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JD Robb/Nora Roberts
Apr. 17th, 2022 09:55 amAbandoned in Death
3/5. A solid procedural entry with a lot of complicated backstory about child abandonment and amnesia and reinventing a self from scratch that was absorbing to read, but that tangles up badly in the end. This book is confused and conflicted about fault, and who can be blamed for the inception of violence. It's fine to be conflicted about that, but Roberts doesn't want to be, she wants her usual black-and-white view of fault. So she writes this ambiguous, tricky story of a parent abandoning a child through some fault and some horrible circumstance, and draws the obvious parallels to Eve and Roarke, both abandoned by their parents in different and terrible ways. And she could have let that breathe, and sit with everything else the series has done on the theme of hurt children constructing themselves into whole adults capable of love and happiness. But nope. She had to simplify it, had to say oh, well, this five-year-old child subjected to a horrible trauma, he was already a baby sociopath before that (what?), so – she doesn't actually have an end to that explanation, it's just really important that she cut through the knot to absolve and assign blame.
It all made me think, wincingly, about how mad Eve gets whenever she catches a killer who is actually mentally ill. Like it makes her furious whenever anyone suggests that maybe someone should be in a psych facility instead of one of these famed off-planet prisons. And Eve can always tell at a glance, you see, being an expert or something. A symptom of the same pathology – the overpowering need to center the fault for violence entirely within the person committing it, as if violence just springs out of no context.
Content notes: Child abandonment, captivity, murder.
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3/5. Classic Nora about the granddaughter of a famous Hollywood star returning to the country house her grandmother supposedly committed suicide in to restore it from the inside out, except someone doesn't want her digging into the house's secrets. Lots of home design and decorating talk, with that usual thing where the making of the home is a metaphor for the making of the self. Published exactly when you think it is for a book that really wants to sell you on how great it is to be a house flipper. Major bonus points for the heroine explicitly being super hot because she's good with power tools and the hero – who decidedly is not – being way into it. Minus points for the hero being a classic Nora Roberts boundary violator (he watches her through binoculars for two hours! For "work"! Christ.)
Content notes: Violence, bad parenting.
3/5. A solid procedural entry with a lot of complicated backstory about child abandonment and amnesia and reinventing a self from scratch that was absorbing to read, but that tangles up badly in the end. This book is confused and conflicted about fault, and who can be blamed for the inception of violence. It's fine to be conflicted about that, but Roberts doesn't want to be, she wants her usual black-and-white view of fault. So she writes this ambiguous, tricky story of a parent abandoning a child through some fault and some horrible circumstance, and draws the obvious parallels to Eve and Roarke, both abandoned by their parents in different and terrible ways. And she could have let that breathe, and sit with everything else the series has done on the theme of hurt children constructing themselves into whole adults capable of love and happiness. But nope. She had to simplify it, had to say oh, well, this five-year-old child subjected to a horrible trauma, he was already a baby sociopath before that (what?), so – she doesn't actually have an end to that explanation, it's just really important that she cut through the knot to absolve and assign blame.
It all made me think, wincingly, about how mad Eve gets whenever she catches a killer who is actually mentally ill. Like it makes her furious whenever anyone suggests that maybe someone should be in a psych facility instead of one of these famed off-planet prisons. And Eve can always tell at a glance, you see, being an expert or something. A symptom of the same pathology – the overpowering need to center the fault for violence entirely within the person committing it, as if violence just springs out of no context.
Content notes: Child abandonment, captivity, murder.
Tribute
3/5. Classic Nora about the granddaughter of a famous Hollywood star returning to the country house her grandmother supposedly committed suicide in to restore it from the inside out, except someone doesn't want her digging into the house's secrets. Lots of home design and decorating talk, with that usual thing where the making of the home is a metaphor for the making of the self. Published exactly when you think it is for a book that really wants to sell you on how great it is to be a house flipper. Major bonus points for the heroine explicitly being super hot because she's good with power tools and the hero – who decidedly is not – being way into it. Minus points for the hero being a classic Nora Roberts boundary violator (he watches her through binoculars for two hours! For "work"! Christ.)
Content notes: Violence, bad parenting.