lightreads

Heart of Stone by C.E. Murphy

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


DNF around 60% through. A largely unobjectionable if boring urban fantasy about the lawyer who encounters the supernatural while out jogging at night. But you know how we all have these specific things that a book has to get right? Like, the author can invent a magical creature out of nowhere, no problem, but she better get the details of how the heroine bakes biscuits exactly correct?

Well, it turns out one of mine is poverty legal services. Who knew! And this book gets that so completely and offensively wrong. I mean, the heroine doesn't have a caseload of 80 open matters, she has one "big" case (which is exactly the sort of case that never lands on the desk of someone like her since private defenders would have been lining up to try it for free for the publicity). And that one case -- yeeeeeah. It's really telling what an author chooses to do when she wants to amp up someone's heroism. And what this author chose to do was erase an ethically complex, grinding, in-the-trenches-of-the-race-war reality with something apparently way more palatable, which is to say ethically unchallenging and full of righteousness about racism without ever engaging with the realities of the heroine's mixed race status. The actual heroism of defending drug dealers and pimps and rapists because everyone, absolutely everyone, deserves someone standing up for them and ensuring the state proves its case beyond a reasonable doubt because that's what motherfucking justice is -- yeah, that's too icky and complicated.




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