*~~~~ (1/5)

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Warning: Contains the f-word, repeatedly.

I give up, Greg.

Wicked gave us a gritty re-imagining of a fantasy world that most of us know best from the saccharine weirdness that was the 1939 film, with intricate characterization, gay people, complex morality and sex! And a weird-ass disability depiction. Okay. I got past that, though it’s a huge peeve and marred my enjoyment of the novel, along with its eventual cop-out concept of evil.

Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister was a gritty re-imagining of an escapist heteronormative fairytale, with feminist themes, intricate characterization, and complex morality! And then a goddamn offensive depiction of disability

Mirror, Mirror equates humans with dwarfism with mythical creatures who are half object and half person and I just fucking give up, Maguire.

You may have been trying to pull the same trick of making a female villain character likeable but a) she’s still shown to be selfish and evil, b) contrasting her with the pretty pale purity of the Snow White character is not challenging the virgin/whole dichotomy but reinforcing it, and c) what the fuck is up with this fucking disability thing?

Not only does your mythical half-man half-rock creature recognize himself in a picture of a human with dwarfism – meaning shortness of stature is a defining feature of the creature’s species rather than, I don’t know, being mostly mineral-based – a dynamic, powerful old woman is rendered helpless and submissive when she becomes disabled.

Also, Greg, I’m afraid this just wasn’t a very good book. I realize you had something poetic you wanted to achieve here, the idea of formation of identity, lots of pretty mental images of blossoming and blood and sex and violence and primordial psyche, but it doesn’t work. Disbelief can be suspended quite far if you get the details right, but that wasn’t the case here. A child survives under ground without food or drink because, well, it’s just a special spot where that sort of thing can happen. She can make dinner out of thin air, too, because of the spot she’s in. She also spews out years’ worth of menstrual blood because, well, she just does, okay. By the way, there really is a God.

Add to that the necessary historical inaccuracies needed to make Lucrezia Borgia your decadent murderess stepmother and no amount of silly preachers or descriptions of rowdy delightful old peasant women (who end up disabled) or “slow” incestuous goose boys… No, wait, that wasn’t going to help your case anyway.

I am angry because you used to get so much of it right, Greg. You depict non-normative people with compassion, you show the humanity of villainous acts, and the villainy of hypocrisy and racial segregation. You create wonderful characters. You show a fabric of humanity that is more varied than just white, pretty people against ugly, usually coloured people. You can’t follow that up with pretentious ableist bullcrap like this and not expect to make your readers angry.

Stop writing for a while, Greg, and read instead. I suggest starting with FWD.

*~~~~ (1/5)

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Young Victoria ascends the throne of England, and her first lesson as queen is this: that demons are real, and they threaten the nation in a very immediate sense. Soon, the young queen herself picks up the sword, the dagger and the spinning saw axe, and does bloody battle with the fiends from hell.

While an original novel, in a manner of speaking, Queen Victoria: Demon Hunter very much reads like another offering in the recent craze for mixing so-called dry subjects with horror genre elements – a craze that tends to produce novels that are more thrilling in concept than execution. Not being constrained by another’s storyline does make the monsters in this offering more of a part of the plot, but the writing is amateurish, with scenes jumping to flashbacks and back without so much as a tense change and the language only really taking off when there is gore to be described – which, fair enough, is done with stomach-turning gusto.

Characterisation is flat when it comes to Victoria and Albert, whose fairytale romance was so poorly written it may as well have come from a pre-opening credits scene in an action movie, setting up the tragedy that would then motivate the hero – as it does in this case. This flaw does not exist across the board, though. Standing out from the rest of the cast were the entertaining duo of the amoral Lord Quimby and his zombie manservant Perkins; however, these two seem almost superfluous to the main plot. Victoria herself remains very much the bland protagonist, which is something no amount of weaponry can cure, and is also upstaged by her protector and instructor, Maggie Brown (mother of John, for you history geeks). I get the feeling this book would have been much better had it been about Maggie and the Quimby/Perkins duo, who the author really seemed to enjoy writing, too.

Given the many fun ideas in the novel, such as a zombie massacre in the Parliament, creepy street urchins, rat massacres and, well, Queen Victoria as a demon hunter, I regret having to give it only one star, but I must be honest. It was just too clumsy for more – and that’s still without going into inevitable historical inaccuracies and the demonisation of the mentally I’ll, which, while a Victorian idea and a traditional in part of the horror genre, is still a travesty.

I did find it readable, but I have a low threshold for readability, and I suppose, if given to a skilled director, it could make a fun film.

*~~~~ (1/5)

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Note: Surprise Monday Romance Review Extravaganza Review #2.
These are all short reviews previously posted on GoodReads.com, re-written and expanded a little for our first random Review Extravaganza.

The first thing you should know about this historical romance novel is that the hero is utterly repulsive. Oh no, wait. The first thing you should know is to not pick this book up if you have rape/abuse triggers. The second is… you know what, it kind of follows from the first.

Or does it? I gather from Smart Bitches, Trashy Books that many romance readers (not the illustrious, funny and very recommended Bitches themselves) like their heroes committing the occasional sexual assault.

I KNOW. WHAT.

Don’t get me wrong, this fellow merely blackmails the heroine first into wearing a shaming see-through negligee, and later into sex, though he takes it back after nothing more than a lot of touching and inserting his finger into her vagina forcefully which, oh, come to think of it, IS RAPE.

Apparently “romances” used to be a lot worse than this. I came to the genre a perfect innocent and never knew. I thought people were ashamed of these novels because they were mushy, light and not very well written, not because they’re actually chock-full of heteronormative, rape culture sustaining bullshit like this.

Anyway. If this is the sort of thing you enjoy, let me tell you more. The setting is an unspecified era in England when women wore corsets and British troops were stomping about India. The plot involves heroine whatsherface receiving into her home a man who looks a great deal like an emaciated version of her dead, abusive husband, claiming to be said husband come back from the dead. Turns out he’s not, but she likes him better because he rapes her more gently. She rescues some grubby-faced orphan angels and he reveals he has always loved her, always, and didn’t actually concoct this hoax for her money at all. She believes him. The way we know they are both good people is that their taste in interior décor is better than the next people in line to inherit the manor.

The novel was not badly written, as such, not like Midshipwizard Halcyon Blythe or The Snow-Kissed Bride, which it still amazes me ever saw publication. If you like your heroines dull and your heroes repulsive, you might enjoy Stranger In My Arms. There was also a pretty sexy almost-cunnilingus scene that was almost not rapey, and many descriptions of hard rippling muscles.

*~~~~ (1/5)

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Warning: This review contains profanity.

Marketed as a gothic fairytale and authored by a German English literature professor, I felt this novel, despite the tacky cover and the cheesy setting, had the potential to surprise and entertain. I was wrong. The only surprise is how truly dreadful it was.

The plot involves 27-year old English “spinster” inheriting a castle in the Black Forest, which offers the only escape from her detested sister-in-law’s household. In grand tradition, there’s a catch: she must marry the son of the castle’s previous owner, Graf von Wolfenbach – a young man who has a reputation for monstrous behaviour and a violent temper.

The reason I picked this particular novel as part of my project of giving the romance genre a fair try was that it was recommended to me as having a particularly plucky heroine. Fair enough, it does. Cissy is a tad too vocal about taking responsibility for her own fate, mentioning on at least four occasions that she’s not Little Red Riding Hood/an enchanted sheep/a fairy princess etc. and will not submit to an unhappy ending. It gets old. Repetition is not the only one of the novel’s problems, but it’s possibly the most annoying one. We also get told often that Fenris (yes, that is the hero’s name) acts like a dreadful demon wolf, that Cissy stamps her foot, crosses her arms and raises her eyebrows, and that Fenris’ brother Loki Leopold looks like a golden god (no prizes for guessing who the villain is), not to mention that damn fairy princess/king of dwarfs story.

Schwab drowns the story in comparisons to myths and fairy-tales, having apparently dug up every variation of the Beauty and the Beast story to beat her point in with. Rather than adding a touch of atmosphere, it leaves the characters wallowing in a sea of metaphor which reaches its peak when the hero’s physical attributes are admiringly ticked off one by one by the heroine, turning him into some kind of a monstrous bird-fruit-fabric-bear creature with coins for nipples. I kid you not.

And yet, atmosphere is what Schwab does best. You do get the sense of rain, snow and forest, of old castles and isolated villages that really is quite attractive until one of the characters walks in the picture.

Cissy, oh Cissy. You may not be a fairy princess sheep, but your insults are clearly picked at random from a Regency vocabulary list online and your speech patterns roam all over period(s) and American teen. And Fenris, get the fuck over yourself. You lost a leg in the war and your family lost some privileges so you roam the ramparts moaning about how lonely you are when all the time you have your old war-buddy to put you to bed every night and a household of loyal servants willing to tend to your every need. You talk about how disgusting you must be to all tender hearts, and yet apparently you work out several hours a day to maintain Standard Romantic Hero musculature.

If I don’t stop now I might never. I’ll condense the rest of my complaints: it was unwittingly ableist (isn’t Cissy great for not minding her studmuffin is missing a leg?), predictable as fuck, servants are apparently not people but exist to buff up the rich main characters, and by the by, where are the werewolves the set-up seems to promise? The only paranormal part of this was a clearly pasted-on living gargoyle sub-plot told in interludes. I call that false fucking marketing.

There. Enough. Avoid.