fffriday | Entries tagged with fffriday

On Saturday afternoon, on the bus ride home, I finished The Traitor Baru Cormorant, because I couldn't wait until I got home to reach the end, despite a long history of reading-induced car sickness. It was totally worth it.

The Traitor Baru Cormorant is all fantasy politics. There's no magic or fairies or prophecies, just Seth Dickinson's invented world and the titanic machinations of Empire. And it is electric. Tentatively, I'd make a comparison to The Goblin Emperor, except that where TGE is about how Maia, completely unprepared for his role, is thrust into a viper's nest of politics, Baru Cormorant is about how Baru has painstakingly taught herself the ways of the empire and enters into the game fully prepared to rewrite the rules to her liking.

Dickinson creates a wonderfully believable world. The Empire of Masks—popularly known as the Masquerade—is sickeningly plausible, with their soft conquests of money and ideas backed by a highly-trained and well-equipped military. The Masquerade is not content to conquer land—it must conquer minds, people. It is relentless in its push to force its colonies and territories to adopt its ways of thinking, to the point of dictating who may and may not marry based on their bloodlines. With this comes a heaping dose of homophobia, frequently enforced on cultures who had formerly been relaxed or even accepting of queer identities and relationships. This presents a specific problem for Baru, who is the daughter of a mother and two fathers, and who is herself a deeply closeted lesbian.

The story makes use of incredibly mundane tools in its schemes, something that also rings realistic. It's not all backstabbing, murder, and blackmail—at one point, a serious political threat is nullified through currency inflation. Baru, who becomes an imperial accountant, is in a prime position to use these seemingly dull tools to marvelous effect. Many schemes are strangled in the cradle, such that only the plotter and the defeater are even aware that they existed. But the game goes on.

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rocky41_7

On Monday's outbound commute I finished the audiobook for Even Though I Knew the End by C.L. Polk. This is a supernatural/fantasy noir romance and it does pack a lot of all three of those things into its brief 4-hour runtime.

This book relies heavily on stock film noir tropes—the veteran down-and-out private (paranormal) investigator (here a lesbian, Helen, our protagonist) who drinks too much and is haunted by past mistakes, a mysterious and sexy female client with a unique case, and "just one last" job before the PI plans to quit and retire with a beloved romantic partner. I didn't find them overused—and seeing them reworked to queer and female characters was fun—but other readers may find them too worn out even here.

Because the book is so short, it moves along at a very rapid pace. The whole thing takes place over the course of two days—the final two days before Helen's soul debt is called due and she finally has to pay the price of her warlock bargain. In this way, any rush felt appropriate, since it fit both the size of the novel and the context of Helen's urgency to get this last job done before she has to pay up.

The characters weren't super developed, but again—4-hour runtime. They're a little stock character-y, but not total cardboard cut-outs. It was disappointing for me to see Helen make the same mistake at the end of the book that she did prior to the start, as if she hadn't really learned anything, but since the novel ends promptly after that, the story never has to reckon much with it.

I was relieved that Edith, Helen's girlfriend, wasn't just the damsel in distress/goal object for Helen, which I was a bit worried about in the beginning. Edith has secrets and goals of her own.

Overall, the book was fine, and it entertained me well enough for a few days. Nothing extraordinary here, but nothing objectionable either. I will say I think keeping it short worked best for this book—I think drawing it out might have only weakened it. A fun little twist on a typical noir novel.

Crossposted to

books and my main

lesbiangalatea

Here is the link to my review and recommendation of the lesser known Japanese horror movie with lesbian elements, X-Cross! lesbiangalatea.dreamwidth.org/1708.html

The poster for the movie X-Cross, featuring a woman in a lolita dress wielding twin scissors and a bloody title above her.

The poster for the movie X-Cross, featuring a woman in a lolita dress wielding twin scissors and a bloody title above her.

oursin

Posted with some commentary over at my own journal: Inside a Secret Lesbian Sex Toy Smuggling Ring: In the 80s, Thrilling Bits was clandestinely selling dildos, vibrators and banned queer erotica – right under the nose of customs.

definitely_not_an_alb

This is one of those fantasy books that is inexplicably marketed with three vague lines basically everywhere, so have an actual dust jacket blurb up front:

Eadaz du Zāla uq-Nāra of the Priory of the Orange tree has been sent undercover to the far-away court of Inys to protect Queen Sabran Berethnet the Ninth in secret. Sabran, young and unwilling to marry, is suffering under the burdens of her office; to be not just the Queen of a country, but also the religious head of three countries, direct descendant of the saviour and founder of Virtuedom, living seal against an unspeakable evil and future mother of the next Berethnet. Sabrans and Eads shared close friend Arteloth Beck has recently disappeared; he and his friend Kit are on a mission to the draconic nation of Yscalin. In the East, Tané, a village orphan chosen by the gods, is fighting for her place in the Clan Miduchi, the famed sea fighters and dragon riders that protect Seiiki from pirates and evil firebreathers both. She crosses path with Sabran’s denounced, exiled and bereft former court alchemist who seeks the secret of eternal life. All of them live in the shadow of an era ending and an old threat to all humanity, the Nameless One, ruler of wyrms, rising once again.

Priory of the Orange Tree is a sprawling Pseudo-Arthuriana/Mythical Epic Fantasy novel with an appropriately fraught, clandestine courtly-chivalric love story and at its centre. It's over 800 pages long, so it take a while for anyone to actually kiss, and it plainly is a high fantasy, not a romance novel, so I wouldn't read it solely for any promised relationships.

Less formally, I described it over in my more in-depth review on my blog as having everything: giant evil dragons, good wise dragons, horse-girl dragon riders, lady knights, identity shenanigans, chivalric knights and dames, secret orders of lady fighters, lesbians with swords, pirate ladies, tragic romances, tragic bromances, non-tragic romances, secret romances, chivalric romances, ancient horrors and also a giant flying tsundere weasel.

My main complaints/(non-cw) caveats are that if you love Tané in the beginning ... well, she gets way less plot/page-time/attention than she deserves, which is a shame and secondly that despite being an 800+ page door stopper, a lot of locations and plot points did not get the breathing room they imo needed.

( Some content warnings )

oursin

Posted at my own blog: post re fashion historian's blog on the history of lesbian style.

oursin

Posted here: an early real-life instance of seething passions in a girls' school.

oursin

I have posted here about a fascinating seventeenth century romantic liaison between Constance Aston Fowler and Katherine Thimelby, who subsequently became her sister-in-law, and to whom she remained tied in bonds of affection throughout their lives.

oursin

Posted in my own DW: the saga of Sisterwrite bookshop, set up in Islington, North London, in 1978. A major centre of feminist and lesbian culture of the period - the account also gives a wider picture of that place and time and what it was like then - preinternet and very different.

kore

I recommended four femslash stories, all Dottie Underwood/Peggy Carter from Agent Carter, for the

ssrconfidential fic exchange at my DW.

oursin

Recommendation of this fantasy sequence posted here.

oursin

Posted here: Digitisation of Radclyffe Hall's papers

oursin

Having recently had occasion to think about them - and their often forgotten devoted maidservant Mary Caryll - I have posted about the Ladies of Llangollen, famed historical icons of romantic female friendship.