Unraveled, by Courtney Milan
Sep. 10th, 2014 09:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rowynThis is the third and last book in the Turner series I've been reading. It's also my favorite of the three. The characters are refreshingly forthright about what they want, and there's a lot of good banter. The characters are lovable and their motivations clear and intelligible.
One of the things I like best about Milan's work are its contra-trope facets. This one works against the idea of the "broken hero that only the heroine can fix through the power of LOVE". The male lead in Unraveled had a traumatic childhood, and he's quite plainly traumatized by it. But he's got established coping methods, functions fine in society despite the trauma, and doesn't regard himself as "broken". Neither does the female lead. It's cute.
Another thing: in each of Milan's books, there is at least one point where one of the leads has the opportunity to pick up the Stupid Ball. This is a chance to do something profoundly awful that the protagonist doesn't really want to do. The protagonist is given a handful of quasi-sound justifications for picking up the Stupid Ball. The reader, however, can tell that doing so will damage the relationship between the two protagonists, betray the trust of one of them, and benefit no one in the long term. This will happen around two-thirds of the way through the book, so the reader knows there's still time to patch over the damage from the Stupid Ball, and it's frankly exactly the sort of stupidity one expects in a romance novel. (Like "let's be irrationally jealous of this clearly platonic relationship!") The protagonist will then consider all of the reasons to pick up the Stupid Ball and run with it. And then, the protagonist will go "Nah, forget that, it's obviously a terrible idea." THIS IS SUCH A RELIEF. It's as if your favorite sitcom looked like it was about to use that plotline you hate and you're already cringing in anticipation of how bad it will be, and then it's all "HA FAKE OUT" and the episode is about something good instead.
Unraveled does have a poorly-developed sideplot with a resolution that's simplistic and naive, so I'll mark it down for that. But the central romance is delightful. I'll give this one an 8.5.
One of the things I like best about Milan's work are its contra-trope facets. This one works against the idea of the "broken hero that only the heroine can fix through the power of LOVE". The male lead in Unraveled had a traumatic childhood, and he's quite plainly traumatized by it. But he's got established coping methods, functions fine in society despite the trauma, and doesn't regard himself as "broken". Neither does the female lead. It's cute.
Another thing: in each of Milan's books, there is at least one point where one of the leads has the opportunity to pick up the Stupid Ball. This is a chance to do something profoundly awful that the protagonist doesn't really want to do. The protagonist is given a handful of quasi-sound justifications for picking up the Stupid Ball. The reader, however, can tell that doing so will damage the relationship between the two protagonists, betray the trust of one of them, and benefit no one in the long term. This will happen around two-thirds of the way through the book, so the reader knows there's still time to patch over the damage from the Stupid Ball, and it's frankly exactly the sort of stupidity one expects in a romance novel. (Like "let's be irrationally jealous of this clearly platonic relationship!") The protagonist will then consider all of the reasons to pick up the Stupid Ball and run with it. And then, the protagonist will go "Nah, forget that, it's obviously a terrible idea." THIS IS SUCH A RELIEF. It's as if your favorite sitcom looked like it was about to use that plotline you hate and you're already cringing in anticipation of how bad it will be, and then it's all "HA FAKE OUT" and the episode is about something good instead.
Unraveled does have a poorly-developed sideplot with a resolution that's simplistic and naive, so I'll mark it down for that. But the central romance is delightful. I'll give this one an 8.5.
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no subject
Date: 2014-09-11 12:56 pm (UTC)1. Male/female or male/male or something else? (Strangely don't see a lot of F/F ones, but sometimes there's a triangle)
2. Power relationship (Y/N?) (i.e. is one of them royalty/in charge/etc and the other a pauper/poor/etc)
3. Age difference? (Y/N) (I'm not a huge fan of the 'ingenue helps exhausted, older lover revive' thing)
4. Expected plot? (stuff like 'prostitute is rescued, woman is saved from financial ruin, etc')
5. Era?
6. Unexpected stuff? (Cross-racial, for instance, or were-creatures that aren't common. I saw were-cockatrice the other day. o_O )
Once I tick off the boxes, I check to see if they add up to something I usually enjoy, and if they do, I go for it.
no subject
Date: 2014-09-11 03:30 pm (UTC)Romance novel blurbs are especially bad, because they tell me nothing that I want to know about the story, and what clues they do give are often misleading. For example, the blurb for Unveiled makes Ash sound like a monster and Margaret sound like an idiot for liking him at all. I would've expected a "hate at first sight" novel from it, where the characters can't stand each other and get together only due to intense sexual attraction: one of my least-favorite romance novel tropes. But none of those things are true of Unveiled.
The things I look for in a romance are more like:
* characters who are interesting people with lives outside of the romance
* humor and wit in the character interactions
* romantic interactions that are about the protagonists discovering one another's good qualities
* protagonists that enjoy each other's company
and some others that are even harder to quantify. For instance, I like the trope of "one protagonist accidentally harms the other, and then takes action to repair the damage and to comfort the other protagonist".The scene in Unraveled where Smite explains why he reacted so badly when Miranda touched his face was my favorite in the book for this reason. From the blurb, I might think that Unveiled would do this too, but it doesn't. It's just not something people mention in blurbs.
Like Michelle Sagara put it, 'it has to fit the very narrow slice of my emotional need', and it's too narrow for me to find filters that work for locating it.
Though if I could, I'd probably get sick of it and want something else. :D
no subject
Date: 2014-09-12 03:54 pm (UTC)If I'm going to read any sort of "blurb" about a story, I'd prefer it to be from a third party who's giving his or her spoiler-free assessment of the story (after actually reading it, I hope). That's pretty hard to get shy of personal recommendations, though.
As for the personal recommendation part, I'd say 75% of the books I've read in the last few years have been because Gwendel got it and said, "Here, read this." (I am not counting comics & graphic novels in this. For some reason, our taste in comics and graphic novels varies more widely than our tastes in conventional written novels.)
no subject
Date: 2014-09-12 04:32 pm (UTC)I do not read romance novels, per se. (I've watched a few romance ANIME with Gwendel, though.) I confess that I am still interested in the romance angle of a book.
I do not like "slap-slap-kiss-kiss" romances in stories. I vaguely recall some joke being made in one of those "When I'm an Evil Overlord..." checklists being along the lines for watching to see if a male and female adventurer enter the kingdom, if they appear to intensely HATE each other, then to see to it that they are killed immediately, because they're obviously destined to fall in love and defeat the Evil Overlord in the process. If they actually already like each other, then they've probably got some OTHER Evil Overlord they're already on a quest to defeat, and with any luck they'll just pass through this kingdom uneventfully.
Or something like that. Sorry, I couldn't guess at the magic keywords to find a handy Google link to supplement my spotty memory.
I confess that I DO tolerate a certain amount of discord between the future romantic interests -- like, they have different viewpoints about how to tackle a problem, or different values, or maybe they're rivals but they have RESPECT for each other. I suppose this might be influenced by my own upbringing, as my parents very often differ with each other, and LOUDLY, on a lot of not-inconsequential issues, and yet I don't doubt for a moment that they still love each other.
But I am so sick of the TV/movie cliche where a man and woman are calling each other names and practically screaming bloody murder right in each others' faces and then suddenly (oh surprise!) they mash faces together, and possibly even commence disrobing. Any "resolution" to their disagreement is apparently only possible by the POWER OF HORMON-- er, I mean, THE POWER OF TWOO WUV. (Which seems to mean, "one party shall acquiesce to the demands of the other, but still occasionally snark about it.")
Considering how often I complain about things, this is probably no surprise, but I can probably more readily identify what I DO NOT LIKE in romance better than what I like. ;)
no subject
Date: 2014-09-12 04:33 pm (UTC)I just finished reading "Magic Kingdom for Sale" by Terry Brooks last evening. (Why? It was in the Goodwill for a buck.)
Our protagonist is a widower from the mundane world who, through contrived and poorly-presented means, ends up buying a ticket to a super-generic magical fantasy-land. And one night he goes bathing in a river, and there's this beautiful girl bathing there, and he just feels this URGENT NEED for her, and she claims, "Oh, prophecy dictated that I bathe here every night and then pledge myself to the first man who saw me thus," and ... ARGH.
There is no chemistry here. Past this point, the impossibly-attractive fairy girl throws herself at the resistant-yet-obviously-intrigued guy ("We are DESTINED!") until he relents. What are her interests? What does she do with her life? Does she even HAVE a life outside of this so-called romance? I dunno. She's a fairy. She does whatever fairies and bears do in the woods, for all I know. And the author tells us she's impossibly attractive, so that should be enough, I guess. Granted, she's a fairy, and she turns into a TREE every now and then, so that's kind of cool, I guess, but that's a novelty, not the basis upon which to build a lifetime commitment.
I think I would've respected the story more if he'd just said "No!" and stuck with it. (Do romance novels ever end with the two main romantically-eligible characters NOT getting together?) It didn't help that the cast of characters was so small, and -- aside from the arbitrarily-wicked witch (who struck me as a much more interesting character) that he only finally met toward the end of the book -- she was the only female character specified to be around.
I think the problem is when a "romance" is presented and I just get the sense that this romance is just a short-sighted wish-fulfillment for one party or the other. One party can be the most handsome or most beautiful, and there can be plenty of low-lidded eyes and short breaths and mashing of faces, and I'm simply not going to CARE. How are they going to get on together further down the road? Do they have a future together? Do they have any common interests (and "each other" DOES NOT COUNT)? How long until one party is dreadfully BORED of the other? Is one just destined to be a recurring hostage that the other has to rescue all the time? (Okay, that's more a concern in fantasy/sci-fi/superheroics than in your typical romance, I'm sure. ;) )
no subject
Date: 2014-09-12 08:27 pm (UTC)The only kind that's even more annoying is the "we hate each other but are going to have a relationship based solely on sexual attraction". UGH. Just NO. I stopped reading the Gail Carringer "*less" books because the protagonists' relationship was too much like this. I want my protagonists to love each other, not just lust each other.
What I think of as the "romance genre" never ends with the main pair deciding it won't work out, because I define the romance genre as "the characters get together and live happily ever after." There are otherwise romance-centric books that do end this way, though.
no subject
Date: 2014-09-12 08:48 pm (UTC)Yeah, that makes sense. Just because a story happens to have a romance in it does not mean it belongs in the Romance genre, any more than "The Cat Who Saw Stars" (from Lilian Jackson Braun's silly "Cat Who..." mystery series) would qualify as Science Fiction just because there's some cheesy implication of UFOs in the background. :)