Bloodhound – Tamora Pierce

Bloodhound is Tamora Pierce’s second book about Beka Cooper, an ancestress of a character in her other books set in the world (referred to from here out as “Tortall books,” as Tortall is the central country). Beka has finished her Puppy year—a year of training to become a member of the Provost’s Guard, the police force well endowed with canine slang—and is starting her first year as a full Dog. What starts out as a bad fall in the Lower City due to a poor grain harvest becomes worse when counterfeits start showing up in the money system—lots of counterfeits. The investigation sends Beka into Port Caynn, a harbor city full of extra-corrupt Dogs and extra-bold Rats.

Tamora Pierce has been a source of comfort-reading for me since I was twelve or so. I’m not sure how many times I’ve read some of her older books, but… more times than I’ve read Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. A lot. None of her books are amazing and there is some variation in quality, but they are by and large good, enjoyable stories. They feature appealing, entirely non-wimpy characters, many of them women, and there’s a decent smattering of LGBT characters and characters of color. I freely admit that I have a soft spot in my heart for Tamora Pierce, so season this review with as many grains of salt as you feel necessary. (Mmmm. Tasty salt.)

The major flaw in the Beka Cooper books comes from the narrative style she chose: journal-style. Dogs are trained to have excellent memories, so after all her adventures Beka comes home and writes them out in her journal, in great detail. Mostly this works, and the level of detail seems appropriate to a police procedural. Yet, for some unfathomable reason, she feels it necessary to throw in gimmicks. Inkblots; paw-prints where her cat walks over the page; words misspelled, crossed-out, and rewritten when Beka is tired. They distract from the story far more than they enhance it.

Fortunately, the gimmicks are widely spread through a book that is otherwise one of her best. Beka’s an appealing character, forthright and prickly. The police work is appropriately gritty and the investigation accelerates in a compelling way as they get closer to the truth. The romance is believable and enjoyable but stays secondary to the main plot and is not viewed through rose-colored glasses.

It’s particularly interesting to look at the Beka Cooper books, especially this one, in comparison to her other Tortall books. It’s set several hundred years earlier, and the difference in gender dynamics is amazing. In the books set later, women are fighting to gain equal status and rights, and to be accepted as warriors. In these, women are just starting to lose equal status, rights, and acceptance as warriors. The pendulum swings. The books from the later time period are generally set in and around the palace and nobles; not every character is a noble, but many are, and the rest interact with nobles on a daily basis. These books are set in a thoroughly lower-class part of town, with nobles showing up only occasionally. Between the gender and class differences, the attitudes among the characters toward money, family, loyalty, noblesse oblige, sex, and marriage are simultaneously quite different from her other Tortall books and yet entirely consistent with them. It’s really cool! I love it when authors put thought and effort into their worlds.

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Bloodhound ~ Tamora Pierce

 

Ash – Malinda Lo

A Cinderella variant haunted by echoes of science clashing with belief and new religions clashing with old ones, Ash tells the story of a young woman untethered, trying to find a place in the world. First Ash returns, again and again, to the grave of her mother; then she shelters in the protection of a handsome fairy; later, she falls for a confident huntress and gets some confidence and agency for herself.

Ash is told in a gentle, largely expository style, fittingly reminiscent of oral tradition. The pacing is unusual; fairly slow, it thoroughly develops Ash and Sidhean, the fairy, before introducing Kaisa, the huntress. Between those two factors, it took a while to draw me in, but once it caught me I was caught but good. Ash’s slow emotional transitions are dealt with beautifully, one set of emotions fading—but not disappearing—as another rises up. The differences between Ash’s relationships with Sidhean and Kaisa are well drawn and a fascinating reflection of the differences in their personalities and statuses, his bitterness contrasting with her caution. Though the romance is important, it’s less central than in many Cinderella variants; the focus is more on Ash coming into her own, something she does slowly and believably, with a few natural stumbles on the way. Likewise, though it builds to a lesbian relationship, the fact that it’s queer is less central than in many GLBT books. For the most part, it’s treated as perfectly natural and obvious that there would be same-sex relationships. In fact, one of the few parts of the book that didn’t work for me was a few pages of Ash being confused and awkward because of the suggestion that her feelings for Kaisa could be romantic and/or sexual. Nonetheless, it’s a beautiful, unusual book, and a pleasant reprieve from heavy LGBT-related books and new stories.

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Ash ~ Malinda Lo

 

Baby Be-Bop – Francesca Lia Block

Background information: Baby Bebop is a prequel to Francesca Lia Block’s Weetzie Bat books, now only in print in the compilation Dangerous Angels. A group in Wisconsin is currently suing for the right to publicly burn their local public library’s copy of Baby Be-Bop. Let’s read it instead, shall we?

Dirk has always known that he’s gay, but he’s never told anyone: not his loving grandmother, nor her gay best friends, nor the young man he falls in love with when they’re teenagers. Full of self-loathing and afraid of anyone guessing, he defends himself with leather, punk music, and black hair-dye. He still gets himself beat up, and in the resulting semi-conscious state he gets a visit from some of his ancestors, telling their stories of love and life.

Francesca Lia Block specializes in an odd sort of Los Angeles flowers-and-fairies dreamy quasi-fantasy, and this is no exception. Plot-wise, there isn’t much to it, but it’s a beautiful book. It does tiptoe into sappiness, but in many ways its more of a love letter to gay teenagers than it is a novel; and love letters are allowed to be sappy.

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Baby Be-Bop ~ Dangerous Angels: The Weetzie Bat Books ~ Francesca Lia Block

 

Empress of the World – Sara Ryan

Teenage girls falling for each other at a summer program for academically gifted high schoolers. Need I say more?

Well, yes.

Empress of the World has two key factors which make it stand out from the general mass of teenage queer books: the main character and her love interest are bi, and there relationship has issues which are not related to their queerness. Now, we absolutely need books about lesbians, and we need books where issues of sexual orientation cause tension in romantic relationships. And we need books about straight people. Of course! But there are very few bi chicks in fiction – and as a bi chick in nonfiction, I really appreciate the representation.

The relationship in Empress of the World is delightfully realistic. They’re so sweet, they like each other so much, and they are awkward and they miscommunicate and they generally act like teenagers figuring things out as they go along. Their missteps make sense and are well-portrayed, so they never become jokes or embarrassment.

It’s a snapshot of a summer: one girl’s experience of a relationship. And it’s a lovely book.

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Empress of the World ~ Sara Ryan

 

Eon: Dragoneye Reborn – Alison Goodman

There are two ways a book can make one miss, or nearly miss, one’s subway/train/bus stop. Most commonly, the book absorbs you such that you stop paying attention to your surrounds. Eventually you look up and realize that you’ve traveled much further than you thought. Alternately, a book grips you but allows you to see your surroundings; you see the stop before yours come and go, you see your stop approach — and you still can barely slam shut the book and get out of the train. Eon does the latter. I read it in three train rides, one lunch, and an evening of ignoring the clock as it got closer and closer to my bed time.

I first heard of Eon when I was reading the starred review it got in Publisher’s Weekly. I looked at the title¹ and cover and thought, “Ugh, that looks like standard overwrought fantasy, why are they giving it a starred review?” I read the summary part of the review and thought, “Ugh, that sounds like standard overwrought fantasy, why are they giving it a starred review?” I read the part of the review where it talked about the gender issues, and thought “Oh!” and wrote it down on my to-read list. Many months later I got around to reading it, and am now refraining from beginning my review with a summary, for fear of making you think its standard overwrought fantasy.

So what is going on? In a vaguely imperial China-esque society, Eon is in the midst of a reverse-meteoric rise from slave to crippled, inauspicious trainee, to a rank just shy of the imperial family. Eon is thrust into the midst of court intrigue and desperate power struggles, in which Eon is as much pawn as player. Oh, and Eon was born Eona and is physically female. After four years dressing as a boy, speaking as a boy, behaving as a boy, and taking part in training and studies only boys are allowed, Eona has been reduced to a tiny presence in the back of Eon’s mind; a little harder to ignore around menstruation, but pushed back and, in many ways, seen by Eon as an enemy.

To this, we add two other central characters: Lady Dela, the court lady assigned to teach Eon courtly ways, and Ryko, Lady Dela’s bodyguard. Lady Dela is a Contraire – male-to-female transgender. The Empire is vast; where Dela is from, Contraires are admired because they combine male sun power and female moon power. Sent to court as a gift, she has had to pave her own way in a setting where she is looked on as more unnatural than a force of nature. Ryko is a eunuch.

This means that many of the conversations in the book take place, ostensibly, between a woman, a man, and a boy. And the woman’s the only one with a penis. And that’s where the power of the book is found. These three characters each have complex relationships with their bodies, their self-perception, and their sexuality, and they all have different complexities. It respects the diversity in gender identity and expression while painting a disturbing but honest picture of the discrimination and violence, often sexualized violence, perpetrated against both a lesser-valued gender and against those whose gender expression breaks societal norms.

It’s a complex, powerful, at times painful book. Beware reading it on trains.

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¹ In Australia, the title is The Two Pearls of Wisdom. We always seem to get the worst titles. And in this case it’s particularly egregious, since Eon: Dragoneye Reborn in conjunction with the title of the sequel gives away something fairly major.

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Eon: Dragoneye Reborn ~