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UBC #14: A Brother's Price
Jun. 5th, 2006 08:49 amUBC #14
Spencer, Wen. A Brother's Price. New York: ROC-Penguin, 2005.
Clair is the opposite of noir.
A Brother's Price, like Her Majesty's Dragon, is a very clair book. As most of y'all have probably guessed by now, my preference is for noir. Which doesn't mean I didn't enjoy ABP--because I did--but does mean that there's a limit to how useful it can be for me to talk about, because at a very fundamental level, I'm not in harmony with its goals.
Which is also not the book's problem. It's mine, and I'm well aware of it.
I galloped through ABP with pleasure; I'm just left with the awareness that most of the things I would say about it are predicated on the fact that I'd have taken the basic concept--gender role-reversal in the Wild West with some vaguely medieval trappings to keep the government working--and done something very very different with it. And avoided the category-romance tropes like the plague. Not because there's something "wrong" with them, but because they just don't do it for me. Again, that's on my side of the net, not the book's.
( analysis--possibly spoilery )
ETA: spoilers in comments, also.
Spencer, Wen. A Brother's Price. New York: ROC-Penguin, 2005.
Clair is the opposite of noir.
A Brother's Price, like Her Majesty's Dragon, is a very clair book. As most of y'all have probably guessed by now, my preference is for noir. Which doesn't mean I didn't enjoy ABP--because I did--but does mean that there's a limit to how useful it can be for me to talk about, because at a very fundamental level, I'm not in harmony with its goals.
Which is also not the book's problem. It's mine, and I'm well aware of it.
I galloped through ABP with pleasure; I'm just left with the awareness that most of the things I would say about it are predicated on the fact that I'd have taken the basic concept--gender role-reversal in the Wild West with some vaguely medieval trappings to keep the government working--and done something very very different with it. And avoided the category-romance tropes like the plague. Not because there's something "wrong" with them, but because they just don't do it for me. Again, that's on my side of the net, not the book's.
( analysis--possibly spoilery )
ETA: spoilers in comments, also.
