skygiants | (no subject)

I like to keep a couple unread thrift-store Barbara Michaels Gothics around the house as emergency paperbacks, but unfortunately I think Here I Stay was the last one I had on tap and it turned out to be my least favorite of all the Barbara Michaels I've read ...

... here is where I have to admit that while I like to talk a big game about appreciating unlikable heroines, the real truth is that this probably only applies when those heroines are unlikable in ways that I, in fact, find likable. I genuinely think Barbara Michaels made a bold choice with Andrea Torgesen of Here I Stay! She's kind of awful in ways that are clearly very much on purpose, and I guess I respect that but I very much did not enjoy reading about her.

So, Andea has subsumed her entire life since teenagerhood into taking care of her now-college-aged younger brother Jim, and as a result is pretty unhealthily possessive in ways that have gotten significantly worse since he lost both his leg and his hopes of a sportsball career in a car accident. She has no time for outside friends or interests, and as a result resents the time that Jim spends with his; she's terrified of allowing him to do anything that's even a little bit dangerous; she knows she ought to respect his privacy but sometimes she's just got to sneak into his room and read his bad teenaged poetry ...

Anyway, the plot of the book is that Andrea and Jim move into an old moderately haunted building and turn it into a successful B&B, after which a political columnist moves in as a long-time lodger and falls in love with Andrea for some inexplicable reason, while constantly recommending that she might want to give Jim more space and freedom and opportunity to envision a life that's not just 'live in this B&B with my older sister, forever.'

I was really hoping that this would turn out to be the kind of book where all this resulted in Andrea developing interests and community and a sense of respect for both herself and her brother as capable, independent people ...

Unfortunately it was not that kind of book. Andrea never learns how to let Jim live his own life!

Instead, she learns to let him go ... WHEN HE DIES OF A BRAIN ANEURYSM ON THE SECOND-TO-LAST-PAGE!

Jim, it turns out, only survived the car accident so that he could die later after bonding with the sad house ghost and help her ... go into the light? Or something? Anyway, fuck the notion that Jim could have a whole and vibrant and independent future without his leg, I guess.

I did like the immortal cat named Satan who lives in the B&B's master bedroom. Also, the very reluctantly psychic local business owner who refuses to admit that she can sense ghosts and also refuses to ever return to any location where she did sense a ghost because she just Does Not Want To Deal With It and has been doing this her entire life, now she'd like to get back to running the town's most popular restaurant, please. I'd read the book about her.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I hit one of those protagonists recently; she's clearly meant to be eccentric, and the author's choice seem wholly purposeful...but the result is a protagonist who makes me wonder why the other characters put up with her on a daily basis, because she is Just That Difficult.

The book in question is Elementary, She Read by Vicki Delany, first in a cozy mystery series about Gemma Doyle (only distantly related to Sir Arthur), English-born operator of a Sherlock Holmes themed bookshop on Cape Cod.

Although Gemma never describes it as such, her protagonist's superpower is that she has precisely the same knack for hyper-precise observation and deduction as does Holmes in the Conan Doyle stories. She can micro-read body language, identify accents at the drop of a syllable, extrapolate accurately from miniscule details of a target's wardrobe, and -- if forced into culinary duty by her best friend, who runs the tea shop next door -- will ask for a ruler to make sure the sandwiches are exactly two inches long by 3/4 inch wide.

The trouble is that Gemma's first-person narration (obligatory, since this is a modern cozy and that's become a Rule) makes her come across as alarmingly and unattractively self-centered. She can't resist correcting other people's imprecisions ("What high tea? Oh, you mean afternoon tea. You really shouldn't get those mixed up."), and imposes shamelessly on friends (finagling a last-second dinner reservation at the most crowded seafood place in town). So when she gets herself involved in a murder connected to the rarest possible Holmesian artifact -- an 1887 Beeton's Christmas Annual -- rather than admiring her deductive instincts, I kept wondering when she was actually going to get arrested for interfering with the police investigation.

One further complicating factor: certain aspects of the writing make me wonder if the author intends Gemma to be perceived as some flavor of high-functioning autistic, which would explain what sometimes comes across as a lack of personal filters where her dialogue is concerned. But the text gives absolutely no overt cues in that direction to the reader, so one can't really use that theory to mitigate Gemma's general lack of likeability.

Which is frustrating in the extreme, because as far as the mystery itself is concerned, Delany supplies a sharp, clever plot, a comfortable and convincingly drawn setting, and a likeable cast of supporting characters. It's just that I spent most of the book shouting metaphorically for Gemma's friends to stage an intervention on her behalf, and I'm not much interested in sticking around for more books (there are four or five at this point) in which they don't call her on her BS.

Edited 2020-04-14 07:52 (UTC)

I stopped reading a cozy culinary crime series where the heroine was becoming unlikable, and the narrative kept insisting that her wish not to investigate a murder where she had tripped over the body of her abusive husband's new girlfriend was a flaw, as stated by the heroine's son. The narrative was far far more forgiving of the abuse than I was.

Also there are characters who are supposed to be so likeable that they cross the border and I am just more interested in the hero's morally dubious estranged legal father. (Different series)

This sounds almost like a reverse problem, which is when the author is convinced that the protagonist's quirks are charming ones and you, as the reader, are like "oh no I do not find this charming though ..." My hackles are ten times likely to get up about a character that I can tell the author really wants me to love and I am just not going to, whereas normally if the author is politely holding out a plate clearly labeled 'TRASH FIRE' I'm like 'all right as long as you know.' (Though in this particular place Michaels clearly did know and I still did not want the trash fire.)