Review: Chocolate Cake for Breakfast by Danielle Hawkins

5 stars
*SPOILER ALERT*

My original review for this book got lost in the digital ether somewhere between Auckland and Sydney, so excuse me if this one suffers from rewrite-itis. As we all know, once a piece of writing is lost it becomes the most inspired, crucial thing since the Magna Carta, never able to matched no matter how you toil over it. Not that I'm being dramatic or anything.

Anyway, Chocolate Cake for Breakfast by Danielle Hawkins features quirky rural vet Helen McNeil. One night, escaping someone at a party, she runs into a guy called Mark and they make small talk. Only later does she realise that Mark is actually Mark Tipene, All Black and shirtless poster on the work tearoom wall. He could have any woman in New Zealand (as everyone keeps reminding Helen), but for some reason he stops by Helen's clinic and asks her out. Nor is he deterred by her on-call roster (formidable during calving season) and discussions of bovine uterine prolapse. But he's based in Auckland, and she's in the Waikato, and then something happens that throws their burgeoning relationship right off it's planned course. 

I felt like Chocolate Cake for Breakfast sat midway on the spectrum that ranges from chick-lit to contemporary romance. It was written completely from the heroine's point of view, the love scenes were closed-door, and the romantic arc saw the hero and heroine in a stable relationship for much of the book; all characteristics that I would associate more with chick-lit or 'sweet' contemporaries. 

However, in other ways, it did feel very much like a contemporary, but I'm not going to list those ways because I  promptly forgot most of them after writing them in the original review. The distinction between chick-lit and contemporary is extremely arbitrary, but I feel the to situate Chocolate Cake for Breakfast with reference to them because it felt...different than the majority of both. Somehow, the sense of fulfilment I got from reading it reminded me of those first dozen romance novels I devoured, which made me feel so gooey inside and and which still hold a special place in my heart, even if, rationally, I know that there might be nothing incredibly exceptional about them. 

I read Chocolate Cake for Breakfast in a day, driven by my love for the quirky Helen and her poignant but still comic struggle with coming to terms with an unexpected pregnancy. Her internal disquiet and insecurities surrounding her relationship with Mark and their impending parenthood were so raw and touching, and I think the lack of sugar-coating was one of the things that made the book feel so different and special. 

Helen can't understand what Mark sees in her, and feels sure that the pregnancy means that he'll stick with her just out of obligation. They develop massive communication issues that stem from the fact that they are very different people, who, because they have only been in a relationship a short time, don't understand each others' needs that well. Because the book is written from Helen's perspective, I've focused a lot more on her, but Mark was a great hero, a classic old-school Kiwi bloke with just enough new-age sensitivity thrown in. 

The fact that he's an All Black opens the field for comparisons with other rugby romances, particularly Rosalind James' well known Escape to New Zealand series. As much as I did like those, Chocoloate Cake for Breakfast feels far more organic, with New Zealand and the All Blacks undergoing far less fetishisation. This is much more made for an internal Kiwi audience, rather than people for whom New Zealand and rugby are exciting and exotic. 

Instead of having one of New Zealand's major draw-cards as a setting, here we have a fictional rural Waikato town, and the representation was both incredibly comic and spot-on. There's grumpy dairy farmers, the local pub, trips to 'big smoke' Hamilton and cousins who spot each others' cars in the local supermarket car park. 

I'm sure the way this book portrayed the familiar rhythms of life in the Waikato has impacted my rating, because it's impossible for me to separate my experience of Chocolate Cake for Breakfast with my near-constant sense of...not homesickness, exactly, but of nostalgia, longing and belonging. As a result, I've debated with myself a lot over whether I'm being rational giving this book 5 stars, especially since I 5-starred The Hating Game so recently. But, at the end of the day, when something is a 5 star book for someone, it's a 5 star book.

Opinion: An Open Letter to a Bookish Charity

Dear [REDACTED],

I discovered you in my quest to find new homes for some of my books, and thought highly of your mission to distribute book to people on the streets across Australia. At first, it seemed we would be a perfect fit. You only wanted books in good condition; I already had a 'to go back to the Salvation Army store' pile and a 'good quality' pile, so I'd give the quality stuff to you. Except that, on further research, I realised you wouldn't want them, because, while my pile has historical fiction, non-fiction and speculative fiction, it also contains many romance and chick-lit novels. GASP!

I know that this is not going to be the beginning of a beautiful friendship, because "out of respect for your customers", you do not accept romance and chick-lit, or other inappropriate and pernicious influences such as religious materials and guides to getting rich quick and/or losing 10 kilos in 10 days.

Perhaps you fear that, if you did accept romance novels, you'd be swamped with tattered Mills & Boons and old school romances with dubious covers and even more dubious expressions of consent. Except that you have already stated that books must be in "near new condition", so anyone who did so would be showing a blatant disregard for your guidelines and the work you do.

Therefore, I can only assume you have made a moral judgement on the content of romance novels, in general but in specific as to their suitability for people who are homeless. It can't be that, despite greater visibility of men sleeping rough, you are unaware of the large numbers of women who are homeless. There were 45,813 women who were homeless on census night in 2011, which accounted for 44% of the total number of people experiencing homelessness. I cannot believe that, with the removal of government funding from domestic violence and homelessness services over the intervening years, that things are any better now.

Speaking of domestic violence, 55% of women state this is the primary reason they have presented to homelessness services, and I suspect this is where your reasoning for banning romance lies, given that you have also disallowed true crime books, and books that deal with drugs, depression and suicide.

And, of course, there are undoubtedly women who, after experiencing intimate partner violence, do not want to read books that centre relationships, some instances and sub-genres of which may normalise controlling or other problematic behaviours. But I also know many readers in the online community who have experienced domestic and/or sexual violence, and who read romance and chick-lit for exactly this reason. As romance author and scholar Maya Rodale said:

Unlike any other literature, romance novels champion women who defy expectations, they validate their interests and experiences, they declare women deserve love, respect and pleasure, and they reward them for refusing to settle for second best. 

They are escapist and provide a guarantee that everything is going to be okay, which can provide comfort in a world that offers no such assurances, especially to women.

Thus far, I've spoken exclusively about women, but statistics from America show that only between 82-84% of romance novels are bought by women, so perhaps your male clients would also appreciate the choice of a few romance novels now and again.

I can only assume that you think that romance is trashy, anti-feminist, not what your clients want, and potentially detrimental to their wellbeing. I don't even know what to say about the exclusion of chick-lit, because I'm finding it hard to see any objection there but undisguised literary snobbery. It's true that there may be sub-genres, tropes and themes that might not be the most suitable, but this is also true of literary and other genre fiction, all of which you accept without caveats.

If you get in contact, I would be happy to help sort through/read any romance novel donations and pull out ones that contain anything that might be triggering, and I'm sure there would be other people willing to do the same in other cities, including some of your current workers and patrons. Maybe that's not the best answer - I don't know - but surely it's better than completely removing choice and agency from your clients, as you are currently. After all, the entire purpose of your organisation is to counter the dehumanisation that can occur when people sleep rough, and yet you are treating your clients in a paternalistic and infantilizing manner. Unless you have asked your customers if they would like to read romance and chick-lit, and the vast majority said no, in which case I apologise. But somehow I suspect you haven't.

I still greatly admire the work of your organisation, and, although I can't make a donation without spending a sizable amount of time re-sorting my books, I'll send my serious literature friends your way.

Sincerely,
Dani

P.S. You'll never see this, of course, and I'll never be brave enough to send it to you, so...I guess we'll never know what could have been. Keep up the otherwise good work.

Review: The Hating Game by Sally Thorne

5 stars

Release Date: 9 August 2016

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher. My opinion is my own. 

My romance catnip is where the hero is more aware of his feelings than the heroine and/or more invested in their relationship, so I nearly had to be hospitalised from catnip overdose while reading The Hating Game by Sally Thorne. I mentally placed it on my favourites shelf when I was only halfway through, and then, somehow, the second half got even better. Just to give you an indication of my insane love for this book, I'm a paragraph into this review, and I already feel all giddy reliving my reading experience. 

The Hating Game is about Lucy Hutton and Josh Templeman, who are the assistants to the to two co-CEOs of Bexley & Gamin publishing house. Bexley & Gamin was formed out of a merger of two separate mergers: Lucy and her co-CEO are from Gamin; Josh and his are from Bexley. They have different corporate cultures, and Lucy has hated Josh from the moment he walked into their shared office, when she smiled at him and he didn't smile back. Now, they spend their time playing games of brinkmanship and one-upmanship: The Staring Game, the HR Game, the How You Doing Game. Then, a new position is announced - Chief Operating Officer - and suddenly Josh and Lucy's games have real stakes, just as Lucy was starting to realise that Josh doesn't hate her the way she thought and maybe she doesn't hate him quite as much as she thought either.

That little blurb I've written above doesn't really do it justice, and it also implies that there's more of an element of sexist "he's mean to you because he likes you" than is really present. 

I've had big problems lately with the not-quite-redeemed hero, but Thorne has no trouble redeeming Josh. Once Josh realises that Lucy interprets his behaviour as enmity and standoffishness - and that this is affecting her self-perception of herself as a likable person - we begin to see a whole other side of him as tries to salvage their relationship and build something new and good. 

Lucy's relationship with Josh - where she gives as good as she gets - is markedly different to her relationship with others, where she values her reputation as a nice girl too much to rock the boat. I loved seeing her confidence grow as a result of Josh's support. In turn, Lucy's support was essential for Josh to face his family at his brother's wedding, and these make some of the book's best scenes. 

The whole thing is just insanely humorous and off-beat, and somehow manages to simultaneously have off-the-charts levels of sexual tension and sweetness. 

Thorne's writing is unique (maybe other people will think it's OTT, I don't know) but I thought it was perfect, both as writing and as the expression of a zany, Smurf-collecting, five-foot tall heroine. In fact, it's lucky I had a physical ARC, becuase I think if I'd had an e-copy I would have broken my Kindle highlighting all the beautiful turns of phrase. As it is, every second page ended up being dog-eared either because I loved the writing, or it was just too heartwarmingly cute, and I wanted to be able to find it again easily. Only, as it turns out, when you dog-ear everything, you can find nothing, so the joke's on me.  

I guess that's it, because I don't know what else to say. I feel like I used up all my praise on books less great than this one in the past and now I have no words that are strong enough to convey my feelings. Fangirl Dani out. 

EDIT 8/4/17: Apologies, Fangirl Dani didn't notice the problematic aspects in this book. Please see the Smart Bitches, Trashy Books review, and Silvana's review on Goodreads for details

Review: Girl on a Plane by Cassandra O'Leary

2 stars
*SPOILER ALERT*

For me, Cassandra O'Leary's debut novel Girl on a Plane didn't live up to the anticipation and hype that surrounded it. The hero was frustrating, which has been a bit of a theme for me lately. I know I don't deal well with misogynistic, patronising or insert-dickish-tendency-here heroes (there's enough of that in real life) but am I asking too much to be able to track a hero's journey from jerk to not-a-jerk, or from emotionally stunted to not-emotionally-stunted?

The hero here, Gabriel, is the Australian CEO of a travel website, and en route to London to set up the European arm of his company, he meets Sinead, an Irish flight attendant. Due to a typhoon, the two of them end up stranded in Singapore, where the hotel has accidently double-booked them in the same suite. Sinead - who is on the fence about the way Gabriel has been behaving - isn't about to give up easily, and a power struggle ensues, until they fall into bed together. When the bad weather clears, they have to decide whether they simply go their separate ways, or whether their secluded few days is the start of something more.

For the first third or so of the book, Gabriel is shown to have serious man-baby tendencies and the emotional coping skills of a baby howler monkey. I might have been more accepting of the excuses given (he was tired, he hadn't meant to do whatever) if he hadn't been so calculating in the way he treated women, and if it hadn't been the female characters, including the heroine, who bore the brunt of his bad behaviour. I mean, he randomly accosts Sinead when she's off-shift in a neutral environment (the airport lounge) to take out his anger at her employer over an unavoidable situation.

While these overt instances of white male privilege fall away somewhat, we're still left with a less than admirable hero. I particularly disliked the male banter between Gabriel and his best friend. In one instance, Gabriel admits to having met someone, and this exchange follows:

Ryan leaned forward in his seat. "Now I'm intrigued. Give me the low-down." 

"Flight attendant, Irish accent, long blonde hair, fantastic breasts. She's hot, but she's more. Funny and sweet. She's got me agreeing to all sorts of crap to keep seeing her....She's making all these rules. No touching for a month." 

"Oh man, you'll be out of your mind. You agreed? She must be special." 

"Special." Funny, Sinead had used the same word. It was growing on him. "Yeah, you could say that. Lucky we already got down and dirty in Singapore so I know it's worth waiting for. It'll be hell in the meantime though."

There's a few things going on here, and elsewhere. First and most obvious is the objectification, followed by the male entitlement to a female's body. This might be a realistic portrayal of how men talk and think amongst themselves, but it left a bad taste in my mouth, especially since Sinead has left an abusive relationship and spends the whole book dealing with the fallout of this. Gabriel doesn't know this at this point (I don't think, I can't remember with 100% accuracy), but the reader does, and it I found it hard to back a relationship where the hero seemed to have some of the same entitled behaviours as the abusive ex.

However, Gabriel's backstory about his mother's early onset Alzheimer's was going some way towards redeeming him, at least until that all fell apart as well. His concern about succumbing to the same illness and not wanting Sinead - or anyone - to have to care for him was poignant and the major barrier to them establishing a long-term relationship. And yet, we don't see it being worked through. Gabriel breaks up with Sinead over this fear, then all of a sudden, he's back on the scene, saying he's been to a doctor and he's going to be fine. Cue HEA.

On the other hand, I did genuinely enjoy Sinead's observations on life in customer service. She describes her work-mode self as a 'flight attendant zombie', and is over the fact that she is clever, fluent in 3 languages and simply worth something as a person, and yet has to put up with being patronised, objectified and generally treated badly. She also holds some ill-will towards a male colleague, who does the same job as her, yet is sullen because he thinks he's above certain parts of it, and is treated differently. I related to her sense of disenchantment, and enjoyed the snark, wit and bone-tiredness that infused her observations. It went some small way to making up for my frustration at Gabriel and the plot. In other ways, however, Sinead's observations made my annoyance worse: the author doesn't have any illusions about being a woman in the service industries, and yet her hero is still exhibits those characteristics her heroine hates.

Review: Fly In Fly Out by Georgina Penney

4 stars

Georgina Penney's Fly In Fly Out (previously titled Unforgettable You) was a solid romance, made extraordinary by its nuanced portrayal of Australia and her dichotomies: rural and urban, old and new, good and bad. It's set in Perth and the Margaret River region, as well as on an oil rig off the coast of Mauritania, where the heroine works as an engineer.

Yes, you read that right: the heroine, Jo, is an engineer. She's a FIFO; someone who flies in and out of their job in mining, petroleum extraction or another insanely profitable natural resources industry. But Jo's migratory lifestyle means that her sister and her best friend, Scott, are left to look after her cat. When Scott's cousin Stephen needs a place to live, Jo's empty apartment seems like a good idea.

Stephen and Jo knew each other as children, and Stephen still feels bad about something that happened when they were teenagers, something that caused Jo to leave their hometown in the Margaret River and move to Perth. He's keen to make amends, and he feels like looking after her apartment is the way to go about it. After a rough start, they settle into a tenant-landlord relationship, which grows into something more. But, even then, Stephen's attempts to delve into their shared past are rebuffed.

Whereas normally we have the closed-off hero, and the coaxing heroine, here it is the other way around. Jo is emotionally closed off, having learnt the hard way to keep her problems to herself. Stephen, on the other hand, is so scarred by this defining incident of their youth that he is hesitant when it comes to women, careful not to push too hard. This made him a really interesting hero, just as Jo's down-to-earth nature made for great heroine material. All of the characters, right down to Jo's cat, Boomba, are well-rendered.

Without wanting to give to much away, the characters came together in a particularly nuanced portrayal of Australia's problem with alcohol abuse and domestic violence. Old attitudes of "don't talk about it" are contrasted with new, more open understandings. In a similar way, the old, rural Australia acts as a foil for the new Australia, where disposable incomes have risen on the back of the mining boom.

In Fly In Fly Out, Penney brought to life one aspect of new Australia I've never known much about: the mysterious world of oil rigs. Until now, my only point of reference has been that line from Cold Chisel's Khe Sanh: "I held a job on an oil rig, flying choppers when I could, but the nightlife nearly drove me 'round the bend". Studying that song in high school history classes about the Vietnam War, I never understood if it was a lack or surplus of nightlife that drove the song's narrator 'round the bend. But now I think I know: it was the lack thereof. It sounds like gruelling work: long shifts interspersed with bad food and sleep.

Weirdly enough, while writing this, I flicked over to Twitter, only to find Yassmin Abdel-Magied, well-known social activist and little-known mechanical engineer, talking on Radio National about her experience on oil rigs. According to her, there are usually only three to four women out of the 150 workers on a rig, but she also says that the dynamic can be different than those numbers suggest.

Regardless of what the reality might be, I liked the way Penney constructed Jo's work environment. She's friendly with the guys, but she'll never be one of the boys, and with an incompetent junior engineer and Stephen playing house in Perth, she becomes increasingly discontented with her job.

I picked up Fly In Fly Out the day after having my wisdom teeth removed. I guess I thought that, since it seemed light and had a familiar setting, I could read it through the fog of industrial-strength painkillers. If it had been a lesser book, I think I'd probably have mostly forgotten it by now, but the emotion of Fly In Fly Out is hard to forget. All those feels could have been the result of the oxycodone, but I'm pretty sure it was just good writing. 

Review: Welcome to Envy Park by Mina V. Esguerra

4 stars

Welcome to Envy Park is that rarest of all things: a novella that felt like a full-length novel. The narrator and protagonist, Moira Vasquez, has moved back to her hometown of Manila after working abroad in Singapore for several years, but she only intends for it to be a temporary stopping place before she moves on to another overseas destination. That's the plan, and having a good apartment and the possibility of a relationship with her neighbour Ethan isn't going to change anything. Neither is the realisation that, whereas all her friends have careers, moving around means Moira only ever has jobs. After all, this is what she wants, isn't it?

The 'heroine trying to figure out her life' is a familiar starting point for chick-lit books, but Moira is wonderfully nuanced and never strays towards trainwreck territory that is such a mainstay of the genre. Her quarter-life crisis was believable and - for me as a twenty-something - eminently relatable. I particularly appreciated Esguerra's understanding that adjusting our preconceptions about how - and where - we will live is often a fraught process. 

Ethan is going through a similar transition. While Moira has her life planned out to a T, he has always just gone with the flow. But he's realising see that, maybe, if he wants something (or someone) he might actually have to go out and get it (or her). 

Despite the fact that the characters and plot were as well-developed as one would expect from a novel, I'm still left with a little of my classic novella complaint that things were wrapped up too quickly. Once Ethan had his lightbulb moment, it was "okay, we'll be together, THE END" and I was looking forward to actually seeing him and Moira as a couple.  

Esguerra also overturned my nebulous preconceptions about Manila, which is only ever featured in the Australian media when a typhoon hits, at which point our 7 o'clock news has some 10-second clips of corrugated iron being ripped from shanties and people walking waist-deep in water. In my ignorance, I'd failed to appreciate that, as with many other Asian cities, Manila is home to a burgeoning middle class and the infrastructure that accompanies them.

That's the point of me undertaking my Beyond a Single Story Challenge this year. I'm still ironing out the details, but I hope to fill out my understanding of the Philippines a little bit by reading at least one historical set there, and one non-fiction book. If anyone has any recommendations or suggestions, particularly for the NF, I would be most grateful.

Review: The Royal We by Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan

5 stars

I want you to imagine two things: One, think of Kate and Wills not as clotheshorses, curiousities or stuffy royals, but as flawed twenty-somethings who have to sort their shit out with the whole world watching. Secondly, imagine that Kate wrote a tell-all book about that experience. Because that's pretty much what The Royal We is: a thinly-veiled, no-holds-barred, somewhat sensationalist imagining of the royal courtship. Except instead of Wills and Kate, we have Nick and Bex, an American on exchange to Oxford. It sounds terrible, but it wasn't. And, from a card-carrying member of the Australian Republican Movement who thinks we should ditch the royals, that's quite a testimony. 

The thing that made The Royal We work was its humour. Bex's narration is searingly honest and often very ambivalent, and yet she always remains hilariously droll. Not only do she and the other characters have a sense of humour, they also have funny little quirks, like Prince Nicholas, who loves crap TV so much he votes for people on reality shows. 

And yet, I wouldn't want to give the impression this book was a laugh a minute, because it wasn't. Somehow, I ended up crying. Twice. I blame this on the fact that Cocks and Morgan make the reader empathise with just about every single character in the book, who are all superbly drawn, vulnerable and human. When I started audibly sobbing, I told myself to take a break, and yet I kept reading. There was something compelling about The Royal We, a need to know what happened next, and the ending is far from a foregone conclusion. There was, of course, a HEA, but it was a real-life HEA, an acknowledgement of imperfection and mistakes and a decision to stick together forever in spite of them. 

The HEA is all the more poignant for the ups and downs Nick and Bex and their circle of friends and family go through. As I said, this is no whirlwind fairytale, but a long book set over several years. It took a while to read, and if your response to it is anything like mine, it will need commitment, because it's not the kind of book you put down willingly. 

There was the stray Americanism at which I ground my teeth, and sometimes it also required a greater-than-usual suspension of disbelief, but, ultimately, the level of absorbstion it induced in me makes it impossible to give The Royal We anything but 5 stars. 

Reflection: My #WNDBResolution and List of Diverse Recommendations

Over the past three or so months, I’ve become increasingly aware of the lack of ethnic diversity in the romance/chick-lit world, as well as in many other genres.  In one of my periods of yearning for India (where I spent a year teaching in 2013), I started to search out novels set there.  And when I say search, I mean search.  Because, while there are some out there, they're often not very well publicised.  I’m also sad to say that some of them (particularly the historicals) seem to be written by people who  have never been closer to the Subcontinent than their local Indian take-away.  

But happily, the search for non-Orientalist Indian romance and chick-lit novels brought me to the ‘Multicultural’ category of Amazon’s romance section.  I progressed through huh, it’s so weird that they have a multicultural romance section through hey, a lot of this stuff is really good…why isn’t better known? to why the blooming heck have I never realised the racial bias in what I read?  Around the same time, I also started to notice that there was a real backlash about the whitewashing of covers in YA fiction, and so I got angry about that too.  (I know, covers are my catnip, but they're such a intensely visual example of ingrained privilege and prejudice).  

This increased consciousness was made concrete two days ago when I read this post, wherein a Guardian journalist reflects of her experience of only reading books by Authors of Colour throughout 2014.  This, in turn, lead me to the We Need Diverse Books (WNDB) movement.  They have an initiative called WNDBResolution, which encourages people to pledge to read a certain number of books with diverse characters in the next year.  So, here's my pledge: 

I'll review them on here and take part in the hashtag #WNDBResolution on Twitter to keep in the loop.  I encourage whoever is reading this to give it a go as well; you have nothing to lose, and a whole lot of new perspectives and awesome reads to gain.  To get you started, I've put down some of my recent favourites featuring non-white leads:  

My Beautiful Enemy by Sherry Thomas

Set in Victorian London with flashbacks to the hero and heroine's first meeting in Chinese Turkestan several years before, My Beautiful Enemy is the story of Ying-Ying-slash-Catherine and Captain Leighton Atwood.  It's a poignant story with an engaging plot that gave me an appreciation for the complex cultural mixing pot that is Central Asia.  

No Sex in the City by Randa Abdul-Fattah

In the chick-lit category is No Sex in the City, about Turkish-Australian Esma, who's trying to balance her faith and the expectations of her parents with the cosmopolitan Sydney life. It's witty and relatable, with a great cast of supporting characters and a cute ending.  Really gave me a new appreciation for the ways in which white Australians can be thoughtless towards their 'ethnic' counterparts.

The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo by Zen Cho

The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo is not your average romance.  It's the 1920s, and as a Malayan-Chinese career girl, Jade Yeo is a fish out of water, to say the least.  Her desire to live independently and the casual way she treats sex makes for a refreshing change from the bulk of the genre.  Short and sweet, it nonetheless deals deftly with the ripple effects of British colonialism.  As Jade says so eloquently, "It is as if I were a piece of chess in a game played by people who never looked down at their fingers".  

A Bollywood Affair by Sonali Dev

At four years old, Mili was married in a mass ceremony.  Now, she's at university in the US, biding her time until her absent husband comes to claim her.  Instead, her husband's brother, Sam, is the one who shows up on her doorstep and sweeps her off her feet.  Dev writes beautifully and sensitively about the clash of modern, globalised India with age-old Rajasthani traditions, fleshing out her characters and developing a unique plot in the process.  One of the best books I've read in a long time.  

Talk Sweetly to Me by Courtney Milan

Being a black, female mathematician in Victorian England isn't exactly a walk in the park, as Rose Sweetly well knows.  She does her best to keep her head down, but her neighbour, renowned columnist Stephen Shaughnessy, isn't making it easy.  Rose's wariness about the world brings home the forms of discrimination and oppression that WOC have faced, and continue to do so.  Like all of Milan's offerings, Talk Sweetly To Me is different, thought-provoking and thoroughly entertaining.  

The Lotus Palace by Jeannie Lin

Set in Tang Dynasty China, The Lotus Palace is about Yue-Ying, a maidservant to a famous courtesan.  When another prominent courtesan from a rival house is found dead, Yue-Ying is caught up in a sea of intrigues that bring her into contact with Bai Huang, an aristocratic scholar and well-known playboy.  The relationship between the hero and heroine was really wonderfully done, and the idea that this novel is set at the same time as Europe was experiencing the Dark Ages blew my mind and opened my eyes to my ignorance about Han Chinese civilisation and history.  

If you have any recommendations, feel free to write me a comment or - even better - post on Twitter with the hashtag #WNDBResolution so everyone can benefit.  Catch you on the other side of my first diverse read for my resolution, Indigo by Beverly Jenkins! 

Reflection: Thoughts on the Socially Awkward Heroine

A few days ago, I finished Addition by Toni Jordan, in which the protagonist, Grace, compulsively counts everything she comes across.  It got me thinking about other chick-lit or romance novels where the heroine is socially awkward, has OCD and/or displays an obsession with numbers or useless trivia.  I could name 8 or 9 off the top of my head and, when I brought it up with a friend, she added several more to the list.  Which begs the question: why is this trope so popular and what does it say about us as a society?

First of all, I’m yet to read a romance or chick-lit novel where the central male character exhibits these tendencies.  This could simply be put down to the fact that few of us would argue that neuroticism is a desirable trait in a man, and that these genres are usually trying make the male lead attractive to the reader.  

But, on a deeper level, I think it can also been seen as a result of the way Western societies have constructed gender.  The characterisation of women as inherently neurotic goes back over two thousand years, when Hippocrates declared hysteria to be a feminine malady that had its source in a woman’s womb.  In fact, the English word hysteria derives from the Greek hysterikos, meaning ‘of the womb’, the same root as hysterectomy and other modern medical procedures of the uterus.  One only has to look at the madwomen of Gothic novels to see that the association has remained.  The literature on hysteria as a Victorian illness is legion, as is that on Freud.  And while the clinical association between the two was abandoned in the twentieth century, it still lives on in popular thinking.  Women are still widely portrayed as being biologically programmed to be more emotional than men, even though studies have proved there is no significant difference. 

However, literature itself is highly gendered, and this too might play a role into the extent to which socially awkward heroine trope appears in so-called ‘chick-lit’ novels.  The feminist academic and writer Joanna Russ argued that stories centring on male characters were presented as universal to the human condition, while those about with female protagonists were not.  She also classified a number of strategies used to belittle books written by women, including its denigration as ‘populist’.  Although she was writing in the 1970s, her observations are still relevant today.  For the most part, novels with female authors and protagonists are marketed as lightweight reads, with gendered covers. Author Kate Hart highlighted the extent of this when she counted and classified the covers of all the YA novels published in a year:

 Source: 'Uncovering YA Covers: Rose-Coloured Glasses' by Kate Hart

Right now, you’re probably going “What about Gone Girl?  Or [insert other serious and well-regarded female-based novel here]?” but this is one of Russ’ points: that a novel written by a woman and featuring a female protagonist may well-received by critics and gain prominence accordingly, but these are exceptions, and are vetted by a series of literary gatekeepers before they are allowed into the realm of ‘serious’ fiction.  Novels such as Gone Girl can also be seen to be a backlash against the chick-lit-isation (that's totally a word) of women’s writing.  In order to be taken seriously and avoid the death knell of a gendered cover and blurb, female authors purposely write ‘misery lit’.  For an excellent deconstruction of this - and the gendered nature of literature in general - have a look at 'The Way We Talk About "Women's Lit" is Sexist' by Courtney Young.

There are undoubtedly many books out there featuring male protagonists with the traits I’ve mentioned, but they’re marketed according to their content, so I’d never read them.  

(EDIT: 1/8/17 - I have since read some neurodivergent heroes, mainly in m/m, and I could speculate on the reasons for that until the cows come home, but I won't. For good examples of neurodivergent heroes, see K J Charles' The Unseen Attraction or Cat Sebastian's The Lawrence Browne Affair. It is interesting to note that male characters are much more commonly labelled neurodivergent than female ones, who remain 'quirky'. As a further aside, this post, which was one of my earliest, is very heteronormative and uses different language than I would choose if I wrote it today, but I am leaving it as-is for posterity's sake.)

Had Addition, the book I’ve just finished, had a synopsis that mentioned the character’s “internal struggle” instead of focussing on her relationship with her boyfriend, I probably wouldn’t have read it either.  Don’t get me wrong, it was good, but a little too poignant for me.  And, in researching this post, I found a book entitled OCD Love Story on goodreads, which had several reviews to the tune of “Don’t believe the title and pink hearts on the cover, this is some serious stuff”.  If I'm not alone in this, then perhaps the incidence of the socially awkward heroine in chick-lit and romance could simply be a result of marketing that assumes that a book about a woman has its sole market in women. 

Just like anything, the socially awkward heroine can be seen in different ways.  Although I've focused on her as a potential vehicle of oppression, she can also be seen in a feminist light. Perhaps her quirks prove that women are as human as the 'universal' represented by a male character.  Maybe she proves that women don't have to be perfect, or live up to societal expectations that expect both too much and too little of them. 

Overall, I don't think we can place parameters on the socially awkward heroine in as being one thing or other - each writer, and each reader will construct her differently.  And hopefully, one day, the marketing surrounding her will reflect this as well.  In the meanwhile, here are some of my favourite examples of the trope:

Bet Me by Jennifer Crusie

Playing Grace by Hazel Osmond

The Duality Principle by Rebecca Grace Allen

Neanderthal Seeks Human by Penny Reid

Nobody’s Baby But Mine by Susan Elizabeth Phillips