Hoyt, Elizabeth - To Beguile a Beast and To Desire a Devil

[oyceter]

These are books 3 and 4 of Hoyt's Legend of the Four Soldiers quartet, which is about four survivors of a British regiment ambushed by Indians in the not-yet-United-States. (I will get to this rant in a moment.)

To Beguile a Beast - Mrs. Helen Fitzwilliam has finally decided to leave her keeper, the Duke of Lister, but she knows he'll go after her just to get her and his two bastard children back. She ends up trying to persuade naturalist Sir Alistair Munroe to let her stay as his housekeeper, since he desperately needs one. Alistair is the titular beast, as he was scarred and had two fingers cut off during aforementioned ambush. Thankfully, this book has relatively little about the ambush, which meant I could pretend to ignore it so as to not throw the book against a wall. Most of the plot revolves around Helen escaping the Duke of Lister, and amazingly, her two children are not nauseatingly cute. In fact, I actually really liked the very solemn and not at all cute Abigail. I like that the hero is actually scarred, as opposed to the usual "Oh WOES I am UGLY wait no it's only a mild scratch" thing, but I was rather unconvinced by how long the "I am not worthy of your love" thing was dragged out on Alistair's part. Overall, not bad, though I like her Princes trilogy better.

To Desire a Devil - Spoilers and rantiness

Reynaud St. Aubyn, thought to be dead in the first three books, makes a miraculous return and literally falls at the feet of Beatrice Corning, the niece of the man who ended up inheriting his title.

OMG people. OMG. The only reason I finished reading this book instead of chucking it at a wall two or three times was so I could write a giant rant about it. Well, that and it's not good form to damage library property, and thank god I did not actually pay for this, though I regret giving it circulation numbers. Okay, first, the premise of the series is still TORTURED BY INDIANS. I was desperately holding out hope that the French would really be behind it and it wouldn't be quite as bad as I thought, but it is worse!

So as we have learned in the other books, the Wyandot Indians¹ captured the regiment and tortured them, ending with the supposed crucifixion and burning alive of Reynaud. As if that weren't bad enough, we now discover that some other man was crucified and burned while Reynaud was kept behind to be a slave to the Indians. Oh, they treated him like he was part of the family, but he was a slave! He is kept by an older Indian woman who comes to like him so much that she tries to marry him off to another captive in another tribe. But he refuses! And eventually that tribes comes over and massacres the women and her family! So not only have the Indians a) crucified, tortured, burned people and chopped off their fingers, they have b) enslaved the poor British soldiers, c) massacred other Indians, and d) conveniently been massacred so our noble White hero can have even more angst.

Really? No, really?!

I am not conversant in the cultures and histories of various Native nations. So let us just for one moment assume that all Hoyt says about these savage Indians is true. EVEN IF this were the case (and I'm going to make a wild guess and say that it is not the case, or if it is, it is more the exception than the rule), the choice to focus on "savage Indians" and the Indian enslavement of white men and to use that as manpain fodder while the British Empire was already enslaving Native Americans and Africans in large numbers to harvest their plantations and also starting to set up the empire that would wreak so much havoc to so many people... OMGWTFBBQ? SRSLY? And EVEN IF some of the things like thinking of them as savages and whatnot fits in with the mindset of the time, the text still validates that thinking, sets Native people up as torturers, killers, or plot devices to be killed for backstory and thereby furthers almost every trope ever with the exception of loyal Indian sidekick, because Hoyt's Indians aren't even allowed actual page time; writes out everything that was happening to Native people during this time period as assorted European nations were taking over their land and trying to drive them out; and completely trivializes all that history by making it backstory so that the White male hetero cis hero (so rare in fiction these days! So devoid of representation!) can have angst and pain to get over. Because that is what you always do with attempted genocide!

I don't even know what to type, I am so angry!

Furthermore, Beatrice has a childhood friend who had both his legs amputated in the war. I was hoping he would be the hero for the secondary romance and was like, "Hey! PWD in romance!" But no. He exists only to get Reynaud to promise to take care of Beatrice for him, and then he dies off screen to provide random angst for Beatrice.

And if all this weren't bad enough, Reynaud is an asshole (maybe I would have more sympathy for his manpain had it not been caused by, say, TORTURED BY INDIANS), Beatrice puts up with him for no reasons I can discern, the resolution to the mystery of who betrayed the regiment is totally tacked on and not foreshadowed in any of the books, and the terrible treatment of Native people in the book made me retroactively despise the two books in this quartet that I managed to grudgingly like.

In conclusion: One of the worst cases of Skanky Race Issues in romance I have seen in a while, which is saying a lot, given the genre.²

Notes:
¹ Hoyt refers to them as such, rather than as a tribe or a nation.
² Amazingly, I do not hate romance the genre. In fact, I greatly enjoy it most of the time and I generally do not countenance bashing romance as "girly stuff" or "porn for women" or "trash." However, the genre is often heterosexist, ablist, ageist, classist, racist, extremely Western-centric, and sexist despite being written by women, for women, and I feel calling these issues out is by no means bashing.

Comments

[dhobikikutti]

::pets:: I read through your rant even though I knew my reaction from your first description. Sorry you had to be the one to write this up to warn everyone.

[oyceter]

No, the ranting was fun! The reading, not so much.

[saraht]

You might find it interesting to look at John Demos's very readable The Unredeemed Captive for historical context on North American captivity narratives. Some North American tribes did engage in a practice that we would call slave-taking, although they may not have conceived it in quite the same way.

[oyceter]

Cool, thanks for the rec! I do realize some tribes did engage in that practice, but am mostly frustrated with how the Western media focus almost always seems to be on the White captive narrative as opposed to the enslavement of Native people and the like.

[saraht]

Sure, that goes without saying. I just remembered quite enjoying the Demos book (which deals with the captivity narrative as a problematic cultural artifact in its own time) and thought that, if you wanted to know more, you might like to read it.

[oracne]

I had hoped for better from that book.

[oyceter]

I had been hoping for better but expecting the worse, but this was even worse than I had been expecting!

Also, even the romance portions weren't very good.

[oracne]

I sort of read it and put it aside. I hope her next book is more to my taste.

[oyceter]

Yeah, me too!

[heresluck]

Oh, OUCH.

Note to self: NO ELIZABETH HOYT. I have plenty of romance backlist to read.

[oyceter]

I knooow! The sad thing is, I really liked her Serpent Prince. But this quartet is just pure NO.

ranting

[(Anonymous)]

To Desire a Devil - Hey, there's lots of things I finish, if only so I can rant about them in a full and completely informed manner on my blog. Am I right that this book was originally published in 2009? Your description makes it seem like a '90s book, at least.

Re: ranting

[oyceter]

Alas, yes, 2009! November 2009! Boooooo.