lightreads (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lightreads) wrote2008-12-20 05:52 pm
lightreads) wrote2008-12-20 05:52 pm
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Magic Burns by Ilona Andrews
Sequel to Magic Bites. Second verse same as etc. – lightweight urban fantasy told by first-person female narrator in post-apocalypse Atlanta.
Best thing about this series is still the worldbuilding. It's interesting and maybe it's not mind-blowingly unique, but I've realized that's actually pretty much all of what I'm interested in. Because otherwise these books are . . . weird. They do a neat two-step around a lot of the genre's clichés (vampires! Still disgusting!) and then barrel face-first into others (werelion beastlord who loves her, sigh). And the whole thing makes me feel vaguely whipsawed and headachey.
I was explaining to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bayleaf how I have this weird relationship with this subgenre. I find it simultaneously compulsively readable and deeply, deeply problematic. As a feminist, often, though also sometimes as, I don't know, a human being. This series so far is doing okay in negotiating those reactions, but like every single other venture, I walk away annoyed that it doesn't do more. Surely surely the problematic elements aren't inherent to the subgenre? I mean, the fundamental theory seems sound – write women's fiction that doesn't apologize for also having fistfights, because hey we can acknowledge that women want to have adventures as well as vampire werelion boyfriends. And yet . . .
Anyway. I digress. This series delivers exactly what you expect out of the subgenre, and the only place it does more is the setting. No, I don't know if that's meant to be a rec or not -- I think that depends entirely on your receptivity to that sort of thing. Mine is waning at the moment, so there you go.
Best thing about this series is still the worldbuilding. It's interesting and maybe it's not mind-blowingly unique, but I've realized that's actually pretty much all of what I'm interested in. Because otherwise these books are . . . weird. They do a neat two-step around a lot of the genre's clichés (vampires! Still disgusting!) and then barrel face-first into others (werelion beastlord who loves her, sigh). And the whole thing makes me feel vaguely whipsawed and headachey.
I was explaining to
bayleaf how I have this weird relationship with this subgenre. I find it simultaneously compulsively readable and deeply, deeply problematic. As a feminist, often, though also sometimes as, I don't know, a human being. This series so far is doing okay in negotiating those reactions, but like every single other venture, I walk away annoyed that it doesn't do more. Surely surely the problematic elements aren't inherent to the subgenre? I mean, the fundamental theory seems sound – write women's fiction that doesn't apologize for also having fistfights, because hey we can acknowledge that women want to have adventures as well as Anyway. I digress. This series delivers exactly what you expect out of the subgenre, and the only place it does more is the setting. No, I don't know if that's meant to be a rec or not -- I think that depends entirely on your receptivity to that sort of thing. Mine is waning at the moment, so there you go.
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I'm having the same trouble with Bujold's new Sharing Knife series. I know LMB can blow my socks off; but she isn't doing it there, and it grates. She said some very interesting things about genre in her Denvention Guest of Honor speech that made it a little clearer what she was aiming at, but I don't think she's succeeding. Will have to read the upcoming fourth book before deciding.
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