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Whisper To The Blood by Dana Stabenow


My rating: 1 of 5 stars
I’m wishing we had an exponentially more intricate system of html tags to denote intonation, because then I could calibrate the exact quality I need when I say that I am struggling with feelings of rage.

I like this series, okay? It’s a bunch of mysteries featuring a subsistence-living Alaskan Aleut and her half-wolf, and twenty of her most colorful friends, and her awesome and screwed up community. This series has been clever and geeky, and it can go from dry to slapstick in a breath. It made me tear up, once. I don’t read mysteries, okay, but I read these, because they have their heart in the right place and I just like them.

This one was going along okay – not great, comparatively, but still a good time – and then wam, our heroine gets partner raped, and the author seems to think it’s, I don’t even know! Hot? romantic?

Let me explain. They’re having a fight – a fight all about their mutual trust issues and intimacy problems, actually – and the boyfriend decides they’re going to fuck it out. Cue a few paragraphs just dripping with – let’s call them rape code words. I’ll just quote, actually, so stick with me because we haven’t even gotten to the really enraging part yet.

“Oh hell, we both know what you trust me for,” and he picked her up off her feet and kissed her so hard, she felt her lip split. She squirmed, her feet dangling a good foot off the floor, pushing against his shoulders, bending herself backwards so she could free herself enough to speak.

“No, Jim, wait.”

This only inflamed Jim further. “Wait my ass,” he said, and started for the stairs for the loft.

. . .

Meanwhile, Kate began struggling in earnest. “No, Jim, stop. You don’t understand.”

“I understand plenty,” he said, starting up the stairs. She was strong and slippery, but he had more muscle mass than she did, as well as a longer reach, and he managed to hold on until he got them upstairs. He didn’t so much drop her to the bed as throw her at it. She bounced once and tried to scramble to the floor.

“Oh no you don’t,” he said, and two hundred twenty pounds of outraged male dropped onto her, driving all of the breath out of her body.

“Jim,” she said, her voice a squeak of sound.

“Shut up,” he said, kneeing her legs apart. He was fully aroused, hard against her. “Just shut the hell up.”

She fought him, she really did. But he ripped the white t-shirt over her head and left it to tangle her hands, before he went for the buttons on the fly of her jeans.

“Jim don’t,” she said frantically. “Not like this.”

“Just like this,” he said, ripping open her jeans and shoving them down.*

At which point she starts participating, and “his hand was between her legs, forcing entry,” and off we go. But here’s the best part: when she calls him on this later, he says that hey, she was cooking when they started fighting, and she turned the stove off, so clearly she consented. And also – I am not making this up -- she came.

Excuse me? Rapists of the world take note! It doesn’t matter whether someone says no to you – as long as you make them come eventually, you’re totally off the hook! And rape survivors of the world – some of whom will be women reading this book! Guess what! If you ever came during a sexual encounter, you consented just like that! So sleep better tonight, because you weren’t date-raped after all! Woohoo!

But wait, there’s more! Our heroine thinks about it later and concludes that, hey, it was fine, if she’d really wanted him to stop he would have.

Okay this? This right here is unacceptable on so many levels. First: you do not get to write a passage like the one quoted above and literally say that she really fought him, and then get – I don’t even know – rape take backsies. No! Second: I am skeeved right out of my skin by – ug. No, you know what? I was going to have this big old rant about just how fucked up the sexual dynamic was in that scene, but how the real problem was that it was sold as something I was supposed to enjoy reading, but I just don’t have the intestinal fortitude for this anymore.

She said no. Repeatedly. He ignored her refusals. It doesn’t matter that she participated later. That was not sexy. That was partner rape. I thought so much better of this series, but I was wrong. I am way angrier than I would be if I’d read this in some random romance novel, because I was invested here. I trusted these books. She said no. The fact that she came doesn’t make it any more okay than the fact that I finished this book makes me any less angry.

*Transcribed from audio, so forgive any small errors.

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Books five through eight in the delightful Kate Shugak Alaskan mystery series. Play With Fire takes Kate mushroom picking and lands her in the path of a suspicious death and religious fundamentalists. Blood Will Tell takes on native politics again at the Alaskan Federation convention. Breakup is an utterly indescribable romp which starts with a jet engine falling from the sky and carries on for at least three grizzly bears and a half dozen gun fights. Killing Grounds is set around the salmon fishing fleet and the death of one of the most hated fishermen.

I wrote about the first four books in this series here, and all I’m really having the urge to say now is that the flaws noted then have corrected themselves, and the virtues continue to charm. Breakup, in particular, is a perfect capsule example of Stabenow’s ability to mix wry but sparkling humor with the most serious subjects, and do it successfully. I giggled my way through the third and fourth shoot-outs, as I was supposed to, and then nodded soberly along not five pages later as the book turns around and undercuts the previous tone with a vicious and accurate assessment of the crippling substance abuse problems in the native community that caused the violence in the first place. Nicely handled, all around.

These are small, charming, rugged books, vividly and gracefully written. They do occasionally suffer from a tiny bit of top-heavy philosophy (Play With Fire and its religious debates) and sometimes a few too many of the characters are just a bit too easy with extensive knowledge of law or literature. But these are also thoughtful books, and I embrace the content while occasionally wincing a bit at its presentation.

Still unique, still very good, still well worth it.