Review: Opening Act by Suleikha Snyder

4 stars

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a book in possession of a Princess Bride reference within the first two sentences is going to be an excellent read.  And Suleikha Snyder's Opening Act starts strong with a band called 'The Brute Squad' .  For those of you who have forgotten the line that comes from, or (heaven forbid) haven't seen the movie, here's a little reminder:

But back to Opening Act.  Journalist Saroj Shah has been in love with her friend, Adam Harper - guitar player of the aforementioned band - for years.  Adam's been burying his head in the sand for just as long.  But when Adam finally wakes up and decides he wants her too, Saroj isn't sure he's serious.  After all:

He was big, doofy all-American Adam.  She was Saroj "where are the twenty gold wedding sarees" Shah...No one looked at the two of them and thought, Yes, they should be together.  That makes sense.  

Most of the novel's conflict is internal, stemming from the hero and heroine's beliefs about themselves and others. When I first finished the book, I felt vaguely disappointed with this.  I kept thinking there would be some big denouement, but there never was and then suddenly it was over.  When I sat down to write this review, it was beccause I needed to vent about reaching the end before I was mentally prepared for it.  But this is not Snyder's fault; it often happens when I read books on Kindle.  The little percentage in the bottom right corner misleads me because it often includes 10%-20% samples of other titles.  

Anyway, once I got over my trauma at being abruptly ripped out of bookland, I re-evaluted and realised that Opening Act was actually a really wonderful novella.  Too often authors try to squeeze too much into a novella, or they use the format to avoid characterisation all together.  Sometimes, they manage both simultaneously.  But Snyder developed her characters and their attitudes well (I especially like the sidekick, Johnny Ray).  To have introduced an external conflict late in the piece would have spoiled the burgeoning relationship between Adam and Saroj, and overshadow Saroj's self-realisation, in which she de-colonised her mind to the point where she went "damn straight, I'm good enough for Adam and stuff what anyone else thinks".  (That's not a direct quote, guys, I promise.  Snyder's writing is heaps better than that.  See actual quote above about doofiness and sarees.)  

So, overall, I really liked Opening Act, and I probably would have loved it if I'd had a better conception of its length and content starting out.  But I do feel a bit weird about making it one of my #WNDB reads (or having them at all).  I've been reading the author's blog and she's understandably disillusioned by white people hijacking conversations that should be for POC.  I would hate to think that, in trying to broaden my horizons, I am being like those men who appear in the comments section of anything ever written about feminism.  Not the 'what about teh menz' ones, but the ones that think that my manslpaining feminism and talking over other people's lived experience, they are actually helping the cause.  It usually ends up with something like this:

But then she also wrote another post entitled If You've Read One of Us, You Haven't Read Us All, where she says: 

“I’ve read one author of color, so I’m done now” is a real thing. We feel it when we put books out there, when we pitch to editors and agents...Can you imagine saying, “Well, I read Sarah MacLean, so I’m full up. I don’t need to read Tessa Dare or Lisa Kleypas or Nora Roberts!”?"

My first thought on reading this was 'what would I do if I had to choose Sarah MacLean or Tessa Dare?' and it made me feel a bit panicky.  Back on topic, maybe fetishising diversity and patting ourselves on the back for reading something different isn't the best way to go about things.  But, then, maybe you can only fight fire with fire.  So, after talking that through and resolving absolutely nothing, I leave you with these two tweets to think about:

Review: Indigo by Beverly Jenkins

4 stars 

Not being American, I've never known much about the Underground Railroad, which smuggled slaves from the South into the free states of the North and onto Canada in the 19th century.  As a child, I had a book entitled Life Stories of 100 Famous Women that had a chapter on Harriet Tubman, and I can sing that earworm of a song about Dinah blowing her horn as well as the next gal, but I've never had any grasp of the finer details.  But I didn't realise quite how much I didn't know until I read Indigo by Beverly Jenkins as the first diverse read of my #WNDBResolution.

Smuggled out of slavery as a child, Hester Wyatt now runs a 'station' in Whittaker, Michigan, where conductors and runaways using the Railroad can rest, eat and receive care before moving on.  When an infamous conductor, The Black Daniel, is brought badly beaten to her doorstep, she takes him in and nurses him back to health.  He's surly and forward, and she's half inclined to give up on him.  Meanwhile, Galen Vachon - as the Black Daniel is really called - is becoming increasingly fascinated by his earnest hostess as his wounds heal and his mood picks up.  But there's a price on his head, unscrupulous slave-catchers in the area, a traitor leaking details about the Road and, like a thundercloud hovering over everything, a war brewing over the South's use of slavery.

The plot was really well-developed, but I'll admit that it took me quite a while to embrace Jenkins' writing style.  In the first few chapters I found the writing abrupt and didactic, but somewhere along the way I ceased to notice it as much, probably around the same time that I became engaged in the story and its level of historical detail.

I found it darkly fascinating that, in the North where all African-Americans were free and slaves from the South were declared free on arrival, a law was passed whereby a judge was paid 10 dollars if the found in a slave-owner's favour, but only 5 dollars if he backed the African-American accused of being a runaway.  Though I knew that societal racism must have continued after the fall of slavery, I naively assumed that kind of institutionalised discrimination would have been largely confined to the South.  But I suppose - and this is a really stupid white girl realisation - that's the whole thing about being discriminated against; the system is stacked against you everywhere, not simply where it is most apparent.  Just because you don't live in Ferguson, where almost 90% of police violence is used against African-Americans, despite the fact they make up only 67% of the local population, doesn't mean you are not facing racial disadvantage and discrimination on a daily basis.

I did really enjoy Hester as a character.  She has the courage of her convictions, only consuming products made by free workers, helping others to freedom as she herself was helped and being a loyal friend and neighbour.  She doesn't pay any mind to those who say that, as a single woman, she should not be involved in the Road and refuses to give into some pretty malicious slut-shaming.  Galen, raised by his mother's prominent Louisianan Creole family, is also charming and - with one notable exception - respects Hester's equality and ability to make her own decisions.  As often occurs in romance novels set during adverse times, it was the minor characters who brought home the horror and difficulty of Black life in the mid-1800s, giving the story a realistic poignancy it would have lacked if it had had a comprehensive happily-ever-after.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book and I'm very glad to have had the chance to discover it.  Hopefully, the other 19 diverse novels I read this year will be just as enlightening.  Because, as Jenkins wrote in the Author's Note of Indigo, "knowledge is power, but shared knowledge empowers us all".  

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: Don't Judge a Culture by its Cover

My awareness of the ways book covers can reflect and reinforce stereotypes of gender - which I touched on in the last post - has come largely from those who seek to point out the way race or 'foreign' locales are represented on book covers.  The cover of a book tells somebody what to expect in reading it, but what happens when the cover doesn't reflect the content, but rather a preconceived stereotype of the setting, characters or content?

Here are two specific examples where entire cultures have been essentialised down to a single image or trope.   First, we have the classic I'm-a-book-about-an-Arabic/Islamic-woman-therefore-I-must-be-oppressed-and-have-no-individual-identity:

Source: arabglot.com

There are some excellent discections of the 'Veiled Woman' cover, including 'Translating for Bigots', 'Don't Judge Books By Their Cover - Especially Arabic Works in Translation', 'Why So Many 'Saving Muslim Women' Book Covers?' and 'Book Covers Promote Orientalist Portrayal of Muslim Women'.  All of them touch on the book covers as a vehicle for Orientalism, which: 

"...considers the way that the Middle East and Asia are represented in Western novels, biographies, and artworks.  Commonly, these depict places lost in times past, inclined towards despotic rule, and prone to odd cultural rituals that can be both pleasurable and symptomatic of weakness....The Orient was a powerfully pictured but vague location that the Westerner believed he could control and enjoy, penetrate and posess, and  hide in....The implicit goal, which repeats across time in politics, media and the popular imagination, was to reaffirm cultural difference and render things 'Oriental' marginal to the West and subordinate to Western international relations."   

-- Extract of 'Post-colonialism' by Christine Sylvester in The Globalization of World Politics, edited by Bayliss et al.

The ways small cultural artifiacts, such as book covers, can reinforce hierarchies of power between countries, communities and individuals in the international arena can be demonstrated using the I'm-a-book-set-in-Africa-so-I-must-feature-a-sunset-over-the-savannah:

Source: 'The Dangers of a Single Book Cover:The Acacia Tree Meme and "African Literature"'

The 'Acacia Tree' covers exemplify Sylvester's first example; that Africa exists within a timeless bubble of primitiveness (none of the examples feature any buildings other than small, mud huts).  As with the Arabic example, this image is developed prior to knowledge of the book's content and the views of the author (both often trying to subvert stereotypes, not reinforce them).  With regards to Africa, this is sometimes called 'Black Orientalism' or 'Afro-Orientalism', but it can also just be classified as Orientalism because of its commonalities with the ways Asia and the Arab world is stereotyped.  No matter what the region, these stereotypes have real-world effects.

In this case, they establish Africa as a homogenous place and thereby illegitimate the experience of being Xhosa or Yoruba, Shona or Kikuyu, from urban Africa or a particular region of the continent.  As a prime example, I just googled Kikuyu to make sure I was spelling it right, and except for one Wikipedia page listing all the pages that Kikuyu might refer to (5 out 7 were related directly to the ethnic group), all of the other options on the first page of my Google results refered to a species of grass.  The Kikuyu make up 22% of Kenya's population - the largest of any single ethnic group - and yet the Western world is more concerned with a native Kenyan grass that was named after them.  

Ebola illustrated the real world implications of such ignorance beautifully.  Although Europe was closer to the Western African outbreak than Southern Africa, tourism in the South took a seroius downturn.

Secondly, the Africa-as-timeless trope denies the reality of the continent's colonial history and the impact this continues to exert today.  Surely, if a Western country doesn't recognise the Rwandan genocide as a partial byproduct by colonial hierarchies that turned Hutu and Tutsi from fluid ethnic groups to castes, then making a decision about whether to intervene becomes simpler.  Ditto the coming African Debt Crisis and many other international affairs issues.  The flip side of this, I suppose, is that the depiction of Africa as primitive and backward allows for neo-colonialism; the West (and other powers, such as China, which has developed massive oil, crop and other interests in African nations) can intervene without international condemnation.  

So, while it might seem that covers featuring acacia trees or veiled women are fairly unimportant in the scheme of things,they are one small cog in a very big machine that determines the way we think about the world.  

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

Review: Trade Me by Courtney Milan (Or, Courtney Milan: Goddess of Intersectionality)

5 stars

Trade Me (released 19/1/15) represents Courtney Milan’s first foray into the ever-burgeoning subgenre of New Adult romance.  For those not familiar with her, Milan has previously written romances set during the Victorian era and is notable for writing outside-the-box stories.  Far from the idle-aristocrat-meets-woman formula, her heroes and heroines are as diverse as a barrister, suffragette newswoman, small-town doctor, fortune-teller and researcher of plant genetics.  Drawing on a wide spectrum of human experience has made her a stand-out amongst historical romance authors, but I was nonetheless apprehensive that a change in genre would signal the end of her position on my auto-buy list.  However, I shouldn’t have worried, because Trade Me blew my expectations out of the water. 

In many new adult novels, the protagonists’ search to ‘find themselves’ in the ‘real world’ of college is shallow and uninspiring, but Milan deftly avoids this trap.  In fact, it was the depth and breadth of her characters that made Trade Me exceptional.  The Chinese-American heroine, Tina, is not only putting herself through university, but has taken on financial responsibility for her family.  While Blake – the son of a billionaire technology magnate – might seem to have it easy, he too is dealing with an array of issues.  When Tina speaks up during a class discussion on food dockets, savaging Blake and daring anyone to maintain their opinion of the working class as ‘lazy’ after experiencing their lives, she never expects him to take her up on her offer to trade lives.  The complexities of swapping lives – and the problems each has retained from their own – is compassionate and nuanced in a way rarely seen in romance novels, and literature in general.  The world the characters inhabit is clearly our world, with all the imperfection that entails. 

When I was perusing other reviews before writing my own, I noticed that some readers felt Milan had tried to tackle too many social issues in one book, or that there was just “too much going on”.  Ironically, the reason they gave Trade Me two or three stars is the reason I found it so refreshingly compelling, and that was the intersectionality that Milan took the time to develop.   

Like Ryan says so succintly, Intersectionality is the study or observance of the ways in which forms or systems of oppression, domination or discrimination interact.  It works on the premise that biological, social and cultural factors such as race/ethnicity, gender, class, ability, sexual orientation, religion combine to define how a person or group is perceived and treated. In Trade Me, Tina’s life and personality are influenced by a web of factors – including her Chinese heritage, her lower-class background and her family’s position as members of the persecuted Falun Gong philosophy.  To a certain extent, when Blake takes on Tina’s life, he is also taking on an awareness of his privilege relative to hers.  The beauty of Milan’s writing is in the way in which this intersectionality permeates the characters, settings and plot of the novel, without ever having it define them. Too often factors such as race and class are used as window dressing for stock characters or as a one-trick pony plot device, but Tina and Blake remain people above and beyond their social demographics, and the plot remains separate as well.  Rather than trying to fit too much in, Milan has woven together the many strands that makes each person unique into solid, three-dimensional characters.  In doing so, she blends the best of the romance genre and the best of reality to create a complex, emotionally satisfying story, and who can ask for more than that?