lightreads

In 2058, New York cop Eve Dallas uses advanced technology and good-old sleuthing to catch killers, deals with her history of abuse, and falls in love with businessman Roarke (yep, that’s his entire legal name, yeesh). I picked these up for the romance, and so I will talk about that instead of what I want to do, which is alternately praise and bitch out the science and future worldbuilding. There are like twenty-five books in this series, I have time.

I came in prepared to really dig these, and ended up with a tepid non-dislike. I’m tolerant of Eve and Roarke’s romance, but it has yet to hit anywhere near the watermark of really caring. I could say it’s partly the thing where Roarke is a gazillionaire, because I’ve read like two chicklittish novels in my entire life, and even I know that’s painfully wrote. That’s just a symptom, though.

Really, it has to do with intention. These are written in close third on Eve, except for the random one or two paragraph interjections where we are informed how Roarke or other characters are feeling. Feeling about Eve, mind, and it’s unerringly complimentary. Which is sloppy and unnecessary, but also just weird. Roarke falls madly, irrevocably in love with Eve within fifty pages of meeting her, and we know it. All the thrashing, then, is simply the reader watching Eve figure it out, and then deal with her admittedly horrific history and personal issues. Which, whatever, but the overall message seems to be that if you are virtuous, if you are a worthy, interesting woman, a fantastically rich and alluring man will fall in love with you with no prompting. Which, uh, no, not so much. We are supposed to admire Eve, and inevitably envy her, and I just don’t see how that’s supposed to be compelling. Do millions of women really enjoy reading these sorts of romantic fantasies where love falls from the sky and the heroin really has no choice but to deal with it (and accompanying riches) because when it’s real love it just can’t be screwed up or ignored? Apparently, but I’m just not wired that way – I keep muttering to myself about how people almost never marry out of their social class, and how is ‘love comes to the lucky and the righteous’ supposed to be comforting, anyway?

Why yes, in fact, I have a much easier time suspending my disbelief for faeries and aliens than soul-searing love from a handsome billionaire. What’s it to you?

Fiction. Trouble-magnet bounty hunter Stephanie Plum chases fugitives, blows up cars, attracts homicidal maniacs, and regularly fucks up her love life. Rereads. I picked up the last one as a bit of a pallet cleanser, and ended up barreling through the entire series backwards. These are ungodly funny books with sparkling dialogue and characters drawn with comic boldness. For all that, these books manage to take themselves seriously to just the right degree, slipping in moments of fear and tenderness and familial outrage. The romances are funny and sometimes sizzling, the supporting cast strong, and everything always comes out okay in the end. Someone, I don't remember who, once complained to me about the female protagonist being such a professional screw-up (she sorta forgets to load her gun all the time) and so I went looking for feminist and other analyses. Unfortunately, I found them. It's a crap argument -- she fails to live up to male standards of kickassedness, so she's a bad female protagonist because those are the standards that really matter, and good female protagonists do it just like the boys do. And men can be screw-ups, but wymyn can't because it's just really bad wymyn PR, yo. Never mind that said protagonist has an uncanny instinct for tracing people and the tenacity of a mad dog. *shakes head*. It's good light reading that'll lift your spirits, and that's about as analytical as I want to get.