weekend adventures in YA urban fantasy, plus rachel caine - glass houses

Spent the weekend hunting through bookshops in Weymouth for YA urban fantasies with strong heroines. I barely escaped with my sanity, because every single YA urban fantasy seems to have the exact same cover. Black. Pale cover model. Gothic text in vivid colour. Examples: Melissa Marr’s Wicked Lovely series; PC and Kristin Cast’s House of Night series; Rachel Caine’s Morganville Vampires series. It was like browsing a shelf of identical octuplets. Maybe it’s done with mirrors, and there’s only one real book cover -- the iconic apple cover of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight -- and its millions of reflections.

Anyway, once I fought off the identical octuplets, I looked at two books, Aprilynne Pike’s Wings and Rachel Caine’s Glass Houses. One I put down, one I bought.

I gave Aprilynne Pike’s Wings ten pages to hook me. Like every YA urban fantasy ever written, it opens with the protagonist meeting a hot guy in biology class. What is it about biology class? I assume this and the identical scene in Becca Fitzpatrick’s Hush, Hush are deliberate homages to Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight, but even so, it’s such an unimaginative way to introduce a character. Nobody ever seems to meet during a burglary, or whitewater rafting, or anything outside a classroom.

But the biology class wasn’t a deal-breaker. The deal-breaker was that I learned plenty about the protagonist’s physical appearance (so supermodel-stunning that everybody is jealous) and nothing about the protagonist’s personality (um ... she’s a vegan). Classic blank page heroine. No thank you.

Then I flicked through Rachel Caine’s Glass Houses, the first in her Morganville Vampires series, and 16-year-old heroine Claire Danvers won my heart instantly. She’s smart, brave and vulnerable, describing herself as “small” and “average”, struggling to deal with the scary new world of college. Unlike Stephenie Meyer’s Bella Swan, whose only ambition is to marry Edward and have his little vampiric babies, Claire dreams of Yale, Caltech, MIT. Her textbooks love her when nobody in her cut-throat dorm does. She values studying so much she’s willing to brave vampires and murderous cheerleaders just to get to class. Heck yes, I bought that.

Glass Houses is a fast-paced and fun read. The real strength of this book is the characterisation. The four inhabitants of the titular Glass House are so close they’re practically a Nakama, and each of them is beautifully drawn. (For bonus points, Claire’s friendship with kickass goth Eve aces the Bechdel test). I want to move in there, but since I can’t, I’ll be picking up the next.

Verdict = 4 out of 5 stars. Glass Houses is enjoyable with an adorable heroine and an unexpectedly shocking ending.

rob thurman - nightlife

This week I’ve been reading the first book in Rob Thurman’s Cal Leandros urban fantasy series, Nightlife. While I found it an overall enjoyable read, I also have mixed feelings, not least about the gender roles. I recommended it to my friend and fellow gritty urban fantasy fan Dystophil, but not without reservations.

I picked up this book because I have a good track record with urban fantasies about two brothers pursued by the forces of evil: I love the TV show Supernatural, and I’m a huge fan of Sarah Rees Brennan’s YA debut The Demon’s Lexicon. On that front, Nightlife did not disappoint. The two Leandros brothers are well-drawn and sympathetic; much as in The Demon’s Lexicon, a younger brother for whom evil is in the blood is saved by his older brother’s redemptive love, a trope I adore. The world is dark, there’s plenty of violence and the dialogue is amusingly snarky.

Unfortunately, the author has a serious case of overwriting. No good line goes uncluttered. Dialogue tags drip with adverbs and adjectives. At times I wanted to take a red pen to the novel. The novel could lose a good 10,000 words and come out leaner and tighter.

About two-thirds of the way through comes a story decision that dropped my jaw: the protagonist Cal is taken over mind and body by a third party. For nearly the entire rest of the novel, including the climax, Cal is just completely gone. Not only does he not make an appearance onscreen, in a metaphysical sense he doesn’t even exist! He doesn’t reappear until the resolution. I can’t understand what the author was thinking here. What kind of protagonist is entirely absent during the climax of the novel? I’m coming to think that maybe the first-person viewpoint is a ruse, and older brother Niko is the real protagonist. Niko is present while Cal is absent. Niko is suffering while Cal is not. Niko makes the decisions while Cal doesn’t even exist. Cal isn’t even there when Niko heroically saves the world. I found that extremely disappointing.

And then there are the gender roles. Yikes.

All the main characters are male. 95% of the screentime is devoted to male characters. All the important relationships are between male characters. Everybody present at the climax is male. Everybody present in the resolution is male. The book’s primary relationship is between two brothers, but that’s neither cause nor excuse for the complete exclusion of female characters. Look at The Demon’s Lexicon: there’s kickass Mae Crawford, demon-summoning dancer Sin and Goblin Market matriarch Morris, and that’s not even mentioning the protagonist’s crazy mother.

But most worryingly, the only female characters featured in Nightlife are all either virgins or whores, and the whores are made to suffer.

• Georgina, the virgin, is the personification of innocence. She’s “truth and faith ... hope and warmth ... Everything about George was gentle”. Despite being only two years younger than Cal, she’s treated as being much younger. (Disturbingly, Cal’s romantic interest sees it as her role to “be a child for [him]”.) Not gruesomely killed.
• Meredith, the whore, is heavily sexualised. She wears revealing outfits, her breasts get enough screentime that they should have their own credit in the ending sequence, and her flirtation is both a manipulation technique and a nuisance the male characters have to tolerate. She’s presented as artificial -- hair dye, plastic surgery, breast augmentation. Gruesomely killed.
• Sophia is a literal whore, as in Cal’s father paid her to have sex with him. She’s also physically and emotionally abusive, a liar, thief and drunk, who extorts money from her own sons. Gruesomely killed.
• Promise, the whore, marries old men for their money and then they die shortly afterward. Cal thinks of her as the “human version of a succubus”, before he discovers that she isn’t actually human at all. She’s a vampire who takes supplements to avoid having to drain blood. (Pity there isn’t a supplement she can take to avoid having to drain money.) Gruesomely k -- sorry, that was a reflex: Promise is the only sexually active female character who is not gruesomely killed.

I think I need to repeat that with more emphasis. Every sexually active female character but one is gruesomely killed.

Verdict = 3 out of 5 stars. Like fast food, Nightlife is tasty. Enjoy it, and don’t look too closely at what went into it.

hush hush, the designated love interest and gender relations in YA

NB: Potentially triggering discussion of why one character is a rapist.

This week I read Aja’s LJ post Bad Romance (or, YA & Rape Culture). Aja argues that Becca Fitzpatrick’s debut YA paranormal romance Hush, Hush “repeatedly and systematically reinforces rape culture”: the protagonist is “both a victim of rape culture and a perpetuation of it”. I scored a copy of Hush, Hush to see if it was as bad as Aja said.

It’s worse.

First the good. Hush, Hush is a fast read. The dialogue zings. I liked the protagonist much more than I thought I would, and her best friend was tons of fun. And the cover is breathtaking. I could stare at that image all day.


Isn’t that gorgeous?

It’s a shame the designated love interest is a creepy sexual predator.

In a cast full of stalkers, designated love interest Patch is absolutely the worst. His his ideal woman is “vulnerable”. He zeroes in on Nora because he can intimidate her. Patch enjoys threatening her. That’s why he keeps asking her if he scares him - because he gets a thrill out of it. He puts his hands all over her, he invades her personal space, he makes unwanted sexual comments, he leers at her, he follows her around, he isolates her, he scares her. That is not sexual tension but sexual threat - the threat of rape. When Patch corners her alone in a deserted tunnel, Nora explicitly wonders if he's going to rape her. While Patch may not physically rape her, his actions constitute psychological (invading her thoughts) and metaphorical (entering her mind, taking over her body, and physically restraining her from calling the authorities so they can protect her) rapes. He is a continual threat to Nora’s independence, self-respect and even survival.

In one particularly horrifying scene, Nora is stranded with Patch with no cell phone and no way of calling for help. Over her repeated objections, Patch forces her to spend the night with him in a motel room with a single bed. He tells her to strip and get in the shower. Then he pins her down on the bed, straddles her and warns her that nobody will come help her if she screams.

Ladies and gentleman, behold the hero of this paranormal romance.

Nobody worthy of Nora’s love would ever, ever, ever do this. A worthy person would respect her wishes. A worthy person would recognise that she feels threatened and help her to feel safe. A worthy person would support her, encourage her, empower her. Patch is the diametric opposite of that person.

When I talked to the twifties about this novel, the wonderful Becca Cooper commented:

“Now that everyone's talking about it I'm sitting here going, "Hey, yah, how did I miss that?" And I think it's because I read the book with the understanding that Patch was the love interest and I was pretty sure he and Nora got together at the end. Therefore, when Patch did these creepy things I sort of dismissed it/tried to justify it/assumed he had good motivations, and so on.”

Patch gets away with it because he is the designated love interest.

I use this term “designated love interest” to try to express how very artificial the supposed romance is. Nora isn’t drawn to Patch because of his humour, warmth or respect for her: he has none. Nor because they have fun together: they don’t. Nor because he empowers her to become a fuller, better person: he doesn’t. In fact, she finds him so repulsive she spends nearly the entire book rejecting and fleeing him. (If someone forced me into a motel room, told me he wanted to kill me, shoved me up against a wall and put his hands round my throat, I’d reject him too.)

Patch has two things going for him. One, he’s physically attractive. Two, the author designated him as the story’s official love interest. You can tell that not because of anything he does, but because he’s on the front cover, and in the back cover copy, and is an attractive yet brooding boy the protagonist meets in class.

That’s it. Those are the only two reasons Nora has to like him. Those are the only two reasons the reader has to like him. However appalling his behaviour, a love interest (by definition) must be a likeable character, and the protagonist must love him (and have good reasons for loving him), and he must deserve the reader’s sympathy. Patch must be all these things, otherwise he wouldn’t be the love interest ... right?

The lesson Hush, Hush teaches is this. Whatever a boy does to you is out of love. He scares you because he likes you that way. He ignores your wishes because he wants to spend time with you. He invades your personal space because he wants you. So if you find yourself pinned down on a bed, trapped and helpless, just remember that he’s doing this to you because he loves you.

I know YA paranormal romance in general has a problem with gender roles. Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight is notorious for this - it’s the archetypal example, the model that Hush, Hush follows closely. Aja suggests other offenders: Claudia Gray’s Evernight, Richelle Mead’s Vampire Academy, Nina Malkin’s Swoon. My friend Hope commented that “it sounds as though YA might be going through the same need to reject rape-as-love dynamic that the romance world went through about fifteen years ago”. But before YA can reject the bad-boy archetype that gave us Patch and Edward, the romantic hero whose obsessive, dangerous love is expressed through threatening and controlling and overriding the heroine, it first needs to recognise that archetype for what it is: Aja’s “perpetuation of rape culture”.

I’d like to finish up by recommending two YA novels whose handling of love, sex and gender put Hush, Hush to shame.

1. In Kristin Cashore’s Graceling, the protagonist Katsa lives in a male-dominated world in which the easiest way of escaping the control of one man is often to take shelter in the protection of another. Katsa rejects that with a vengeance. Katsa challenges the many contexts in which men have power over her: direct feudal hierarchy, offers to protect her, telepathic understanding of her thoughts and feelings, marriage proposals. Unusually for a YA heroine, Katsa explicitly prizes her own autonomy and independence. Her love interest is sweet and warm: he respects and loves Katsa's strength of character. He allows and encourages Katsa to be a strong, independent woman.
2. In Sarah Rees Brennan’s The Demon’s Lexicon, the character of Nick Ryves is a deconstruction of the classic YA supernatural bad boy. He's scary and dangerous and smoking hot. He possesses many forms of power - physical, sexual, magical. He's the Edward, the Patch, of this story. The twist? Nick is the protagonist of the story, not the designated love interest who dominates a weak heroine. And when we're in his viewpoint, we see how much of a freaking psychopath he is. We see his callousness, his violence, his total lack of empathy. Frankly, he's Chaotic Evil. We see clearly that the YA bad-boy stereotype of Hush, Hush is incapable of real love for another person, only dangerous, controlling obsession. (And the girl who is initially attracted to Nick for his bad-boyness comes to realise that he's a psychopath and kicks his ass to the kerb.) In a way, I perceive The Demon’s Lexicon as a critique of the YA paranormal romance subgenre, and I love it all the more for that.

Further reading: Choco, “Why YA Romance Needs to Change”.

in fantasy men fight and women surrender

In my review of Heroes Die, I commented on gender roles:

"I got a twitchy feeling of gender stereotyping from [the heroine’s] sweet, nurturing, protect-the-innocents nature versus [the hero’s] rampant destruction. This feeling increased when the heroine has to surrender to and channel a greater, external force in order to match the (male) antagonist, which is just weirdly sexualised."

Then I got to thinking about women in fantasy, and all the surrendering they seem to do.

Robert Jordan’s epic fantasy series The Wheel of Time features a type of magic called the One Power, which is split into male and female halves. This sounds equitable. Except “touching [the female half] saidar is like an embrace, touching [the male half] saidin is like a war without mercy. (V: 66)” (Wheel of Time Concordance)

1. the female half, saidar, is "gentle, but infinitely powerful; a force which will do what you wish it to, but requires patience and submission to guide its power. Surrender is necessary to gain it, and women universally speak of it as 'embracing' the Power." (Wheel of Time Wiki) ... “cannot be forced for women, they just lose hold of it. To control the Power, a woman must surrender to it. (II: 208)”
2. the male half, saidin, is a “raging torrent of the Power which must be subdued and dominated” (Wheel of Time Wiki) ... “must be fought against and controlled. (IV: 152)”
   

I’m seeing a common theme here in both Heroes Die and the Wheel of Time. Men fight, women surrender.

It taps into a greater gender distinction that I see in a lot of fantasy. Men are warriors, women healers. Men are aggressive, women nurturing. Men are the heroes, women their damsels in distress. But more of that later.

Are there other examples of this fighting vs surrendering dichotomy in fantasy? Can you suggest authors and novels which subvert this idea?

matthew woodring stover - heroes die

Heroes Die is the first in the Acts of Caine series by Matthew Woodring Stover. Protagonist Hari Michaelson is better known by his stage name Caine - he's an Actor who travels to a medieval alternate dimension and participates in spectacular derring-do to entertain sheeplike Earth viewers. When his estranged wife is kidnapped by the bad guys, Caine lines 'em all up for one gory takedown mission: his studio bosses, an oppressive government and an amusing range of competitive bad guys are all standing between him and his girl. Hilarity ensues. And violence. And profanity. ("**** me like a virgin goat!" = new favourite epithet.)

This is a good book. My jaw dropped on several occasions. There are great set-piece battles, especially the climax, which functioned on so many different levels it broke my mind - I swear the plot could only be followed with a flow chart: I had to talk it out with my brother afterward. (Unfortunately, Caine's actual plan was a little disappointing compared to the head-exploding inspiring brilliance of his fake plan.)

I enjoyed the mixture of D&D-esque magic and real-world military tactics. I think the appeal is that it perfectly captures the D&D and MMO gaming experience. You interact with fake-medieval people in a fake-medieval world, using fake-medieval magic, but you bring modern ideas and tactics. Also, the politics of both settings within the book, plus the interrelation thereof, were pure gold.

Sociopathic protagonist Caine rocked. He's not quite Richard Morgan's Takeshi Kovacs, but he'll do fine. I also liked the sociopathic antagonist Berne. Conversely, the lead female character was flat and cardboard. I got a twitchy feeling of gender stereotyping from her sweet, nurturing, protect-the-innocents nature versus Caine's rampant destruction. This feeling increased when the heroine has to surrender to and channel a greater, external force in order to match the (male) antagonist, which is just weirdly sexualised. Then I realised the only other female characters of importance are:

1. who hero-worships Caine;
2. a whoremistress; and
3. her, uh ... miniature lesbian sex pet.

I feel much better about the gender roles now.

The constant homoerotic tension between the antagonists Ma'elKoth, Toa-Sytell and Berne (don't even try and figure out the naming patterns, there is no logic) was pure hilarity. Add all the jealousy re: who liked Caine better than who and I was holding my breath expecting a hot foursome of evil.

It was sweet deliciousness, and I have authorised the purchase of the second book. (Book-buying in the household of us is a complicated affair of figuring out which book will appeal to the most readers.)

Verdict = 4 out of 5 stars. If you enjoy Richard Morgan, especially if you enjoy both his SF and the fantasy, I suspect you'll like this. Just be prepared for the violence, swearing and gruesome torture scenes.