(no subject)

[skygiants]

Listen To the Moon is not my favorite of Rose Lerner's books, but I'm fascinated by it because it's probably the least wish-fulfillment-y romance novel that I've ever read.

None of the protagonists are upper-class, which already is rare enough; the hero is John Toogood, a middle-aged valet with a stellar work ethic who lost his job as a result of the shenanigans in Sweet Disorder, the first book in the series (one thing I really like about Rose Lerner: her willingness to explore the fact that one person's happily ever after might be SUPER UNPLEASANT AND INCONVENIENT for other people) and the heroine is Sukey Grimes, a maid making ends meet with various boarding-house gigs around town.

Soon John is offered a position as a butler in the vicar's house, but the vicar wants his butler to be married for reasons of morals, so John and Sukey must make a marriage of convenience!

...this is pretty much the only tropey thing that happens in the book. The rest of the plot is a remarkably down-to-earth story about navigating a marriage: like, how do you deal when your husband is your boss? What about differences in age, personality, class, background? (Neither of them might be nobles, but the class difference between a trained valet to a high-ranking nobleman and a small-town maid-of-all-work who tidies up for boarders not much better-off than her is in fact NOT SMALL.) How do you make a life for yourself around the edges of a workday that goes from five AM to ten PM, every day, in a job that requires your individuality to be as sublimated as possible? And even if you make a life for yourself, how do you then manage to successfully include somebody else in it?

There's very little escapism in this book; Sukey and John's romance is not going to be magically lift them out of a life of labor, nor would they expect it to. Which doesn't mean they don't find happiness, of course, because it is a romance novel. (Also, Rose Lerner seems determined to make up for the lack of tropiness by putting in about twice as many sex scenes as in any other book of hers I've read.)

I also really appreciated the subplot non-romance, in which a middle-class white man pursues a working-class woman of color who informs him that their relationship is a bad idea, rallies support around her from colleagues who agree that their relationship is a bad idea, and then in fact successfully goes on NOT TO HAVE A RELATIONSHIP WITH HIM.

I am somewhat amazed this got published by a traditional publisher and I hope we will start seeing many more like it. DOWN WITH DUKES.

Comments

[skygiants]

It's true! I actually remember very little about Curse of the Black Pearl besides Jack Norrington and his longest-of-suffering faces, which is probably for the best because they were amazing long-suffering faces.

[sovay]

I actually remember very little about Curse of the Black Pearl besides Jack Norrington and his longest-of-suffering faces, which is probably for the best because they were amazing long-suffering faces.

That series (I speak only of the first three movies; I am aware that someday I will want to watch only the mermaid scenes from the fourth, but at this time I am still avoiding it) fascinates me because it ultimately failed in a mode that I have hardly ever seen before: it carried off the myth-arc beautifully, but blew most of the ordinary human interactions, including a coherent plot. That is not the usual order of priorites.

Incidentally, I just realized that I first heard of Rose Lerner when she weighed in on the terrible Nazi romance whose nomination by the RWA consumed most of the internet spaces I read last summer. So that's why her name has been looking familiar to me all this while.

[skygiants]

I've never seen the three movies all together in reasonably close succession, so my memories of them are highly disjointed. Regrettably, it is probably the fourth one that I remember best.

Most of the things I've seen Rose Lerner say around the internet have been interesting and intelligent; she also did a great list of Jewish Regency romance novel ideas which you may have already seen, all of which I would very gladly consume.

[pedanther]

Funnily enough, I spent a large chunk of this weekend re-reading On Stranger Tides, the novel that inspired the fourth movie. It's a very different story from the movie - no mermaids, for one thing - but I had the interesting experience that the pirate captain mentoring the naive hero reminded me enough of Jack Sparrow that I had to keep pausing to realign my mental image of him with the way he's actually described in the text.

One of the interesting things about the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie (the writers' commentary on the DVD is fascinating) is that it went through several major revisions as a straight pirate movie where Barbossa attacks Port Royal and kidnaps the governor's daughter for ransom before it got handed to a new set of writers who had the idea of adding all the skeleton-curse stuff and turning it around so that the pirates were after something else and only kidnapped the governor's daughter by mistake. Which means, among other things, that although it was fleshed out as a fantasy movie, it has the skeleton of a pirate movie and is populated by pirate movie characters. All the sequels were conceived as fantasy movies from the get-go, and I don't think they work the way the first one does.

(Which observation doesn't have a lot to do with what you were saying, but I've been looking for an excuse to say it to somebody.)

[sovay]

but I had the interesting experience that the pirate captain mentoring the naive hero reminded me enough of Jack Sparrow that I had to keep pausing to realign my mental image of him with the way he's actually described in the text.

Makes sense to me. Someone involved in the film's production probably had the same reaction.

Which means, among other things, that although it was fleshed out as a fantasy movie, it has the skeleton of a pirate movie and is populated by pirate movie characters. All the sequels were conceived as fantasy movies from the get-go, and I don't think they work the way the first one does.

Well, they also don't work because they were filmed as they were being written and consequently have no structure to speak of, but that's an interesting shift of narrative priorities and does fit my observations about Dead Man's Chest and At World's End. The sea-myth does work beautifully! I would love the second two movies for Davy Jones and the Flying Dutchman alone. The third has the least functional plot, but its underworld is full of gorgeous images: the Black Pearl sailing over a sea of stars, the dead who drift on the glassy currents without a ferryman to guide them, a candle kindled at the fore of each small boat to light their way. But the only thing that holds it all together is the arc that is ultimately the long game of Calypso and Davy Jones. The relationships that come out best are the ones that depend most heavily on the mythos. Everyone else is conveniently disposed of, forgotten, or cut loose to fend for themselves. A stronger spine of actual piracy could only have helped.

(Which observation doesn't have a lot to do with what you were saying, but I've been looking for an excuse to say it to somebody.)

I didn't know it, so I don't mind!