On the Edge by Ilona Andrews

On the Edge by Ilona Andrews

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


So this book is all, “I’m cool urban fantasy about a girl living a hardscrabble life where two dimensions meet, working a menial job and single-parenting her baby brothers (the werecat and the necromancer), but I’m also a fairy tale in the good way where a knight in shining armor rides in from the magic dimension and there are three tasks to court her, but I’m totally not one of those books where the girl is awesome and then some asshole comes along and ruins her life and then fixes it with his enormous bank account. Definitely not.”



Right. So there’s this bit early on where our heroine explains to the hero that she doesn’t have anything against women who sell themselves for sex, you see, she’s just not one of them. I eyebrowed a bit at the time and muttered, “yes, but would you want your daughter to marry one?” But hey, it’s June, it’s sunny, it could have been sincere.



And then I learned a lesson. Several lessons. See, hero later explains to the heroine how he’d social engineered his place in his formalized, old-fashioned society so the only women who ever approached him wouldn’t be women looking to marry. They’d be looking for a lover or a sponsor.



And our heroine says, I am not making this up, I swear to God, “the only women you favor with your attentions are either sluts or whores, and you prefer it that way.”



Let’s review what I learned from this:



1. Women who want to have sex – women who opt out of the marriage market and take control of their sexuality -- are sluts. Well. Thanks for clearing that up.



2. Now we know what Rose really thinks of women who sell sex, and it ain't pretty.



3. You can’t trust what this book is telling you. No really.



And the really irritating part is that the world building is good, and Rose’s poverty is the constant, wearing, exhausting kind and not the sexy kind, and her brothers are great, and just argh. Some asshole comes and ruins her life then fixes it with his giant bank account, and it’s supposed to be romantic. What the fuck ever.





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