Duran, Meredith - Written on Your Skin

[oyceter]

This related to Bound by Your Touch in that the heroes know each other, but they barely show up in each other's stories (I like that, although YMMV).

British spy Phineas Granville meets American flibbertidget Mina Masters in Hong Kong (why all the "exotic" settings WHY?), where she saves his life at some cost to her own. Four years later, Phin wants out of the spy game, but Mina is in trouble, and he's the only person she can think of to go to for help.

Thankfully for my blood pressure, the book gets out of Hong Kong fairly quickly, so I can not have British colonialism shoved in my face again. That said, there are still mentions of Phin's older spy missions, all of which are exactly as imperialist as you might think and focus on his white man angst instead of the brown people being screwed over, but at least it's not the main plot. It's so sad that nowadays, I almost prefer that romances stay all white and all in America or Western Europe and ignore the POC there, because when they don't, there's so much fail. I managed to not think about it so I could enjoy the book, but it's still there.

Anyway! With all that in mind, I actually loved this. Mina is an excellent heroine: she is stunningly gorgeous and knows it and uses it to her advantage, she detests being caged, and she is incredibly smart. One of the most frustrating yet most rewarding parts of the book is watching Phin find this out. At first, he suspects her of pretty much everything, leading to some standard "I loom over you to threaten you and make you talk" scenes, but Mina won't have any of it. I loved her description of one of their kisses, in which she mentally notes that it's very skilled, but forced seduction is both boring and predictable.

She has constructed an entire facade that almost everyone buys into because no one, not even Phin at first, believes she could be as intelligent as the evidence shows. I was so happy when she calls Phin out on how he assumed someone had to be behind her because of course she couldn't possibly have done it herself.

I also love her entire brainless bombshell routine, as it feeds into my love of the Scarlet Pimpernel fop-hiding-something trope. Here's Mina telling Phin of when a priest ran over her dog Mongol and she used it to blackmail the priest for chocolate:

"Blackmail? We called it a friendly agreement. By the end of the year, I wished I had another terrier for him to kill. But not really," she added quickly. "Wouldn't that be too bad of me! I much preferred Mongol to chocolate. Dogs are always much better than chocolate, of course, because they're alive." She paused to frown. "Then again, if one counts mold, I suppose some of the chocolate was also alive in the end... the cherry-filled ones, you understand; I never liked cherries. Well, it's all rather confusing."

After Phin gets over his misunderstanding, he turns out to be a rather nice hero, even though I still wanted to bash him over the head in the final conflict. I liked how he actually bothers to listen to Mina, that he understands her jokes and what it means for her to call his body "beautiful" and to comment "Why you're a pocket Venus write large, Ashmore."

Sex-wise, I wish Duran had gone farther. I feel bad for pushing for dominant heroines in every single romance review I do ever, given that it's not for everyone, but there's just such a lack of them! I can still count the number of dominant heroines on one hand. It was especially frustrating because Mina clearly gets off on it in an earlier scene: she's bored until she makes Phin lose control, backs him up against a wall, and marks him. She also makes a move to blindfold him and possibly tie him up later, but then Duran turns the tables on her. I did appreciate Mina thinking that even blindfolded and tied up, she was still choosing what to give and what not to, but it was so close! I'm so frustrated by how almost all the romances I read never have the hero tied up, or even if they do, they still manage to give him control. Even with these complaints, Duran still manages to pack character and relationship development into the sex scenes, which impressed me given how hard it is to do.

And as mentioned previously, the issue of control isn't a passing one for the book. Mina has fought tooth and nail to control her own life, which is one reason why I would have liked to see more of that in the sex, as well as why I was so annoyed by the final conflict and how it's all about Phin's issues and resolving them instead of Mina's.

In conclusion: I loved this, even though I wanted it to go farther and wished it hadn't had scenes in Hong Kong. I'm also extremely frustrated, because Duran is clearly a good writer doing interesting things, but she also seems to be very into the whole "exotic" setting with white people frolicking about, which means I will probably avoid many of her books. (I couldn't even get past the first chapter of Duke of Shadows because it pissed me off so much.) These settings are not exotic, they are not backdrop, they have people who live there and speak the language and grew up there and have relatives there. And the time period these books take place in is one that devastated the places being used as mere stage settings, these places that are people's homes.

Comments

[daedala]

Don't read the new Lorretta Chase! Don't! Save yourself!

Or if you must, buy the stupid thing, because destroying library books is tacky.

I bought it without reading the back cover, and damn do I regret that. It's going to be awful. (Plucky White Slave Harem Girl Returns to England a Virgin. No, I'm not joking.)

[oyceter]

I saw the back cover copy on her website when I first heard she had a new book out and was SO DISAPPOINTED. I just. OH LORETTA CHASE NO. I understand your attachment to Dorothy Dunnett! But it does not mean you have to keep doing the Middle Eastern harm thing OMG.

[daedala]

I am kind of embarrassed in that I really liked The Sandalwood Princess. But I feel better when I remember that I mostly just loved the hero and heroine and ignored the rest. Scarlet Pimpernel the butler! I mean, damn.

I like your Freudian slip there. :)

[oyceter]

Scarlet Pimpernel the butler? ... do I want to know?

Haha! I missed that typo, but yes, very appropriate!

[daedala]

About Sandalwood Princess? Probably not. Adorably cute superspy is trying to recover many-times-stolen artifact which was given to heroine (he steals it from her, she steals it back, la la la), who has returned to England, and he gains access to her household by being hired as a butler and organizing her life in a very helpful, wifely way.

It also has a Mystical Wise Indian Princess, much exoticization, and white (or mostly white) people acting against a backdrop of exotic and eccentric brown folk.

As a major plus, I don't recall them acting against a backdrop of horror and pain; there are no wars and I don't think anyone dies, though I may be misremembering. It's more the cute-and-fuzzy side of Colonialism, which is obnoxious and wrong but doesn't strike me as quite as exploitative.

Though I may just be making excuses, because I really loved the main characters and their relationship. And I read when I was stupider than I am now.

[daedala]

It is worse than you imagine, I'm guessing. It was worse than I imagined. *throws book*

[daedala]

Er, if you want more details on the badness, let me know. I am almost to the point where I might be able to be coherent.

On the fluff-angst scale, it is somewhere in the middle. But the fail is strong in this one. In some ways I find it worse than the first Duran, which is saying something.

[oyceter]

Oh noes! Tell, tell! Although with spoiler text if necessary.

Using the term "white slavery" unironically is an automatic FAIL

[daedala]

None of the problems are really spoilery. They're just stupid and bad.

You know how most romances are kind of more like, "My Stockholm Syndrome, let me show you it!"? This one is far too much the other way around: the heroine was stalked by Evil Arabs and sold by her maid into white slavery when she was twelve, forcibly married to the favored-yet-impotent (!) son of a Pasha, and none of this has impinged upon her plucky English girl psyche. No PTSD, no distrust of servants, no evidence of any contact with another culture -- except for the baths. She likes taking baths. That is something modern people like about Muslim culture at the time, so therefore baths are ok! Oh, and asking the hero to marry her within five minutes of meeting him and promising in front of her family to provide him all of the pleasures she has been taught to provide. But never actually provided. Because, you know, see above "impotent."

In Muslim countries, women are totally, totally subjugated in all ways, and she is so much more free in England. Also, all those prostrations to her superiors in the harem mean she was able to give THE MOST AMAZING curtsey to the Queen, because she is so flexible. Ahem.

Because of her experience in the harem, particularly the scheming wives and concubines and eunuchs, she is the ne plus ultra of domestic managers and rights the hero's household for him, because he ignores everything his servants do as long as he doesn't have to deal with it. She is also fully able to read English account books despite not having been in England since she was twelve.

Hero (I use the term advisedly) and heroine (ditto) are both overcome with lust repeatedly, to the point of heavy petting in public places (and it would have gone further than heavy petting if her sister had not started hitting them with an umbrella).

Oh, and by the way, the sisters are treated very poorly in the narrative. They are set up as stereotypical screeching hens who are SO WORRIED about their reputation and have no respect or love for their sister except for the jewels she has brought with her etc. etc. And yet, if my sister found some guy climbing down my dress in broad daylight in Hyde Park, I'd hope she'd stop him, even by hitting him with an umbrella; this is treated as a ridiculous, hysterical interruption. Because, you see, the heroine can take care of herself, and the sister is just a busybody prude. (Perhaps Hyde Park was a hotbed of heterosexual shenanigans in the 18th century. I find this unlikely, though.)

So, we have a 12-year-old white girl being stalked by white slavers in the hope that she will cure the impotence of the Pasha's favorite son. We have a girl who spent her life from 12 in a harem and yet seems wholly untouched (both literally and figuratively) except when it is useful to make her a) more sympathetic to modern readers who bathe and b) amusingly sympathetic, as the marriage proposal above or the super-duper curtsey. We have a wholly stereotyped view of Muslim countries and the place of Muslim women in them -- I do not pretend to know what is correct, but I can tell that this is total bullshit and feeds into the "we must rescue the Afghani women by bombing them" type of crap we've been hearing lately.

I tend to draw a distinction between "how people of the time would treat this" and "how the author treats this." So I'm not dinging her on having her characters say things like "Mohammedan," because it is (I think) period. Having the heroine popularly caricatured as "The Harem Girl" also seemed reasonable. However, her not being much affected by her experiences does not seem reasonable. (Hell, it would even have been ok for her to think women in the harem were totally subjugated if the text supported a more nuanced view and indicated she was unreliable -- but no, she is a Reliable Narrator. Remember how Jessica in LoS was super-smart and figured out everything that was going on? She is in that mold of reliability. She's right even when she ought to be wrong.)

The hero's emo angst about his household was pathetically stupid and privileged, but not racefail specifically, and anyway that probably gets into spoiler territory. He has more reasonable angst about the deaths of various family members.

There is a crappy "put the heroine in danger" plot with a lot of classism.

Re: Using the term "white slavery" unironically is an automatic FAIL

[oyceter]

Oh.... dear. I mean, I had suspected as much from the back cover copy but still! OH LORETTA CHASE NO!

Re: Using the term "white slavery" unironically is an automatic FAIL

[daedala]

It was just... horrifying, in a "why are you writing so badly?" kind of way! And I really liked her previous book.

My reaction to these sorts of things is always to add to my List of Books to Pretend that I Will Someday Write. (I probably will write. Just... I feel better about owning my wannabewriterieness. Graduate school comes first, ya know?) Heroine-as-child gets lost in an Arab country (don't ask me to be specific now, I am brainstorming)! The evil nice Arabs try to find her family and home! The British Embassy is uninterested in a Random Foundling, or there is some paperwork problem, or something! So she is taken care of and treated well by their standards (which I do not mean are substandard, just different), and then someone Recognizes her and "saves" her by kidnapping her back to her family in London, and everyone is horrified that she has gone native while she is horrified at their kidnapping her and their mad English customs... You know, this could really work. All my best story ideas come from bitching about how UR DOIN IT RONG.

BTW this is not to say that a book using the term "white slavery" ironically cannot be full of fail. :) But if the author is in freaking earnest, it's automatic.

Re: Using the term "white slavery" unironically is an automatic FAIL

[daedala]

Huh. This was longer than I thought now that I look at it on a screen. Should I post it to the booklog I never post to?

Re: Using the term "white slavery" unironically is an automatic FAIL

[oyceter]

Yeess doooo it!!!!!