J.S. Fields

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December 20, 2017

Review: Daybreak Rising by Kiran Oliver

Genre: fantasy

Pairings: f/f

Queer Representation: trans, lesbian, nonbinary, gay, pan

Warnings: whitewashing

Rating: one star

 

Review (print version. It’s relevant, trust me)

Celosia Brennan was supposed to be a hero. After a bunch of military (?) commandos put way too much on the shoulders of a teen and she fries a town, Celosia has joined the resistance. She is part of a corp of elemental magic users (GO PLANET!) bent on taking down The Council. I don’t know what The Council is. I don’t know what it’s motivations are. Apparently it either kills elementals or tries to leash them to do its bidding, and so our ragtag band is out to take it down. Among them is a blind woman, at least two lesbians, a trans man, nonbinary people, among others. There is a reasonable smattering of black people, although two have problematic blue eyes. That’s a whole different blog post.

Diverse books hold a special place in my heart.

Diversity is not, however, enough to hold an entire story together.

Books need plot. They need character development. They need a copyeditor and a proofreader and page numbers. This book had…none of those. Typos were abundant (double periods, quotation errors, NO PAGE NUMBERS), the prose was stilted and super telly (constantly telling, then showing, then sometimes telling again, ad nauseum), and the story lacked a discernible arc or plot through line. So let’s break it down, issue by issue.

Typos and redundancy

I realize this book was self-pubbed, but that isn’t an excuse for not having an editor, copyeditor, and/or proofreader. This book also suffered from a heavy amount of word redundancy within paragraphs, which made it read very fanfic and amateurish. Fundamentals were left out as well, such as, and I’m still not over this, a lack of page numbers in the print version.

Writing style

If I hadn’t wanted to leave a thorough review for this book, I’d have DNF after the first fifteen pages or so. No clear plot emerged until about halfway through the book. The backstory of the lead character didn’t come through until about thirty or so pages in. There was no way to get character buy-in, or world placement, for the first half of the book, and that was really frustrating.

There was no multi-act structure for this book. Tension was never built, save for the Big Reveal about three-quarters of the way through (which was the only moment of true interest I had in the book). The book wasn’t even a complete arc, with it ending just before the Final Battle. The primary plot appears to be getting Celosia over her PTSD (admirable, for sure), but her whole situation is confusing. She was used by the rebels, screwed up her job because she was a kid, and now everyone holds her responsible for the screw up. I have no empathy for people who hold a child responsible for failing an adult task which again, made world buy-in next to impossible.

The author mainly told instead of showed, maybe as a way to speed up the slow pace of the book (which was achingly slow). The occasional show was always followed up by a tell, which really treated the reader as a moron. Most readers can pull intent and feelings from context and motions, we don’t need to be beaten over the head with it.

 

The White Gaze

Black people with blue eyes. Just. Don’t.

Don’t.

 

Characters

Too many POV characters for the length and type of book. This was no five hundred page epic fantasy. I don’t actually know how long it was, because it HAD NO PAGE NUMBERS, but there was barely recognizable growth in our lead POV character, Celosia. All the other POVs seemed thrown in for plot relevance, but not enough time was spent with any of them to make them real people. Even three quarters of the way through the book, new POV characters were being introduced, which was very frustrating.

 

Romance

The main romance line felt forced, rushed, and lackluster. The two characters had no chemistry, and Ianthe seemed more like a plot device than a character.

 

Queer representation

This was the one strong point of the story. The trans romance line was handled well, the gender discussions were thorough, and the lesbian romance was…well, there was a lesbian romance, so that counts for something.

 

Final thoughts

I so wanted to like this book, but I felt like it reached up and smacked me every other numberless page. The typos, the lack of tension, the poor character development, the lack of any type of formal act structure, all came together in a book that felt rushed. It felt like I was reading a draft zero of a book that had a lot of potential, but the author didn’t want to go through revisions. I was left disappointed–in the book, the characters, the flailing plot, and the typos I almost drowned in.

If you’re willing to forgive all of that to see some decent queer rep in a fantasy, you can buy Daybreak Rising in ebook here and print here.

Filed Under: book review Tagged With: disability, fantasy, gay, lesbian, mental health, problematic tropes, trans

December 14, 2017

Review: Touched by Starlight by Linda North

Genre: romance, very light scifi

Pairings: f/f (lesbian)

Queer Representation: cis lesbian

Warnings: rape, dubious consent, body shaming, transphobia

Rating: none

 

Review

“…she clicked on the notebook expecting to see some heifer that looked like a drag queen…”

This isn’t going to be a normal review. I have a lot of very strong feelings about this book, and they need to couched in a discussion of tropes, and the lesbian fiction arc genre as a whole. Before all that, a quick plot review.

Kiernan is a space tech genius with a sizable fortune. Due to the stipulations of her grandmother’s will (of course), Kiernan must be married and produce a child by her 40th birthday. Ariel (who is, yes, named after The Little Mermaid) is a physics professor. Her mother, a data analyst, gets charged with hacking into Kiernan’s business, and through some very underhanded dealings by Kiernan’s uncle, Ariel is forced to marry Kiernan so that Kiernan will not press charges.

So there’s strike one right there.

Let’s talk about tropes

I love tropes. When I read, I’m not always looking for fresh. Sometimes I want to be comforted. Sometimes I want to relax into the known, to follow a path I know the ending to. It can be fun, even exciting, to see a common heterosexual romance trope turned around to involve a same gender pairing. Hot, even, especially when well done (see Gardner’s Born Out of Wedlock, which contains, and this isn’t hyperbole, almost every lesbian trope out there).

The problem with simply doing a find and replace for a standard het romance trope is that a lot of het romance, especially older het romance, is couched in misogyny and/or rape culture. It’s important that authors be mindful of that when redoing these tropes, as otherwise we can unknowingly perpetuate this culture within our own.

I want to be really clear. There is no place for rape culture. Not in the heterosexual world, and not in the homosexual, either. I’m not talking about rape fantasy, which I would be willing to hear an argument for. Here, specifically, I am talking about a greater culture.

 

Doing it right versus doing it wrong

Many of the books I’ve read that rely on heavy-handed tropes (power differentials of different forms, among the most popular being the forced marriage trope), also employ an additional spin. I’m going to keep coming back to Born Out of Wedlock, because 1) I recently read it and 2) it could have gone very, very wrong, but it didn’t. Born had the same set up as Touched by Starlight: forced marriage, power femme, bitchy pseudo-butch (half-butch? moderately butch? Is there a shorter word for ‘butch on the streets, femme in the sheets’?), unbreakable inheritance wills, meddling men.

The fundamental differences between the two are, at the core, intent and consent. For intent, the pairing in Born both have something to gain from the forced marriage. They both have choices. They both have something to lose. The agreement is a business agreement, and there is not even a mention of a forced sex clause. In Touched, sex is stipulated by the contract (by the meddling uncle) and Ariel is coerced into the marriage via threats by her future wife.

See above. Strike one.

For consent, Born operated, for better or for worse, in third person omniscient. Not a particularly popular choice for a narrative, but it made sense in the first bedroom scene, where Addison has aggressive sex with Joanna (our power femme). Because we are in both heads we know Joanna is willing, and while Addison herself is lacking that context (and later laments that she may have raped Joanna), we, the readers, know that not to be the case. It gives conflict, and the ‘heat’ of rape fantasy, without any actual lack of consent. The scene may not be to everyone’s liking, but it was done as well as it could be, and I admire the author’s very clear attempt to remove rape components from such a scene.

In Touched, the word ‘no’ is used repeatedly. Ariel continues to penetrate Kiernan until she is actually in pain. In the orchard scene before this, Kiernan touches Ariel and makes advances despite Ariel having verbally rebuffed her several times. We get access to both sets of thoughts over time, but it is clear in the first sex scene, specifically, the Kiernan wants Ariel to stop, even verbally requests it several times, and Ariel does not.

That’s strike two, and quite frankly I’d have stopped reading at this point if I wasn’t already so determined to finish the book so I could write a proper review.

I don’t know what the author was striving for here. Just because our power femme, who lacked power and was coerced into the marriage, was sexually aggressive to her aggressor to the point of rape does not make rape okay. That they are both women does not make it okay. This would have been rape in a het romance, and it is rape in a same-sex romance. And while I read enough of my grandmother’s bodice rippers to know that falling in love with one’s rapist is a time honored trope, I really expected better from lesbian fiction. We don’t have to be constrained by patriarchal stereotypes. We don’t have to participate in rape culture. We’re better than this.

 

And then there’s the writing…

Strike three was the writing. Choppy, often telling (and then showing, and then telling again), with many redundant scenes. The book read more like a fanfic than a novel in that it wasn’t tight. There was too much ‘here’s a chapter in Kiernan POV, and then here is a chapter in Ariel POV, but they cover the same time span’. The scifi aspect felt tacked on and yet, it was the only fresh part of the book. How did we not get scenes with Kiernan racing spaceships? How did we not get scenes with Ariel designing one, or fixing one? Kiernan runs this space tech company and is apparently very good at it, but we get one spaceship scene, at the end of the book, with mostly a ‘the ship is going to explode’ arc and not any real wonder or tech. There are so many places the author could have taken the plot, and yet, it remained simply a power struggle romance.

 

It’s not over till the fat lady sings

“…she clicked on the notebook expecting to see some heifer that looked like a drag queen…”

Yes, I lead with this quote segment. I’m repeating it again because these casual acts of body shaming and transphobia have no place in lesbian literature. I know they exist, clearly, but they need to be called out, every time. Since this line came from Kiernan’s POV and Kiernan was well established to be a pretty terrible person (I assume this is why she ‘deserved’ to be raped?), it could be argued that this view reflects the character only. If it were the only offense I might be more forgiving. After all, characters grow and authors often enjoy writing unlikable characters. But this, combined with the deplorable acts by both our main characters, makes me wonder if this was just an offhanded line thrown in without thought for what it actually says.

I’m surprised, frankly, to see a book like from a publisher, especially a queer publisher. It makes me wary not only of other books from this author, but of other books from the publisher as well.

I’d like to look for some way to recommend this book to some subset of readers, but I can’t think of any group applicable. It is possible that those interested in more patriarchal rape fantasy, looking to see that trope with two women, will find this book enjoyable. I’d argue, however, that the sex scenes definitively cross the line between dubcon and full on rape.

 

You can buy Touched by Starlight in paperback here and digital here

 

Filed Under: book review Tagged With: dubcon, lesbian, problematic tropes, sci fi

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