns, rape in backstory.

Comments

[lb_lee]

O_o It's so weird to think someone might not have any Chinese friends they can ask.

[wolffyluna]

I guess there could be an issue of her wanting to make sure the names are historically accurate.

...but she also has a protagonist called Rhine Fontaine, so...

[lb_lee]

I can't imagine names like Hsu or Li changing much over the ensuing century or two... but, I mean, if I was really uncertain, I'd just ask one of my Chinese friends, "hey, what names did your family have, a few generations back, if you know?" or dig through one of those genealogy/cemetery websites that are full of really obsessed people wanting to chart folks who died.

There are Catholic cemeteries, Jewish cemeteries, it seems likely enough that a lot of the Chinese folks would have their own graveyards...

--Rogan

[wolffyluna]

Yeah, it's a very solvable problem, and it's a bit odd that she seems to be trying to avoid the issue.

(Of course, I could be completely wrong about what's going on here. But it's weird.)