Short Reviews for Eclectic Readers: August 9, 2020

I did a pretty good job writing reviews for most books I read in July, but I did fall off the wagon a bit towards the end when the bar exam was frying my circuits. So here are some super-duper quick reviews:

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I honestly don’t know what to say about The Shape of the Night. It purports to be a mystery like the rest of the author’s books, but it’s actually a wannabe Gothic-type take on Fifty Shades of Grey??? But then in the second half, Gerritsen remembers she’s a suspense writer and offers a completely watered down attempt at a traditional murder investigation. This entire book was so clumsy and heavy-handed, from the demonic sex to the awkward red herrings. Every single plot movement is telegraphed 100 pages in advance, with all the subtlety of a hippopotamus starring in the Bolshoi Ballet. The protagonist’s primary characteristics are her insatiable addiction to wine and her endless self-flagellation over The Bad Thing She Did On New Years. I don’t get it. Nothing about this book works.

But if BDSM ghosts are your thing, then boy are you in luck!

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Cute, soft, fluffy sapphic romance. Perfectly nice and enjoyable, but nothing special. Two lesbians are back in their tiny hometown in Maine, living next door to each other in their childhood homes. They hang out a bit, develop mutual crushes, have sex, and fall in love within a few weeks. No major conflict here, not much character growth. (Honestly, both Jude and Iris narrate alternately in first-person, and their voices sounded identical to me, which was confusing.) Overall, I liked The Girl Next Door, but it was pretty bland.

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I’m absolutely gutted that this Egyptian romance turned out to be one of the most misogynistic things I’ve ever read.

The problem is simply that Titus (the “hero”) hates women. He honestly and without nuance believes that all women are shallow, petty, slutty, and inferior. Not only does he think this, he says it every chance he gets!

Example 1:

Women were mostly alike, he had found. Their minds were usually empty, but their bodies were soft and yielding, and they could provide a special kind of comfort after a day of taking lives.

Example 2:

Did she suspect him of something? Impossible. …Besides, she was just a woman, with a woman’s limitations of intellect. He had no reason to worry.

Example 3:

But the women were like shells—beautiful, alluring, and disappointingly empty. Their desire for wealth and status ranged far beyond their intellect. They were easily bored and seemed unable to participate in even the most basic discussions of philosophy or politics.

Example 4:

‘Are you able to do it?’

‘Of course I am able,’ she told him. ‘Am I not a woman?’

‘Yes, and I am a man and thus you are naturally inferior to me.’

Example 5:

He yearned for her body, but also for her mind, for she wielded it like a secret knife…. But she was a woman. A woman! Women were not scholars. They were mothers and wives, maidservants and harlots. Besides, she was too desirable to be a scholar.

Example 6:

She was just a woman, after all. A Woman was only as powerful as a man allowed her to become. That was what he had always believed, had been taught since he was a boy.

But she was not like the other women.

Can you believe this guy? (There was more, but I didn’t have the heart to type it all up.) Obviously, then, this “love story” just becomes an exercise in Not Like Other Girls-ism, whereby a flaming misogynist realizes the error of his ways because he meets a woman whose boobs he likes enough that he sticks around and realizes that she actually has a brain. Hard pass.

Oh, also, he’s a Big Manly Man of Superior Intellect and Self Control, but he’s completely incapable of honoring her non-consent?

‘Stop,’ she cried.

He wrapped his arms around her body and rammed his desire into her stomach, pushing against her with too much force. His shaft throbbed with impossible need. He found her loincloth with his hands and fumbled to release the knot, desperate to find his home inside of her. Gods, how he wanted her. Needed her.

‘Please stop,’ she said, and he felt the warm wetness of tears upon her cheeks. ‘Just stop.’

But he could not stop. His need was too great.

Uh…Boy, bye.

HARD. PASS.

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Like a lot of readers, I was lured in with “lesbian necromancers in space” but was ultimately disappointed with Tamsyn Muir’s execution of the concept. Gideon the Ninth is a slow-paced novel with vague world-building and a labyrinthine plot that exhausted more than than it intrigued or entertained. There wasn’t much space stuff happening here, and the lesbian aspect was not centered at all—mostly this is a story about a bunch of necromancers trapped in a house talking about necromancer things.

I honestly found this book exhausting. Muir’s prose felt dense and inaccessible to me, and my brain had a difficult time simultaneously grasping the setting, the storyline, and the rather large cast of characters. A big draw for a lot of readers seems to be Gideon herself, the book’s narrator. Snarky tumblr meme queen isn’t much of a personality, in my opinion, though a lot of readers seemed to enjoy her.

Overall, I just didn’t feel like this novel flowed. It was an effort to read, all the way to the end, and I’m not personally one for reading that requires that much effort. And dear Goodreads reviewers who say this is a “good” lesbian book where “the main character gets the girl in the end”? We’re gonna have some words.