skygiants | (no subject)

Over the past two weeks, I have been on - I think eight different airplanes? THINGS HAVE BEEN HECTIC. The most dramatic event was last week's family-plus-

genarti trip to Jamaica, the departure date of which unfortunately happened to fall on a day that the entire East Coast was due to be out of commission due to a major snowstorm. I managed to reschedule our flights the day before so that we would leave 7:30 that night instead of the following morning. Of course at this point I had not yet packed.

ME: It's fine! I'm a quick packer, and home is only 15 minutes away from the office! I'll run home after work, do a quick packing job, and be ready to go!
THE UNIVERSE: Hahahahaha you think it's going to be SO EASY, do you?

So of course when I got home at 4:30 it turned out I had lost my keys and could not get into the house.

An hour later -- after a panicked call to my roommate, who valiantly battled her way through the city at rush hour to come to my rescue -- I finally managed to run into the house, throw everything into a backpack, and flee to the airport. We got there! WE DID IN FACT GET THERE.

However what I didn't have time to do until our layover was put any books on my Kindle, so instead I comfort-reread some of the Courtney Milan Brothers Sinister books that I liked best from last year and as it happens never wrote up. WHICH I WILL DO NOW.

The books I reread were The Heiress Effect and The Suffragette Scandal. The Heiress Effect is the one about Jane Fairfield, the heiress who turns her own tactlessness and amazingly terrible taste into a POINTED WEAPON to stop ANYONE from trying to marry her EVER, so that she can instead stay home and act as a buffer between her sister and all the terrible doctors her guardian keeps engaging to try and cure her sister's epilepsy. Unsurprisingly, I think she is amazing. The romance is between her and a rising politician who is struggling up from a low-class background, and the conflict is because he thinks he needs a quiet political wife and Jane decides she likes being tactless in terrible clothes and does not want to squash back down into appropriateness. Oliver the politician is fine but less interesting. He is also less interesting than the sweet but too-short B-plot romance between Jane's sister and an Indian law student with complicated feelings about colonialism, but I am still glad that we got the B-plot romance at all.

The Suffragette Scandal is the one about Oliver's sister Free, who runs a feminist newspaper that is being targeted by an EVIL DUKE who has a CRIMINAL BROTHER who was LEFT FOR DEAD and then CAUGHT IN A WAR ZONE and TORTURED and FORCED TO BETRAY HIS FRIENDS and is now full of PETTY CRIME AND PTSD. Yes, he is the love interest, how did you guess? I mean, he's not boring! And Free, whose life story borrows liberally from Nellie Bly, is pretty amazing. I do constantly appreciate Courtney Milan's dedication to giving her heroines interesting and unusual fears and traumas, and "still haunted by that time she checked herself into a prostitute's lock-up for the big scoop!" ranks high on the list. It has the same problem that The Duchess War did for me, with a third-act betrayal that I feel was probably not narratively necessary, but is highly enjoyable nonetheless. Also: the B-plot in this one has lesbians! (A-plot with lesbians, MAYBE SOMEDAY, we live in hope.)

The one I did not reread: The Countess Conspiracy, the one about the secret science genius who discovers heredity and the dude she pays to publish her work for her. Given givens, I should have really liked this one, and it didn't actually work for me very well, but I read it long enough ago that I can't really remember much about why? This is not a very helpful review.

(I also did not reread Talk Sweetly To Me, the concluding novella with a black mathematician heroine, but that's mostly because by that point I could actually download all the books I had meant to put on my Kindle for vacation to begin with. I did like it though! Again, largely for the heroine and her family, I don't remember terribly much about the love interest. But that's OK.)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

rymenhild

The problem with The Countess Conspiracy is that Violet's internal angst is less about being a secret science genius and more about having a history of marital rape. I'd much rather read about the science without the rape backstory.

Edit: Now I'm confused, because I'm remembering a separate and equally triggerworthy issue in Violet's traumatic backstory. Either way, I didn't like the traumatic backstory.

Edited Date: 2015-03-17 01:22 am (UTC)

From:

skygiants

Man, I totally forgot about Violet's tragic past! (I remembered the parts that pertained to lesbians due to having just reread lesbians, but NOTHING ELSE.)

From:

thistleingrey

Yep, there's another triggerworthy issue in Violet's backstory, which seemed to me not quite to fit with the rest of it (why do we not conclude that husband #1 had syphilis, given the biochem bent, and get on with life, carefully).

Re: post, "Talk Sweetly"'s love interest is pretty forgettable, I think--I like the heroine and have no real sense of the putative hero except that he is careful beyond belief. Perhaps he needs to be in order for the rest of the story to parse semi-believably.

From:

evewithanapple

why do we not conclude that husband #1 had syphilis, given the biochem bent, and get on with life, carefully

I think what Milan wanted to do was write a female romance heroine who had no interest in "babies ever after," which is fine! But the whole reason she was anti-babies is because she was basically made that way via excessive trauma, which sort of negates the whole "I don't want kids and that's totally normal and okay" moral. (Also . . . Sebastian, you don't actually have to use the pull-out method. Condoms! They work!)

From:

thistleingrey

*nods* Though I am on board with not having babies ever after (despite having a child of my own--not everyone wants a baby and it is fine!), I agree that this approach to it rather negates the point.

From:

skygiants

Yeah, "Talk Sweetly" I think is an extreme version of one of those Milan love interests whose personality sort of narrows down over the course of the plot to "THINKS THE HEROINE IS SO AWESOME" in order to let the heroine shine and be interesting and have all her cake and eat it too. I mean, this is absolutely a price I'm willing to pay for Milan heroines, I very much appreciate that Milan is committed to letting them enjoy as much cake as they would like, but it may be the reason that her actual romance plotlines for me are often not as memorable as the family and friendship dynamics that surround them.

From:

thistleingrey

*nods* Since I tend not to read genre romance for the romance plotlines, I too am okay with this in general!

From:

wakeupnew

The love story in Talk Sweetly to Me bummed me out - Stephen cracked me up in Suffragette Scandal, and then he was SO DAMN DULL in the novella appearance. I appreciated how much he appreciated Rose, who was fantastic, but ... my god, I was so bored by Stephen.

From:

skygiants

To be honest, I actually spent a lot of Talk Sweetly To Me a little bit disappointed at first because I really liked the plot description at the end of Suffragette Scandal -- the one with letters written under a false identity! -- that she eventually decided not to go with. And then I felt guilty about being disappointed, because Rose was great! I'm glad Rose turned out to be who she was and got a book! I'm ... sorry Stephen was really not interesting in it!

From:

evewithanapple

The backstory was kind of . . . both? Basically the marital rape was sort of implied (she doesn't use that word, but her husband basically kept pressuring her to get pregnant so it's a safe assumption that at least some of their sexual encounters were not all that enjoyable on her part) and she kept miscarrying, wash rinse repeat until her mother got sick of that shit and shoved Violet's husband down the stairs. I liked the bit with her mom, but the rest was a bit . . . much, yeah.

From:

rmc28

The whole marital rape / miscarriage story completely and utterly worked for me, complete with crying along with Violet at the Big Reveal, and then being very affected by Sebastian being very very careful with her afterwards.

I have not suffered either miscarriage or rape, but I've carried two pregnancies to term: the first I merely disliked, the second was so utterly unpleasant it put me off ever being pregnant again, and generally left me with messy and strong emotions on the entire topic. So basically, catharsis through a fictional character's sufferings, probably :-)

From:

skygiants

Well, if it worked for you and gave you catharsis, then that's a very good reason for it to be in there! :) Whether or not it worked for me.

From:

evewithanapple

I had a hard time putting my finger on why The Countess Conspiracy didn't work for me- I mean, friends-to-lovers isn't a favourite trope of mine, but it's also not one I'm opposed to- but I think in the end, I just wasn't all that into either Violet or Sebastian as characters or as a couple (I'd been hoping while reading The Heiress Effect that Violet would turn out to be Genevieve's future love interest, but alas it was not to be) and there was also kind of a TOO MUCH BACKSTORY thing going on. Milan had to establish that Violet and Sebastian were longstanding BFFs, and that Violet was a secret scientist, and that Violet's sister was an asshole, and that Violet's father had imposed ridiculous expectations on his kids and then killed himself and that Amanda was trying to make a run for it . . . it was just too much.

I did enjoy Amanda and Genevieve for what they were, but they kind of had the opposite problem; at some point between books three and four, Amanda 1. came to terms with her sexuality (in VICTORIAN ENGLAND) and 2. developed a hardcore crush on Genevieve, but we didn't see any of it! I mean my general policy on queer characters is "the less angst, the better" but it actually fell a bit flat as a result, because we never really saw why they liked each other beyond a sort of "pair the spares" ending.

From:

skygiants

Yeah, I usually like friends-to-lovers and long-term respectful pining, but when Violet and Sebastian first showed up way back in Duchess War (and they were delightful in Duchess War! They sparkled!) I was definitely kind of hoping they would each get their own book with their own separate stories and romances instead of getting subsumed into each other's. Violet seemed like such a force of nature, it would have been really cool to have her play kind of the traditional 'hero' role in a romance, and that's sort of what I was hoping for. (I didn't think to ship her with Genevieve, but now I wish I had, that would've been awesome.) And there was so much backstory! So much I have now forgotten pretty much all of it!

And hah, yeah, agreed on Amanda and Genevieve. I am very glad they were there! It's certainly better than nothing! But I would have liked a lot more than "- oh wait you're actually a lesbian after all? OK GREAT WELL WE'RE SET THEN."

From:

rymenhild

I have said this to you before, but I would really like a Courtney Milan romance without the men. Her female characters are wonderfully varied and unusual! Her male characters are... I can see why people like them? I mean, they're courteous to ladies and they're secretly made of marshmallow and they're also quite attractive. There's nothing wrong with that. But for the most part, I don't care about the men. Pair those ladies off instead, and I'll be sold.

From:

skygiants

I WOULD LOVE THAT. Though I do like some of the men! This is probably why my favorite of her romances as a romance is still Unraveled, because Smite is so much weirder and thus more interesting than most of Milan's heroes, which makes the romance that much more interesting as well.

From:

sandrylene

...I swear this comment wasn't here when I wrote mine. And uh. Mental jinx? :P

From:

skygiants

I mean, SMITE DOES STAND OUT. Due to being a spacetoaster.

From:

sandrylene

I think I agree with this for most all of them except Smite (in Unraveled), who went totally counter to the usual. I don't recall him particularly described as attractive, and obviously he has his own issues and values that are totally what makes him stand out as a character.

Anyhow, yeah, most of the rest of them it's like, "okay, you are broadly unobjectionable, but not all that memorable," and the ladies are wildly more interesting. But again - I'm not about to complain, really. :P

From:

happydork

I just read The Heiress Effect! It is so compelling and the women are all so delightful and I love that Jane's learning and growing is basically "Yep, I am totally awesome, and you know what else is awesome? FRIENDS!!!" and oh, the elderly aunt and her agoraphobia and her secret inner world!

Having read the comments here and your author tag, I suspect I will be better off reading one particularly good book by her every few months rather than gorging myself on them -- but I am excited for trying either Unravelled or Trade Me in a couple of months! :)

From:

skygiants

JANE IS SO LOVELY. And so is Aunt Freddy! And Free! And the twins! SO MANY interesting women with interesting relationships to each other. I remember practically airpunching when the twins were like "actually let's be friends? WE WANT TO BE FRIENDS."

Unravelled and Trade Me are both excellent choices for Next Courtney Milan! :D I tend to save her books for when I need stress relief, much as I do Heyer.