#I would just subvert the genre by being a competent spy

[transchaoswizard]

Oh I'm having fun with it

spin the wheel for a genre!

[explosionshark]

Thanks for recommending Gideon the Ninth! It was so good! Do you have a book rec tag I could check out? :)

honestly i should, huh? i’ve read more books than probably ever before this year and i’ve talked about ‘em intermittently, but not with a consistent tag. i’ll recommend some right now, though, with a healthy dose of recency bias!

sf/f

the priory of the orange tree by samantha shannon - a truly epic fantasy novel with one of the most beautiful, satisfying f/f romances i’ve ever read. the novel takes account nearly everything i hate about fantasy as a genre (overwhelmingly straight, white, and male centric, bland medieval European settings, tired tropes) and subverts them. incredible world-building, diverse fantasy cultures, really cool arthrurian legend influence. one of my favorite books i’ve ever read tbh.

gideon the ninth by tamsyn muir - which you’ve read, obviously, but for posterity’s sake i’m keeping it here! sci-fi + murder mystery + gothic horror. genuinely funny while still having a super strong emotional core and more than enough gnarly necromantic to satisfy the horror nerd in me. makes use of some of my favorite tropes in fiction, namely the slowburn childhood enemies to reluctant allies to friends to ??? progression between gideon and harrow. absolutely frothing at the mouth for a sequel.

the broken earth trilogy by nk jemisin - really the first book that helped me realize i don’t hate fantasy, i just hate the mainstream ‘medieval europe but with magic’ version of fantasy that dominates the genre. EXTREMELY cool worldbuilding. i’ve definitely described it as like, a GOOD version of what the mage-vs-templar conflict in dragon age could have been, with a storyline particularly reminiscent of “what if someone got Anders right?”

this is how you lose the time war by amal el-mohtar and max gladstone - i’m not usually big on epistolary novels, but this one really worked for me. spy vs spy but it’s gay and takes place between time traveling agents of two opposing sides of a war. the letter writing format really plays to el-mohtar’s strengths as a poet, the unfolding love story is weird and beautiful. it’s a really quick read, too, if you’re short on time or attention.

empress of forever  by max gladstone - i just finished this one this week! if you’re in the mood for a space opera, look no further. imagine if steve jobs was an asian lesbian and also like not a shitty person. this is where you start with vivian liao. you get the classic putting-the-band-together arc with beings from all across the universe, your romances and enemies-turned-friends and uneasy alliances all over the place. really satisfying character development and some extremely cool twists along the way. it’s just a fun good time.

the luminous dead by caitlin starling - this one rides the line of horror so it’s closest to that part of the list. it reminds me of the most inventive low budget horror/sci-fi films i’ve loved in the best way possible because it makes use of the barest narrative resources. it’s a book that takes place in one primary setting, featuring interactions between two characters that only meet each other face-to-face for the briefest period. the tension between the two characters is the most compelling part of the story, with competing and increasingly unreliable narratives and an eerie backdrop to ratchet things up even higher. the author described it as “queer trust kink” at one point which is, uh, super apt actually and totally my jam. the relationship at the center of the book is complicated to say the least, outright combative at points, but super compelling. plus there’s lost of gnarly sci-fi spelunking if you like stories about people wandering around in caves.

horror

the ballad of black tom by victor lavalle - we all agree that while lovecraft introduced/popularized some cool elements into horror and kind of defined what cosmic horror would come to mean, he was a racist sack of shit. which is why my favorite type of ‘lovecraftian horror’ is the type that openly challenges his abhorrent views. the ballad of black tom is a retelling of the horror at redhook that flips the narrative by centering the action around a black protagonist. 

lovecraft country by matt ruff - more of what i just described. again, lovecraftian themes centered around black protagonists. this one’s especially cool because it’s a series of interconnected short stories following related characters. it’s getting a tv adaptation i believe, but the book is definitely not to be missed

rolling in the deep / into the drowning deep by mira grant - mermaids are real and they’re the ultimate deep sea predators! that’s really the whole premise. if for some reason that’s not enough for you, let me add this: diverse cast, a romance between a bi woman who’s not afraid to use the word and an autistic lesbian, really cool speculative science tangents about mermaid biology and myth. 

the haunting of hill house by shirley jackson - it’s halloween month so i’m thinking about hill house again. one of the greatest american ghost stories ever written. especially worth the read if you follow it up w the 1964 film adaptation (the haunting) and then the 2018 netflix series.

the hunger by alma katsu - i’ve always been fascinated by the donner party even though we now know the popular narrative is largely falsehoods. still, this highly fictionalized version of events scratched an itch for me and ended up surprising me with its resistance from the most expected and toxic racist tropes associated with donner party myth.

wounds / north american lake monsters by nathan ballingrud - nathan ballingrud is my favorite horror writer of all time. one of my favorite writers period regardless of genre. in ballingrud’s work the horror is right in front of you. you can look directly at it, it’s right there. but what permeates it, what draws your attention instead, what makes it hurt is the brutally honest emotional core of everything surrounding the horror. the human tragedy that’s’ reflected by the more fantastic horror elements is the heart of his work. it’s always deeply, profoundly moving for me. both of these collections are technically short stories, but they’re in the horror section of the recs because delineations are totally arbitrary and made solely at my discretion. 

short stories

her body and other parties by carmen maria machado - tbh i almost put this in w horror but there’s enough weird fiction here for me to be willing to straddle the line. it was really refreshing to read horror that centered queer women’s perspectives. the stories in this collection are really diverse and super powerful. there’s an incredible weird fiction piece that’s like prompt-based law and order svu micro fiction (go with me here) that ends up going to some incredible places. there’s the husband stitch, a story that devastated me in ways i’m still unraveling. the final story reminded me of a more contemporary haunting of hill house in the best way possible. machado is a writer i’m really excited about.

vampires in the lemon grove by karen russell - my friend zach recommended this to me when we were swapping book recs earlier this year and i went wild for it! mostly weird fiction, but i’m not really interested in getting hung up on genres. i don’t know what to say about this really other than i really loved it and it got me excited about reading in a way i haven’t been in a while. 

the tenth of december by george saunders - i really like saunders’ work and i feel like the tenth of december is a great place to start reading him. quirky without being cloying, weird without being unrelatable.

misc

the seven husbands of evelyn hugo by taylor jenkins reid - there’s something really compelling to me about the glamour of old hollywood. this story is framed as a young journalist interviewing a famously reclusive former starlet at the end of her life. the story of how evelyn hugo goes from being the dirt-poor daughter of cuban immigrants to one of the biggest names in hollywood to an old woman facing the end of her life alone is by turns beautiful, inspiring, infuriating and desperately sad. by far the heart of the book is in evelyn finally coming out as bisexual, detailing her decades-long on/off relationship with celia st. james, another actress. evelyn’s life was turbulent, fraught with abuse and the kind of exploitation you can expect from the hollywood machine, but the story is compelling and engaging and i loved reading it.

smoke gets in your eyes by caitlin doughty - a memoir by caitlin doughty, the woman behind the popular ‘ask a mortician’ youtube series. it was a super insightful look into the american death industry and its many flaws as well as an interesting, often moving look at the human relationship with death through the eyes of someone touched by it early and deeply.

love and rockets by los bros hernandez (jaime and gilbert and mario) - this was a big alt comic in the 80s with some series within running on and off through the present. i’m not current, but this book was so important for me as a kid. in particular the locas series, which centered around two queer latina girls coming up in the punk scene in a fictional california town. the beginning starts of a little sci-fi-ish but over time becomes more concerned with slice-of-life personal dramas. 

[mediaevalmusereads]

The Black Hawk. By Joanna Bourne. New York: Berkley Sensation, 2011.

Rating: 2.5/5 stars

Genre: historical romance

Part of a Series? Yes, Spymasters #4

Summary: Someone is stalking French agent Justine DeCabrillac through London's gray streets. Under cover of the rain, the assassin strikes--and Justine staggers to the door of the one man who can save her.  The man she once loved.  The man she hated.  Adrian Hawkhurst. Adrian wanted the treacherous beauty known as "Owl" back in his bed, but not wounded and clinging to life. Now, as he helps her heal, the two must learn to trust each other to confront the hidden menace that's trying to kill them--and survive long enough to explore the passion simmering between them once again.

***Full review under the cut.***

Content Warnings: blood, violence, graphic sexual content, graphic sexual content involving teenagers, references to child prostitution and sexual assault

Overview: This book appeared on Bustle’s list of feminist romances, which has been hit or miss for me. On the one hand, the list gave me favorites like The Suffragette Scandal and The Raven Prince, but also duds like Not Quite A Husband. I decided to give this one a go, and despite the high rating it has on Goodreads, The Black Hawk just wasn’t for me. While I applaud Bourne for creating a spy story that goes against the grain of usual marriage plots, I ultimately didn’t think I, as a reader, was given enough motivation to care about the politics or the characters. Maybe it’s my fault for coming in at book 4 in the series, but still. I wanted so much more than what I got from this novel.

Writing: Personally, I found Bourne’s prose to be a little stilted. There were a lot of paragraphs where the sentences would be the same length, making some passages feel robotic, and Justine, in particular, spoke in ways that felt either archaic or overly formal. I also think Bourne had a problem of over-writing in some areas; characters would narrate what they were doing or going to do rather than Bourne showing us (”I am going to put the kettle on for you, and then you will shave” rather than something like “She put the kettle over the fire as he sharpened his razor”) and some scenes would get dragged down by unnecessary detail. As a result, I felt like the pace throughout the entire novel felt the same, and even when we get moments of sentence variance, it didn’t feel like form matched function.

I also think the structure of this book was a little strange. The narrative flashes backwards and forwards in time, and while I like it when books do this, I think authors need to be deliberate and show how the two (or more) timelines parallel or compliment one another. The Black Hawk seemed to not know why it was jumping through time; I thought at first that the first plot thread (Justine’s assassination attempt) was going to be a frame narrative, and somehow, the assassination would be linked to her past. Granted, we do get some of that, but I think overall, the time jumps weren’t deliberately placed. We got an intro where Justine seeks out Hawker and he treats her wounds, then we jump back in time and follow them as 13 year old spies for some 60 pages, then back to the present for 6 pages, then a different point in the past for 30, etc. I think I would have preferred a structure where the events happening in the present were made more significant by the plotline of the past. When Justine is laying in bed and recovering, for example, maybe Hawker could be worried about her dying and start thinking back to when and how they first met. When Justine starts to sicken from the poison, maybe there’s a scene from the past where they discover the Caches have been learning to make poison or something. In short, I wanted the past and present to comment on one another a bit more, and for the present to be more of a frame, rather than a plotline in itself.

Plot: The summary of this book makes it seem like the main plot will be about Justine and Hawker overcoming their tumultuous past and learning to love one another again. What we really get is a story with 3 main threads: 1.) the present day assassination plot, 2.) the discovery and rescue of the Caches in 1794, and 3.) thwarting a plot to kill Napoleon in 1802.

Personally, I found the present day plot to be a little underwhelming, which is why I wanted it to be the frame rather than the main draw. There wasn’t nearly enough angst to make the present day story feel suspenseful, and I ultimately didn’t feel like I was watching a mystery unfold because the motivations of the perpetrators were somewhat bland. I think if Bourne had put more work into the emotional turmoil and developing the relationship by navigating old wounds and lingering angst, the present day stuff would have felt more suspenseful.

The 1794 plot is mostly significant for establishing the concept of the Caches - children who are trained to essentially be sleeper agents for France. This plot is less significant to Justine and Hawker’s story than it for a side character, Pax, which meant that I didn’t feel like rescuing the children and thwarting the operation was personal for our main characters. Even though Justine claims to want to rescue them because they’re children, I never got the sense that she had unusually strong convictions - she (and Adrian) seemed to act only because it was the right thing to do. I think I would have liked to see more personal stakes in this plot, like if Justine herself was an escaped Cache. While Pax and Hawker’s friendship makes the stakes somewhat personal for Hawker, I feel like it doesn’t come to fruition until much later, so I would have liked to see more immediate concerns for Hawker as well (maybe he has a soft spot for children or something).

The 1802 plot was also similarly empty. Justine seemed to want to thwart the assassination attempt because she’s pro-Napoleon and pro-France, and Hawker wants to subvert the assassination because he doesn’t fancy England and France going to war again. While I can understand these nationalistic and political motivations, I never got the sense that Justine was spying because she loved France or felt like she owed her spy organization anything. Bourne seems to take for granted that the reader will care about saving Napoleon or preventing war, and personally, I didn’t really feel strongly about any of these potential consequences because the characters don’t seem to have complex feelings about them. I think this plot would have been more compelling if Justine had some event in her past that makes protecting France and France’s interests personal for her, or if she felt like she owed the Police Secrete for saving her from prostitution. The same would be true for Hawker; maybe a friend or family member died in the Napoleonic Wars and he has to balance the need for revenge with the desire to prevent more human suffering. The vague “I’m doing this for my country” felt rather empty and impersonal, and I think that prevented me from really getting into the story.

Characters: Justine, our heroine, is likeable in that she’s a competent spy. I liked that she never made any stupid decisions for the sake of the plot, and even when she was put in a position where she was helpless, it felt like a believable fault or limit to her abilities. I also really liked her devotion to her younger sister and her sense of pragmatism, even when her emotions told her to do something else.

Hawker, our hero, is also fun in that he’s a competent spy and master thief. I liked that he was ruthless without being cruel, and he wasn’t overly broody or belligerent.

I don’t really have anything to say about the two of them other than that because it my opinion, they didn’t really evolve that much. They were still likeable, they had some nice banter, and I think they were competent enough spies, but there wasn’t much in terms of a character arc. Justine seemed to have some trauma from her past as a child prostitute, but other than the first sex scene and the protectiveness she feels for her little sister, it didn’t really play a big role in her life.

Side characters were interesting in that they embodied archetypes that are useful to the plot. Pax, Hawker’s friend and fellow spy, is a great addition and a good source for a potential conflict of loyalties. Severine, Justine’s sister, gives the story a personal element while also providing a sweet familial relationship to counterbalance the darker elements. Antagonists like Leblanc and allies like Doyle were also complex and well-used, and I think Bourne did a good job showing how these espionage networks were made of different people with messy personal and political motivations.

However, I ultimately didn’t think the “main” present-day antagonists were all that interesting. Because we don’t spend a lot of time in the present (compared to the past), we don’t really get to explore their complex motivations for wanting to kill Justine and frame Hawker. I think if these characters had been integral to Justine and Hawker’s story in both 1794 and 1802, their crimes would have been more impactful, but as it stands, these antagonists felt like random background characters who have a shallow grudge.

Romance: Despite being about two rival spies, The Black Hawk did not contain nearly enough angst for my taste. Hawker and Justine are supposed to be on opposite sides of a political conflict, but they didn’t seem to clash much or be put in situations where they had to choose between their love and their loyalties. They were more reluctant allies than anything, with both of them working towards the same goal more often than not - their relationship only seemed to be taboo because Justine was French and Hawker was English.

I also didn’t quite buy that they had many hang-ups in the present-day, as they seemed to reunite after being apart for years and just get over their emotions without any real, honest reconciliation. The main barrier presented - that Justine had once tried to kill Hawker - was ultimately revealed to be an accident, so there really wasn’t anything to grapple with, emotionally.

Overall, the book feel less like a story about Justine and Hawker’s romantic relationship and more like a political/spy thriller. While I wouldn’t normally knock a book for trying to subvert or play with genre tropes and structure, I personally felt like Bourne was more interested in espionage than in character relationships. For me, that made the romance feel like an afterthought, and while I’m ok with books that are light on romance, I feel like character relationships should still be important, regardless of genre. In this book, there wasn’t really an arc to the relationship, and though I liked how well-matched Hawker and Justine were in terms of ability, I didn’t see how being together improved or enriched the emotional lives. It was difficult to see why they loved each other (rather than just having professional admiration or respect for one another), and in my opinion, not enough was done to show that their loyalties were in conflict.

I also was not a huge fan of the first major graphic sex scene, since it was between the two protagonists when they were 16 years old. I know there’s an argument to be made about how teenagers experience sexual desire and there’s a way to handle teen sexuality with care, but ultimately, the sex scene in this book just made me uncomfortable.

TL;DR: While I appreciated that The Black Hawk doesn’t follow typical romance structure and focuses on spies, this book ultimately suffers from a plot with no personal stakes and a barely-there romance.