skygiants | Entries tagged with rose lerner

I'd been saving up Rose Lerner's The Wife in the Attic for a long trip out of a feeling that it would be a perfect plane read, as indeed it very much was.

The pitch for The Wife in the Attic is 'lesbian Gothic Jane Eyre'. I did not know, but probably should have expected given Lerner's narrative interests, that it would be, specifically, Jewish lesbian Gothic Jane Eyre; when the impoverished, middle-aged heroine accepts a classic Gothic position as a governess in an isolated manor to instruct young Tabby Palethorpe in various respectable subjects and good Christian values, one of the secrets she's very careful to keep from her charming new employer is her half-Jewish heritage.

The main tension in the plot is the shifting balance of power and trust between the heroine, the aforementioned charming new employer, and his near-invisible and ambiguously foreign wife, who suffers from a mysterious 'illness' and seems to play no part in her own child's life. Both Palethorpes have a very particular version of reality that they'd like their new governess to believe -- and though our heroine, very unaccustomed to being of importance to anyone, initially finds all the attention a little seductive, it all very soon begins to take on an increasingly sinister element.

The first-person heroine has a name, by the way, but I kept forgetting that fact and wanting to refer to her by 'I' or 'B-ko' like the heroine of Rebecca -- actually I think the structural problem of the book for me sort of comes down to the fact that the book as written feels more like it wants to be wading through the murkier waters of Rebecca than Jane Eyre, and end with more messy third-act ambiguity to match the really successful tension and unease that's building through the rest of the book.

( More discussion of the ending and the battle between romance and Gothic )

Anyway, I can imagine a book that would land better but all that said I'm glad it's the book that it is and that all the weirdness and tension and discomfort was allowed to stay in there rather than sanding off the edges off either the protagonist or Lady Palethorpe -- it's not a perfect book but it is a tremendously interesting book. (Also shout-outs to Rose Lerner for both writing a kid whom the protagonist cares about deeply while also finding her annoying and difficult most of the time, and for remembering always that lower servants in the house have a viewpoint and that viewpoint is very likely to be judgmental for good reasons.)

I've been feeling playlisty recently, so a few weeks ago I did a Twitter meme where I asked people for prompts for 5-song playlistlets about things we both liked, which I would make in the next week.

...it has now been almonst a month, but on the other hand almost every playlist on this list has more than 5 songs in it, so really it was an equal-opportunity lie!

clones (star wars) for

bluestalking - I uh for sure had this one ready to go already, mostly with songs siphoned off from the playlist for my clone amateur oral historian character from our last tabletop campaign

bash for

jothra - relatedly, the playlist for my clone amateur oral historian character from our last tabletop campaign

wild theatrical productions for

evewithanapple - I was not sure whether this prompt meant 'songs from wild theatrical productions' or 'the mood of creating/experiencing a wild theatrical production', so I attempted to do the second with the first? please note that 'wild' is not a condemnation, some of these are from productions I think are legitimately delightful and some from productions I sincerely believe are terrible

Kay for

aella_irene - this was surprisingly difficult, the only thing in my personal feelings about Sir Kay that for sure I feel like I captured was my strong belief that he spends his entire life annoyed and stressed

Russian Doll for

aberration - this is another one I definitely had cued up and ready to go already

the Iron Bull (Dragon Age) for

agonistes - the Land Down Under here represents Ferelden

bog bodies -

shati forbade me from using Zombie by The Cranberries in this playlist, which, technically, I did not

UNIONS! -

happydork is lucky this playlist was not composed entirely of Daniel Kahn songs

True Pretenses by Rose Lerner for

sophia_sol - this one was so much fun to do AND coincidentally also gave me an excuse to use another Daniel Kahn song >.>

Ernest Shackleton Loves Me for

pseudo_tsuga - an attempt at conveying the Mood of this great work without using any actual songs from the show

Princess Tutu - ok YOU guys all know that my personal playlist for this is LENGTHY, but the person who requested it is my roommate M and we've just finished watching S1, so I had to leave off more than half the things I would put on it until a later date when they will make sense >.>

Twelve Kingdoms for

izilen - another playlist I have had ready to go for years just waiting for someone to ask me about it

the specific emotion of yankumi pretending that shin rescued her from the scary gang member she just beat up for

esmenet - this is indeed a very specific delightful emotion which I did my best to capture!

trapped in an inn for

nextian - a mediocre playlist for a great prompt, I would LOVE more suggestions for songs that express the feeling of 'I'm been stuck for a week in this place with a bunch of people I don't like OH WAIT no nevermind I love them now'

Feel free to chime in with a.) song suggestions for any of these playlists or b.) more prompts, I am always looking to grow my music collection and I continue to find playlisting a pleasant and soothing activity.

It was extremely helpful of Rose Lerner, Courtney Milan and Alyssa Cole to jump on a pop culture zeitgeist and put out a trio of novellas right before a month in which I had a bunch of work travel and was looking for non-stressful reads; I read most of Hamilton's Battalion on a flight back from DC and it was great.

The novellas are linked together by a frame story about Eliza Hamilton's quest to Gather Reminiscences About Her Husband, although Hamilton himself actually takes up the absolute minimum amount of pages required to slap his name on the cover.

"Promised Land" by Rose Lerner features:
- a cross-dressing Jewish officer in the Revolutionary Army
- who takes her love interest prisoner when she catches him spying
- who is her EX-HUSBAND whom she FAKED HER OWN DEATH AND RAN AWAY FROM several years prior
- and then they have numerous arguments about their different relationships with Judaism and Jewish identity in colonial America while she's leading military operations and he's chained to a wall!

Rose Lerner, you didn't have to target your romance novella quite so directly to my interests. I'm super not complaining, I am A-OK being an extremely pandered-to target audience, I'm just saying it wasn't strictly necessary!

"The Pursuit of..." by Courtney Milan is about a black American soldier and a British officer who attempt to kill each other at the battle of Yorktown and then go on a ROM-COM ROAD TRIP. Their first conversation features the British officer self-deprecatingly joking about imperialism, which tells you that a.) Courtney Milan is real interested in poking at the inherent contradictions of a war For Freedom And Ideals fought between a colonial power and a slave-owning proto-nation, and b.) she is giving even fewer fucks about strict historical accuracy than usual. She is also very interested in jokes about cheese. I found this overall quite enjoyable although I was occasionally jarred by anachronisms in dialogue and by concern for the digestive health of our protagonists as they steadily ate their way through terrible un-refrigerated cheese.

"That Could Be Enough" by Alyssa Cole is about black lesbians -- one of them Eliza Hamilton's secretary who has Sworn Off Love, the other a flirtatious local dressmaker who would like to convince her to reverse that decision. It's cute and features several elements I like, including epistolary romance and a community theater production, but I wish the story did not drive the back half of its plot with a Big Misunderstanding.

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.

Crossposts: http://bookelfe.livejournal.com/437194.html

The other day I was trying to explain to

innerbrat why I stayed up until 3 AM reading Rose Lerner's True Pretenses.

BECCA: OK, so the hero of this Regency novel is a JEWISH CON ARTIST, and he and the heroine bond over the fact that she's an upper-class woman who politely gets things done and there are a lot of ways in which being an upper-class woman who manages to get things done within the rules of propriety in Regency England is BASICALLY LIKE being a con artist! And the other thing they bond over is the fact that they both have younger brothers that they mostly raised from when they were small, and now both of their brothers want to go off and have their own lives, and their older siblings are not ready to let them go be adults, so they have shared sibling issues!

DEBI: I would say this book had 'Becca-bait' written all over it, except: is there cross-dressing?

BECCA: THAT IS THE ONLY THING MISSING.

Guys, I really, really liked True Pretenses. It starts off kind of Brothers Bloom, with Ash and his brother Rafe, con artists extraordinaire:

RAFE: I am ready to go straight and stop swindling people. :(
ASH: OK. OK, this is fine. We can handle this, this is fine, we will find you an attractive rich woman to marry and you will be set for life!

So Ash finds Lydia, an attractive and hypothetically rich woman who can't get into her money until she marries, and who really wants to get into her money so she can continue doing charity work and supporting the town's Tory party. Unfortunately, her younger brother is SO DONE with politics and has decided he's not giving any more money to the cause, so until she gets into her own cash she's kind of stuck.

ASH: Hello, we are respectable individuals! Allow me to smoothly matchmake --
RAFE: HI YO LYDIA my brother thinks we should have a marriage of convenience so you can buy me an officer's commission and then get into your money, is that cool?
ASH: *facepalm*
LYDIA: Ummm. Well, OK, I ... see the advantages of this, but ... actually I kind of think Ash is the more attractive one, soooo what if we did the marriage of convenience thing instead?
ASH: UM. I ... you're cute but ... that was not the plan, and -- don't know if want??

Then Ash and Rafe get into a huge fight about ( early-book spoilers )

RAFE: HI YO LYDIA by the way my brother and I are CON ARTISTS and we are also TOTALLY JEWISH and I am LEAVING and never want to see his face AGAIN!
LYDIA: ....well, I feel deeply uncomfortable about all this information. On the other hand: still really want into my money. Ash, I think we can make this work!
ASH: Aren't you worried about the whole con artist thing?
LYDIA: It's true, you could easily blackmail me by telling everyone in the world about my terrible con artist marriage of convenience. On the other hand, I could blackmail you by telling everyone you're Jewish and have also committed many crimes, so we're probably even as far as mutually assured destruction goes.

So Ash and Lydia do the marriage of convenience plot, and it's my favorite kind of marriage of convenience plot, where they're both REALLY ENJOYING THEMSELVES pretending to be googly-eyed over each other, and they're both in on the joke -- but also both aware that the other is not necessarily trustworthy, and definitely aware that the power dynamics have the potential to get really weird in both directions, given, again, the mutually assured destruction/potential blackmail factor, not to mention the huge class and cultural issues.

Let me repeat: I love the class and cultural issues! I love how much of the book is Ash and Lydia actually working at liking each other, around all the weird feelings raised by Ash's background and Lydia's enormous amounts of privilege; I love that Lydia wonders if her attraction to Ash is her creepily fetishizing DANGER AND POVERTY!!, if Ash's attraction to her is as much about her fortune and her lovely house at Netherfields as it is about her as a person. And both of these things are probably a little bit true.

I also am so into how the book throws itself behind the thesis that the accepted way for women to get things politically done in a system where they have many rules to obey and little direct power -- smiling, dropping hints, making people like you -- uses basically all the same skills as being a con artist. Lydia is really good at getting things done! SHE MAKES A WONDERFUL CON ARTIST.

I love the sibling issues -- how all four of them are trying to protect each other and end up stifling each other in different ways. I love that being Jewish means very different things to Ash and Rafe -- that Rafe takes ritual very seriously, and Ash not at all, and both of those things are valid. I love the whole thread about when and where they speak Yiddish; I love that they come from a poor Jewish community in London, that all of Ash's first girlfriends had Jewish names. I love that Ash is like "look, I don't tell people I'm Jewish because they probably say things that will make it hard for me to like them and I like liking people." I love that Lydia, who starts out with all the prejudices of her time, says several things, throughout the book, that make it harder for Ash and Rafe to like her.

And speaking of: wow, how much do I love that even though this takes place in the same town as Sweet Disorder, the protagonists from that book appear a grand total of once, and Phoebe and Lydia super don't like each other and probably never will? I am always so delighted when authors let sympathetic characters genuinely not get along for personality reasons! There's also a really good subplot about how Lydia and one of her friends approach friendship really differently, and have misunderstandings based on their different convictions about what friendship ought to be.

What a good romance novel. Or, more accurately: what a romance novel with 'FOR BECCA' written directly on it, probably in Hebrew letters.

Crossposts: http://bookelfe.livejournal.com/419524.html

Last weekend I was on vacation! To cover all my vacation bases, I brought with me a mystery novel, a romance novel, and a fantasy novel about dragons.

I think I actually liked the romance novel best! Rose Lerner's Sweet Disorder, which is about SMALL TOWN NINETEENTH CENTURY POLITICS.

The plot revolves around the fact that for much of the nineteenth century in the UK only male persons of a certain status in town were enfranchised. The heroine is a widow who has inherited an ability-to-vote from her husband, which she can't use herself, but can give to someone else if she marries them, and various political machinations on the part of town political parties to get her to marry someone who will vote usefully. Matchmaking and bribery ensues!

At first I was like, "is it really that plausible that people would be focusing so much energy on this poor woman's one vote?" and then I was like "OK, here's the rubric: would a nineteenth-century Leslie Knope do this? Yes. Yes, Leslie Knope ABSOLUTELY would," and that sold it for me.

(The hero's mother basically IS a more ruthless nineteenth-century Leslie Knope, which is one of the reasons I'm sad the book likes her less than it likes almost everybody else. I mean, it likes most of the rest of its characters a lot! Overall, it's a very kind-eyed narrative. Which is one of the reasons I like it. But I also like nineteenth-century Leslie Knope!)

Anyway, Our Heroine Phoebe is very much enjoying being a widow despite her reduced resources and has no intention of marrying again even for copious amounts of matchmaking and bribery, until her teenaged little sister turns up distressed and pregnant, at which point bribery suddenly becomes of the essence! So she graciously makes it known to the political agents at hand that she is open to negotiation, and they present her with bachelors.

BACHELOR A: Mr. Moon, a very nice man who runs a pastry shop (which will also be bailed out of crippling debt by matchmaking bribery if they go through with the marriage.) Problem: while he is very, very nice, and has progressive politics like Phoebe, they are COMPLETELY INCOMPATIBLE in personality. Also, Phoebe hates pastry.
BACHELOR B: a nice older factory owner with a sense of humor and good taste in literature, and also an adorable young daughter, who also likes reading, which is basically Phoebe's kryptonite. Problem: he is a Tory and his political opinions are awful and racist.

And then of course there is also a Bachelor C, the actual hero, who came back from the Army with depression and a limp and is now a political agent and supposed to be hooking her up with Bachelor A. He's also nobility, of course, but that feels -- almost tacked-on? Like, there's a little bit of the obligatory angsting about the gap in their station, and some exploration of wealth and power dynamics, but really this book wants to be about working and middle-class people who live in small towns. I'm ALL FOR that. I always want to be reading more Regency novels about working and middle-class people who live in small towns! Phoebe has a family, a brother-in-law that she's close to, a landlady, a woman who helps her with the laundry twice a week, a whole sewing circle; she very much feels like she's part of and embedded in a community, which is one of the reasons I liked the book so much.

The other reason is that, like I said above, it's a very warm novel generally. There aren't really bad guys, just difficult situations -- with one major exception (which is not hard to see coming), and while the major exception is in fact TERRIBLE, and appropriately so, he is also very clearly drawn as a human being, who happens to be terrible.

Anyway, I'm into small-town politics, and small-town newspapers, and small-town families (I also really like the whole subplot about Phoebe's brother-in-law) and Rose Lerner, apparently! Will definitely be reading more of her stuff.