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Stuart, Anne - Ice Storm
I've held off on writing this, as I feel it needs more brain power than I possess to write a review that compares and contrasts it with Stuart's Moonrise with a particular examination of gendered roles in romance novels. Unfortunately, if I don't write this now, I'll put it off forever and end up forgetting half of what I wanted to say.
Ice Storm belongs in the unfortunately tiny subgenre of romance books that includes Megan Chance's Fall from Grace and Connie Brockway's All Through the Night; that is, they all star icy and morally dubious heroes and heroines and aren't so much romances as erotic power play. Parts of it also strongly resemble Laura Kinsale's Shadowheart, particularly in the way both heroes of the books are undone by sex, rather than gaining power through the sexual desires of the heroines, which is how most romances go.
Isobel Lambert is the head of a shady international organization called the Committee (as all shady international organizations are called, unless they are "the Institution" or "the Institute"). The Committee is supposedly on the side of good, though they do things like assassinate inconvenient people and overthrow governments. They now must protect an Eastern European international terrorist to get information. Little does Isobel know that he's actually Killian, the first man she fell in love with, the first man she killed, and also the reason why she stopped being innocent, sweet Mary Curwen and started being icy assassin Isobel Lambert.
This is the fourth book in a series; I could tell because there are three other couples. Sadly, all the prior books seem to be on male assassins and the innocent, beautiful women they are supposed to protect and/or kill. One of the couples has jokingly named one of their babies (there are lots of babies) "Swede" in honor of the Stockholm Syndrome.
I think they found that much more sappy and romantic than I did.
I suspect Anne Stuart would have written something much darker and more erotic if she thought it would have sold; either that, or she's so used to writing within romance genre constraints that they infest the book despite its boundary-pushing content. I would have loved this ten times more had it discarded the couples, the babies, and the gender roles. That said, I still loved this a lot for what it did do with genre tropes, and it would have earned a place on my bookshelf just for the heroine's final line. Also, it is hot like burning.
Even so, I actually wish this one had more sex, or at least more detailed sex (this may be a first for me, at least in the romance genre). The most interesting changes to the characters happen in bed, and I'm grumpy that we get the lead-in, a brief summary, and then the morning after, because it definitely needed something like the POV change in Shadowheart.
Race:
I nearly didn't read this because of all the problems I had with race in the beginning. All the countries mentioned with political turmoil are third-world, with the occasional exception of Eastern Europe. All of them are also POC, with the same Eastern European exception. And I'm not even going to go into the problematic set up of a largely white institution manipulating POC countries. The book sets up the Committee as morally problematic, but not in a racial way; there's no sense of the history of the white world fucking with predominantly POC countries and the ravages of colonialism and imperialism. All the mess in the third-world countries we see are messes without context.
While I was glad to see a mention of an Asian man, I rolled my eyes because he was Japanese (why are all the Asians Japanese? Why?!) and he was named "Takashi O'Brien." I am guessing he is half-Japanese, half-white. Also, he is in an interracial romance, from what I could gather, but of course it is with a white girl. Far be it for interracial romances to ever occur between two POC! At least it's a step up in that the Asian guy gets to have some sex and be sexy.
Killian and Isobel are accompanied through most of the book by an Arab kid named Mahmoud. Mahmoud exists solely to kill Killian, as Killian killed his 15-year-old sister. Mahmoud gets no development whatsoever and is mostly there as a prop for Killian. He also ends up forgiving Killian blahblahblah boringcakes.
I do give the book props for introducing the hero of the next book, who is also Japanese. Unfortunately, he is going to be set up with his cousin's white sister-in-law (I hate that I can tell from this book). On the plus side, I really like how he is set up to be one thing and turns out to be the complete opposite; he is sexy, hot and competent, and I'm almost tempted to read the next book. Bonus points for snide remarks when one of the white characters offers to take him out for sushi.
I am also hoping that Mahmoud grows up to be the cool, sexy, and hot but not in a sheik-ish way hero of another book. He can run around amorally overturning the effects of imperialism! And not kidnap a white girl to sexually threaten her! And have a romance with a woman of color!
Sadly, I seriously doubt it will happen.
Gender:
In terms of gender, I found this fascinating. I also nearly put this down in the beginning because of Stuart's insistence on making Isobel less morally grey than she could be. While some of this is just to keep reader sympathy, as romance heroes get the treatment as well, I think much of it is also to stay within the acceptable boundaries for romance heroines. It's frequently noted in the first few chapters that Isobel only kills or orders kills when she thinks it's morally correct, and she never ever asks of her operatives what she won't do herself. Honestly, given that she's the head of an international organization that overthrows governments, I wanted something more pragmatic and ruthless, especially because the continual insistence on her moral goodness undermines the threat we're supposed to feel from the Committee and undermines her later emotional changes.
Plus, both Killian in this book and the hero of Moon Rise get to be dark dark dark; they're not hampered by anything so petty as a conscience or a moral compass. Why can't Isobel be that way as well, especially since she's in command of guys just like that?
I also suspect that the book starts out with the innocent Mary Curwen specifically so it doesn't completely alienate readers. I don't think Stuart is doing any of this consciously, by the way; I think it's the acceptance of romance tropes within the romance community, something which is nearly impossible to avoid if you're going to be a best-selling (or any-selling) writer. I felt the flashbacks to Mary Curwen could have been completely cut; either that, or they should have been revealed later down the line, when we had gotten a better idea of Isobel's personality. That way, any revelations about Mary Curwen would have actually been revelatory, as opposed to information I didn't care about because I didn't know any of the characters. We should have also gotten more looks at how Mary Curwen turned into Isobel; Isobel's a character who deserves heaps of angsty backstory.
Isobel is, of course, sexually attracted to Killian, and like every romance ever, this sexual attraction scrambles her brains. We mostly get her POV on this, which is different from most romances: we get some Killian POV in the flashbacks, but they're the standard "I am sexually attracted to her so I should kill her so I can do my job!" (substitute "kill" with "ignore" or "get rid of" for non-assassin romances). I was constantly thrown out by how Killian took the lead in nearly everything, despite Isobel having been an assassin for 18 years. Isobel is consistently thrown off by her sexual attraction to Killian; all her memories of him serve to weaken her rather than strengthen her.
The really eye-rolling bit is that we keep being told that she's cold and emotionless and not affected when she clearly is. This book would have been about a thousand times better if Isobel had been just as coldly efficient as Killian in fact, not just in exposition.
Both of them constantly thought about killing the other; unlike in Moon Rise, where I found that deeply disturbing, in this book, I thought it was hot. Much of it was the more balanced distribution of power: cold male assassin thinking about killing innocent young woman just makes me think about codified male privilege and violence against women.
What drew me back into the book was how Killian kept getting the upper hand on Isobel by knowing more about her -- only to find that once she realized this, she regained much of her emotional strength, and not in the fuzzy "Oh, he loves me, how sweet!" way. And though we see much of her emotional turmoil and lack of action, I enjoyed her snappy tongue and how she would frequently come back with things like, "So supposedly I've been waiting all this time just for your touch? Oh woe is me, now I finally seen the light. Except, wait, I'm going to kill you as soon as we get the information we need." (not direct quote).
Also, I love Isobel's last line in the book, which is something like, "Get into bed. I can always kill you tomorrow."
More gender, with spoilers:
So I was incredibly disgruntled to find out that Killian of course knew Mary Curwen/Isobel was alive long before she knew he was alive. And I saw the whole thing about Killian being a CIA agent about a hundred miles away, and only the fact that I was in a romance novel kept me from whapping all the characters on the head. How do they call him the most feared assassin ever when all his assignments are mucked up? I mean, how dumb can they be?
But! I think my favorite moment ever was when Isobel discovers that Killian not only knew she was alive, but also saved her life, brought her to her ex-husband, gave blood to keep her alive, and tracked her through the years. Instead of doing the usual "shock, horror, how dare you" thing, she narrows her eyes and notes she's his weakness, since he won't let himself come while having sex with her because he's too afraid of the vulnerability (I am somewhat dubious of this logic in the real world, but in the romance novel world it sort of works). She then proceeds to give him a blowjob and have hot sex with him, after which he says he loves her but she never says anything back. This is where there should have been way more detail, because the readers should get to see and feel Killian coming to pieces and falling apart, instead of just seeing the aftermath.
In fact, I would love this book just because she never says she loves him (well, aside from the "Get into bed. I can always kill you tomorrow," which I feel does not cut it in the romance novel verse, even though it would be the equivalent of the eternal swearing of devotion in blood in the Saiyuki-verse).
I also love that Isobel shows zero signs of relef when she learns Killian's actually not an evil mass-murderer; instead, she's so pissed off at him that she just lets him wander off, potentially with a mortal wound. And instead of the usual "Let me-the-hero kill him for you so you won't soil your hands," Isobel shoots the villain point blank in the head.
I'd rec this if you like the aforementioned Kinsale, Chase, or Brockway books, even though Ice Storm is the most flawed of them all. That's really unfortunate, because if you squint past all the romance novel trappings, there would be a killer story.
Some day I will get the complete gender inversion of the usual killer alpha male hero and the sweet innocent heroine, and it will be the BEST THING EVER. Till then, I will satisfy myself with books that at least take on romance tropes, if not always successfully.
ETA: corrected horrible grammar errors
Ice Storm belongs in the unfortunately tiny subgenre of romance books that includes Megan Chance's Fall from Grace and Connie Brockway's All Through the Night; that is, they all star icy and morally dubious heroes and heroines and aren't so much romances as erotic power play. Parts of it also strongly resemble Laura Kinsale's Shadowheart, particularly in the way both heroes of the books are undone by sex, rather than gaining power through the sexual desires of the heroines, which is how most romances go.
Isobel Lambert is the head of a shady international organization called the Committee (as all shady international organizations are called, unless they are "the Institution" or "the Institute"). The Committee is supposedly on the side of good, though they do things like assassinate inconvenient people and overthrow governments. They now must protect an Eastern European international terrorist to get information. Little does Isobel know that he's actually Killian, the first man she fell in love with, the first man she killed, and also the reason why she stopped being innocent, sweet Mary Curwen and started being icy assassin Isobel Lambert.
This is the fourth book in a series; I could tell because there are three other couples. Sadly, all the prior books seem to be on male assassins and the innocent, beautiful women they are supposed to protect and/or kill. One of the couples has jokingly named one of their babies (there are lots of babies) "Swede" in honor of the Stockholm Syndrome.
I think they found that much more sappy and romantic than I did.
I suspect Anne Stuart would have written something much darker and more erotic if she thought it would have sold; either that, or she's so used to writing within romance genre constraints that they infest the book despite its boundary-pushing content. I would have loved this ten times more had it discarded the couples, the babies, and the gender roles. That said, I still loved this a lot for what it did do with genre tropes, and it would have earned a place on my bookshelf just for the heroine's final line. Also, it is hot like burning.
Even so, I actually wish this one had more sex, or at least more detailed sex (this may be a first for me, at least in the romance genre). The most interesting changes to the characters happen in bed, and I'm grumpy that we get the lead-in, a brief summary, and then the morning after, because it definitely needed something like the POV change in Shadowheart.
Race:
I nearly didn't read this because of all the problems I had with race in the beginning. All the countries mentioned with political turmoil are third-world, with the occasional exception of Eastern Europe. All of them are also POC, with the same Eastern European exception. And I'm not even going to go into the problematic set up of a largely white institution manipulating POC countries. The book sets up the Committee as morally problematic, but not in a racial way; there's no sense of the history of the white world fucking with predominantly POC countries and the ravages of colonialism and imperialism. All the mess in the third-world countries we see are messes without context.
While I was glad to see a mention of an Asian man, I rolled my eyes because he was Japanese (why are all the Asians Japanese? Why?!) and he was named "Takashi O'Brien." I am guessing he is half-Japanese, half-white. Also, he is in an interracial romance, from what I could gather, but of course it is with a white girl. Far be it for interracial romances to ever occur between two POC! At least it's a step up in that the Asian guy gets to have some sex and be sexy.
Killian and Isobel are accompanied through most of the book by an Arab kid named Mahmoud. Mahmoud exists solely to kill Killian, as Killian killed his 15-year-old sister. Mahmoud gets no development whatsoever and is mostly there as a prop for Killian. He also ends up forgiving Killian blahblahblah boringcakes.
I do give the book props for introducing the hero of the next book, who is also Japanese. Unfortunately, he is going to be set up with his cousin's white sister-in-law (I hate that I can tell from this book). On the plus side, I really like how he is set up to be one thing and turns out to be the complete opposite; he is sexy, hot and competent, and I'm almost tempted to read the next book. Bonus points for snide remarks when one of the white characters offers to take him out for sushi.
I am also hoping that Mahmoud grows up to be the cool, sexy, and hot but not in a sheik-ish way hero of another book. He can run around amorally overturning the effects of imperialism! And not kidnap a white girl to sexually threaten her! And have a romance with a woman of color!
Sadly, I seriously doubt it will happen.
Gender:
In terms of gender, I found this fascinating. I also nearly put this down in the beginning because of Stuart's insistence on making Isobel less morally grey than she could be. While some of this is just to keep reader sympathy, as romance heroes get the treatment as well, I think much of it is also to stay within the acceptable boundaries for romance heroines. It's frequently noted in the first few chapters that Isobel only kills or orders kills when she thinks it's morally correct, and she never ever asks of her operatives what she won't do herself. Honestly, given that she's the head of an international organization that overthrows governments, I wanted something more pragmatic and ruthless, especially because the continual insistence on her moral goodness undermines the threat we're supposed to feel from the Committee and undermines her later emotional changes.
Plus, both Killian in this book and the hero of Moon Rise get to be dark dark dark; they're not hampered by anything so petty as a conscience or a moral compass. Why can't Isobel be that way as well, especially since she's in command of guys just like that?
I also suspect that the book starts out with the innocent Mary Curwen specifically so it doesn't completely alienate readers. I don't think Stuart is doing any of this consciously, by the way; I think it's the acceptance of romance tropes within the romance community, something which is nearly impossible to avoid if you're going to be a best-selling (or any-selling) writer. I felt the flashbacks to Mary Curwen could have been completely cut; either that, or they should have been revealed later down the line, when we had gotten a better idea of Isobel's personality. That way, any revelations about Mary Curwen would have actually been revelatory, as opposed to information I didn't care about because I didn't know any of the characters. We should have also gotten more looks at how Mary Curwen turned into Isobel; Isobel's a character who deserves heaps of angsty backstory.
Isobel is, of course, sexually attracted to Killian, and like every romance ever, this sexual attraction scrambles her brains. We mostly get her POV on this, which is different from most romances: we get some Killian POV in the flashbacks, but they're the standard "I am sexually attracted to her so I should kill her so I can do my job!" (substitute "kill" with "ignore" or "get rid of" for non-assassin romances). I was constantly thrown out by how Killian took the lead in nearly everything, despite Isobel having been an assassin for 18 years. Isobel is consistently thrown off by her sexual attraction to Killian; all her memories of him serve to weaken her rather than strengthen her.
The really eye-rolling bit is that we keep being told that she's cold and emotionless and not affected when she clearly is. This book would have been about a thousand times better if Isobel had been just as coldly efficient as Killian in fact, not just in exposition.
Both of them constantly thought about killing the other; unlike in Moon Rise, where I found that deeply disturbing, in this book, I thought it was hot. Much of it was the more balanced distribution of power: cold male assassin thinking about killing innocent young woman just makes me think about codified male privilege and violence against women.
What drew me back into the book was how Killian kept getting the upper hand on Isobel by knowing more about her -- only to find that once she realized this, she regained much of her emotional strength, and not in the fuzzy "Oh, he loves me, how sweet!" way. And though we see much of her emotional turmoil and lack of action, I enjoyed her snappy tongue and how she would frequently come back with things like, "So supposedly I've been waiting all this time just for your touch? Oh woe is me, now I finally seen the light. Except, wait, I'm going to kill you as soon as we get the information we need." (not direct quote).
Also, I love Isobel's last line in the book, which is something like, "Get into bed. I can always kill you tomorrow."
More gender, with spoilers:
So I was incredibly disgruntled to find out that Killian of course knew Mary Curwen/Isobel was alive long before she knew he was alive. And I saw the whole thing about Killian being a CIA agent about a hundred miles away, and only the fact that I was in a romance novel kept me from whapping all the characters on the head. How do they call him the most feared assassin ever when all his assignments are mucked up? I mean, how dumb can they be?
But! I think my favorite moment ever was when Isobel discovers that Killian not only knew she was alive, but also saved her life, brought her to her ex-husband, gave blood to keep her alive, and tracked her through the years. Instead of doing the usual "shock, horror, how dare you" thing, she narrows her eyes and notes she's his weakness, since he won't let himself come while having sex with her because he's too afraid of the vulnerability (I am somewhat dubious of this logic in the real world, but in the romance novel world it sort of works). She then proceeds to give him a blowjob and have hot sex with him, after which he says he loves her but she never says anything back. This is where there should have been way more detail, because the readers should get to see and feel Killian coming to pieces and falling apart, instead of just seeing the aftermath.
In fact, I would love this book just because she never says she loves him (well, aside from the "Get into bed. I can always kill you tomorrow," which I feel does not cut it in the romance novel verse, even though it would be the equivalent of the eternal swearing of devotion in blood in the Saiyuki-verse).
I also love that Isobel shows zero signs of relef when she learns Killian's actually not an evil mass-murderer; instead, she's so pissed off at him that she just lets him wander off, potentially with a mortal wound. And instead of the usual "Let me-the-hero kill him for you so you won't soil your hands," Isobel shoots the villain point blank in the head.
I'd rec this if you like the aforementioned Kinsale, Chase, or Brockway books, even though Ice Storm is the most flawed of them all. That's really unfortunate, because if you squint past all the romance novel trappings, there would be a killer story.
Some day I will get the complete gender inversion of the usual killer alpha male hero and the sweet innocent heroine, and it will be the BEST THING EVER. Till then, I will satisfy myself with books that at least take on romance tropes, if not always successfully.
ETA: corrected horrible grammar errors
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I skimmed the one with the Japanese-American assassin. On the positive side, he is the hero (and is just like all Stuart's heroes, a cold creepy bastard) and there's an evil New Age cult, which I naturally thought was pretty hilarious. The heroine is white. Her Maguffin is a Japanese porcelain piece which her Japanese housekeeper (or something) left her when she was a child.
On the negative, Asian stereotyping (details forgotten) and either a truly stupid plot point or else a HUGE bit of stereotyping, in which the heroine flees into a random noodle restaurant which turns out to be in league with the bad guys chasing her because of either a total coincidence or all Japanese noodle restaurants are in league with that particular group of Japanese-connected bad guys.
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I keep wanting non-Japanese Asians in things. Arrrgh. Also, this Stuart annoyed me by capitalizing Yakuza. It is a total pet peeve, but there you have it.
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But what does that mean for Noodles & Co.? Do the yakuza only own a third of the counter space? Do they fight with the Sicillians and the mac & cheese Americans over who gets to extort and verbally threaten the next customer? Tip jar gets dealt out at gunpoint, I bet.
Sounds like bad continuity, to me. They could easily mention the noodle restaurant earlier in the book to allow for that plot device later.
here via
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Let's see... I have my sort-of romance conversion kit, which also links to
Loretta Chase is very good at writing romances that look standard, but executes the tropes very well. I particularly like Lord of the Scoundrels and Mr. Impossible for their takes on male rakes. As mentioned in the post, Laura Kinsale's Shadowheart does really neat things with the notion of female vulnerability and male strength via sexuality, as does Megan Chance's Fall From Grace. I also like Chance's Candle in the Dark, which also reverses gender roles a little, though not as obviously.
Hope that helps!
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THIS IS SO TRUE.
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Of course, what he does immediately afterward doesn't hurt.
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I need to write this up, as I finished it. I keep not doing it because what actually happened has dissolved in my brain into a mush of love for many characters, hatred for God, and bogglement at the giant flying zombie angel eyeball.
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The best thing is that the giant flying zombie angel eyeball is really almost forgettable when compared to the main storyline.
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Cherryh has a lot of moral ambiguity. RIMRUNNERS is a good one with a tough soldier heroine.
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This lurker thanks you heartily for mentioning it within her hearing. :)
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Some day I will get the complete gender inversion of the usual killer alpha male hero and the sweet innocent heroine, and it will be the BEST THING EVER.
I know of a bunch of manga that touches on this, but the romances don't exactly end well.
Soten No Komori (Bat in a Blue Sky) is a one shot by the Fullmetal Alchemist manga-ka about a cold female assassin who somehow ends up injured and is found by a perky, innocent lord. She tries to leave her past behind. The manga is more about the assassin, but there is a definite romance vibe between her and the lord. I uploaded the manga just in case you haven't read it; click on the link to download.
I'm also not sure if I should rec you the "Anne Freaks", as the female character and the romance subplot might be darker than you're looking for. I'm not sure how you feel about horror, and graphic violence. The manga is a 4 volume seinen horror/thriller, about teenage killers who want to take down the violent cult their parents belonged to. Anna has these charismatic psychopath tendencies, makes the plans, draws in the boys to her agenda, and is very gung ho about violence. Yuri, the main character, is a boy who killed his mom, suffers from nerves and misgivings about violence, but gets drawn in because he's in love with Anna. The last volume could have been gender sporky, but instead did something else. It's definitely horror.
Saikano (roughly translates to My Girlfriend the Ultimate Weapon) is a manga that sorta fits the bill since it's about an innocent civilian teenage boy who turns out to be dating a girl who transforms into a weapon of mass destruction. The series is character based slice of life set in a backdrop of apocalyptic warfare. I'm kinda sporky over the gender stuff. Most reviews I've seen have been positive of the manga and anime, and I seem to be the only person with issues. It's seinen, and 7 volumes. The manga is also very depressing.
Point of No Return is a bad action B-movie from the 1990s where a female assassin gets into a romance with a photographer, and tries to leave her job behind. If you're really desperate for female assassin/male innocent, you can check it out. I think it was based on a French film called "La Femme Nikita" which I haven't seen but heard was better.
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Justine Larbalestier also recced Anne Freaks, so I'm tentatively putting that on my list of things to read, though I may proceed slowly, given that I have very low tolerance for horror.
I've had the first vol. of Saikano (in Jap.) sitting on my shelf for ages precisely because of the weapon of mass destruction thing! But I've been avoiding it because Rachel also has massive issues with the series, so you are not alone!
Oooh! I liked the film "La Femme Nikita," though I didn't like the TV series as much (I had very little patience with Michael's angst), so I may check out the movie. Thanks!
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Anne Freaks starts with Yuri burying his mother's corpse that he killed under a highway overpass. So you might want to factor that in when deciding if the manga's within your horror tolerance levels.
I thought it was just me who had issues with Saikano. It's good to know I'm not the only one.
I remember seeing a couple of episodes of La Femme Nikita. I didn't know Michael had angst, as he seemed to emote as much as a block of wood.
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*snorfle* Oh so true.... Well, that, and he plays the cello (or violin)! In the dark! In the rain! With the windows open!
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(And can't remember name of criminal organisation she ran before she went straight - The Combine?)
(However, suspect the racial politics are entirely dubious throughout.)
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See, this reminded me of _The Princess Bride_, which is a very different image . . .
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