Book Reviews: a prologue and typical over-analysis of my process

It used to be that I was quite content with the notion that my tastes in fiction were idiosyncratic enough to make other people’s recommendations of questionable value. Oh, every once in a while someone would suggest a book that hit my sweet spot. (I still recount the time I walked into the Other Change of Hobbit and said to Tom Whitmore, “So I’m trying to remember the name of this new series people have been telling me I might like…” and he immediately and correctly offered, “Naomi Novik, the Temeraire books.”) And sometimes my knee-jerk avoidance of authors that absolutely everyone was raving about meant that it took me a while to discover that, in this case, my taste really did fall in with the mainstream. (I avoided Bujold for years and years because her fandom had almost a cult-like air to it. And I still have some uneasiness about the nature of her books’ appeal, but that’s a different topic.) And since the volume of my fiction reading has decreased in the last couple decades, there are enough books in my to-be-read stack that are a known quantity that I wasn’t really looking for new recommendations.

But an interesting thing has happened in the last year or so. For one thing, as a published author, I now feel something of a responsibility to keep up with the field more, particularly in those corners of the genre I intersect. And for another, becoming active on Twitter specifically for the purpose of engaging more with the larger writing and publishing community has exposed me to a lot more chatter about new books—and much of it from people whose taste and preferences align strongly with my own. This means that more and more I’m approaching books with expectations built on the enthusiastic recommendations of a community that I want very much to belong to.

This is not entirely a good thing.

I have found myself with a nagging sense of guilt at finding certain books merely very enjoyable, when the lead-up hype raised the expectation that they would be OMG mind-blowingly awesome. Do I need to re-calibrate for hyperbole? Am I still simply out-of-sync with popular taste? (And then there are the dark voices that whisper that I’m just jealous because people aren’t raving about my book in the same way and I need to get over myself and maybe my book really isn’t even in the same universe as these books and that’s why nobody’s talking about it because I have no critical taste and that’s why I can’t recognize the complete genius of what I’m reading and ….) And then there are the suggestions I keep hearing that authors should never ever review other people’s books because fans are vicious and vindictive and if you imply their favorite books are anything less than perfect they’ll sic the internet trolls on your amazon review page. Well, screw that. I’m not going to stop reviewing books (and other stuff) and I’m never going to be anything less than completely honest about my response to a book. So it’s time to get caught up on a few fiction reviews for novels I’ve read in the last year. Let the chips fall where they may, and if my taste doesn’t always align with the rest of the world…well, I’m used to that.

(The actual reviews will be in separate posts because I'd rather separate this introduction from any specific book.)

Book Review: Mary Robinette Kowal’s Glamourist Histories - Books 1 & 2

The Glamourist Histories: Shades of Milk and Honey, Glamour in Glass by Mary Robinette Kowal

I read the first two books in Mary Robinette Kowal’s “Glamourist” series on my Thanksgiving trip last year. It was also my first serious experiment with reading new e-books. (I’ve had a bunch of old favorites on my iPad for a couple years now, but those are for “stuck waiting somewhere” reading.) Both books were light, quick reads – I finished the first on the flight out and the second in odd moments later on the trip. (And I’m writing this review largely from memory, so this is what stuck.) The setting trades, to some extent, on current Austen-mania, although not in a direct pastiche sort of way.

The premise is simple: Regency England with a type of illusion-based magic called “glamour” that is used primarily for enhancing domestic environments but that also has untapped potential for more practical use. Kowal’s prose captures Austen’s formal, rather mannered style and she has worked hard to evoke the language of the era. We also see a lot of Austen’s familiar character archetypes: the plain but talented protagonist, the pretty and somewhat badly-behaved younger sister, the kindly but ineffectual father, the air-headed and socially-conscious mother. We are left guessing through most of the first book whether the mysterious brooding man is a scowling villain or the brusque but good-hearted romantic interest. And there is a bevy of potential suitors and possible rivals for our protagonists that have sufficiently complex backgrounds keep the romantic plots guessing. Kowal’s original contribution is the intricate and well-realized magical effects, detailed with just the right level of technical terminology to evoke without over-explaining.

Shades of Milk and Honey concerns itself with entirely domestic conflicts: the relationships of a close rural community, marriage prospects, and the hazards of everyday life. Glamour is a talent--much like singing or painting--employed by young women to advertise their suitability for creating a charming and comfortable home environment for potential spouses. All magic needs limits to be interesting, and the practice of glamour is limited by the physical toll it takes on the user—an interesting conflict, given that it is viewed as primarily the purview of women, but considered especially taxing to their frail bodies. (A harsher side of this conflict emerges in the second book, where the practice of glamour is seen—and demonstrated—to be incompatible with childbearing. What does it mean for a woman to stake her success in marriage on a talent that she must then abandon when she gets pregnant? I was actually rather disappointed by deployment of the stock "magic is incompatible with pregnancy" trope.) In this, it provides an interesting metaphor for all manner of self-destructive practices into which young women are pressured by society, particularly poignant in the example of the neighbor girl who feels the need to continuously “glamourize” her imperfect nose in public, to the detriment of her health.

In the first book we are shown technical details of the workings of glamour, intertwined with the ups and downs of courtship, sibling rivalries, and just enough personal hazard to make the climax exciting. It is no spoiler to note that our protagonist wins her man by virtue of her wit and talents. With that match happily made, the second book explores additional nuances of the workings of glamour, including a technological innovation (the “glamour in glass”) that has the potential to expand its practical uses. The conflict with France brings our glamour-working couple into a much sharper danger than any seen in the first book. And while some of the plots and stratagems seem rather contrived (especially the extent to which our point-of-view protagonist is kept artificially in the dark about essential facts), the means by which our heroes succeed in those plots is satisfying within the rules of the setting.

That ends my review proper, but I feel I must digress for a moment on the question of industrial magic and the economics of glamour. As I note, glamour is presented as largely a matter of entertaining illusion, with only hints of possible more practical uses...except in one minor facet. There are several references to “cold-mongers”: people who can use glamour to create localized temperature changes. This is portrayed as something of a working-class skill and used for commercial purposes. For me, this creates something of an elephant in the room. We’re at the edge of the industrial revolution, with the leveraging of mass semi-skilled labor on the rise. Why is the commercial exploitation of glamour stuck on a cottage-industry level? If one cold-monger can keep the groceries cold, surely a bank of cold-mongers, working in shifts, could maintain warehouse-level refrigeration? And though domestic uses of glamour are portrayed as a leisure skill, akin to needlework or music, it seems implausible that no one is exploiting the same ability on a grunt-level commercial scale. In such a context the physical cost of using the ability suggests some rather horrifying potential consequences of that exploitation.

Now, I understand that these are light-hearted stories focusing on people of relative privilege. And perhaps these questions will be addressed in later books in the series. But when we see the toll that glamour can take on a mildly desperate young woman whose concerns are limited to the marriage market, it’s hard not to wonder what toll it could take on a more seriously desperate young woman whose concerns are feeding and housing her children