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Mar. 16th, 2015 12:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsOver 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.)
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.)
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Date: 2015-03-17 03:00 pm (UTC)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 :-)
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Date: 2015-03-17 09:10 pm (UTC)