Smart Bitches Trashy Books | All of the romance, none of the bullshit.

So at the end of Book One, we find out Our Very Own Temeraire is actually a Celestial dragon, the most rare Chinese breed of all. The British are quite pleased, because Celestials have the power of Divine Wind--and no, it’s not the same thing as Savage Thunder, though both involve the forceful expelling of copious amounts of air. The Chinese, however, are rather less than thrilled when they find out that not only has one of their precious Celestials fallen into a commoner’s hands (according to tradition, only members of the imperial family are suitable companions for them), but he has been pressed into military service, too. A delegation, headed by the hostile Prince Yongxing, is sent to England to retrieve Temeraire and return him to his rightful station.

Except Temeraire has his own thoughts about that, and he refuses to leave without Laurence and his crew. And so Our Merry Band of Adventurers depart the shores of England for the Orient on a massive dragon transport ship. There, Laurence and Temeraire begin to learn about the great differences between the treatment of dragons in the West vs. the treatment of dragons in China, as Yongxing is not especially shy about attempting to woo Temeraire away from Laurence’s side. Adventures abound, as the ship encounters a hostile ship, storms, attempts on Laurence’s life (...or ARE THEY? Perhaps Laurence was just being being paranoid! *dun dun duuuuun*) and even a wild creature of the deep (which was an especially exciting episode that led to some interesting, if rather perfunctory, explorations on the nature of consciousness and sentience).

And all that’s before they get to China, where the real politicking and maneuvering begins, and where Temeraire and crew have an opportunity to witness the rather more progressive state of dragon rights in China. Between that and first-hand observations of the treatment of human slaves, Temeraire becomes quite the advocate for dragon rights, with Laurence agreeing with his assessments but feeling a great deal more cautious and less optimistic about the enterprise. Will Laurence discover who’s trying to kill him? Will Temeraire wish to return to England after experiencing for himself the disparity in the treatment of dragons? Will the Chinese court relent in their attempts to separate Laurence and Temeraire? How many of Temeraire’s crew will remain at the end of the book? Tune in to My Brother the Big-Ass Dragon.

This particular installment suffers from certain classic second-book issues: we get to know the characters better, but the action slows down, and a lot of the book feels like set-up for future books and not just a story in its own right. Don’t get me wrong; it’s cracking good fun, but it wasn’t quite as satisfying as the first book, and I was actually able to put it down for hours at a time, instead of risking life and limb by pulling it out and reading it in the car when traffic came to a standstill on I-5.

Its attempts to engage in a conversation about natural rights also felt somewhat half-baked; the implications of the status of dragons in China are interesting, but not adequately explored.

“But Candy,” you cry, “Give it a break! It’s a freaking fantasy novel!”

Well, yeah. Which makes it an excellent venue for this sort of conversation. Speculative fiction, with its rampant “what-if"-ism, has spawned some of the best fictional treatments of thorny political and philosophical issues, from 1984 to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? to Oryx and Crake. I’m sure the conversation will continue and improve in future books; it’s just that its treatment in this particular installment felt slight, when it wasn’t being a touch ham-handed.

However, enough with the niggling and the nagging, because there’s quite a bit to love about this book. Novik continues to do a stellar job with her characters. Laurence continues to unbend, and Temeraire continues to charm--so much so that I wish Novik would give us some passages from his point of view, though limiting the POV strictly to Laurence provides a certain power to the narrative as well. Secondary characters like Granby (on whom I have a small crush, I have to confess) are also being developed quite nicely.

Her attention to detail and narrative voice are also excellent. Her portrayal of 19th-century China is especially detailed, fascinating and even-handed, even as she convincingly filters the experience through the lens of Laurence’s point-of-view, with all its attendant preconceptions and cultural biases. That takes some doing.

All in all, if you loved His Majesty’s Dragon, this sequel is worth reading, even if not quite as crackastic as its predecessor, and there’s quite the doozy of a set-up for the third book, Black Powder War. As far as I’m concerned right now, Novik can’t write these fast enough for me.

So, to sum this book up--not that it can in any way do it justice: In the alternate universe in which His Majesty’s Dragon is set, dragons are real, and have been tamed and selectively bred, mostly for military purposes. When Captain Will Laurence of the Reliant captures the French frigate Amitié, he doesn’t expect its crew to put up such a fierce fight--and he certainly doesn’t expect to find a dragon egg in the hold. England’s Aerial Corps is always in need of more dragon stock, and the egg will increase the bounty money he will receive for the captured frigate by quite a bit, but when he finds out from the ship’s doctor that the egg is on the verge hatching, with the ship weeks away from land, his elation turns into trepidation. Dragons need to be harnessed and bonded to a human as soon as possible after hatching, or they run the risk of becoming feral. There are no aviators on the ship--and nobody eager to step up to the role, either, aviators being pariahs of sorts in His Majesty’s service, with most of them being sent away to train with dragons at seven years of age, and forever tied by their bond to their dragons to live life apart from most of society.

Laurence comes up with a makeshift solution: they pick the aviator-to-be by lot. What he doesn’t expect, however, is that the dragon has his own ideas about who he wants to be harnessed to when he hatches--he completely ignores the chosen officer, and instead picks Laurence.

Laurence is far from excited at this development. His father, Lord Allendale, is a stern sort with very definite ideas about suitable occupations for his son, and Laurence had already earned his ire by daring to join the Royal Navy against his wishes. Being an aviator will put Laurence beyond the pale, not to mention end all his hopes with a certain young woman with whom he’s had an understanding of sorts for years.

Laurence soon finds out, however, that Temeraire provides more than ample compensation for his losses, as the two of them truly bond and are initiated into the world of the Aerial Corps. Plenty of adventures await them, as they discover just what sort of dragon Temeraire is, and Laurence learns some interesting truths about aviators, the aviator-dragon bond and dragons themselves.

I find it difficult to describe how delightful I found this book. Intellectually, I can pinpoint a few niggling flaws. There’s a predictability to the progression of the story, for instance--the moment I was introduced to certain characters, I immediately saw the trajectory of their fates, and pretty much all my expectations were proven right. And the shape of human history and society is a little bit too similar to our current reality for my tastes, given the huge implications of living with another sentient species capable of learning and speaking human languages with fluency.

But the less-than-stellar bits are more than compensated for by Novik’s deft hand at crafting a rollicking adventure story--and more than that, her way of creating believable characters who charm and infuriate and burrow their way into my heart and my brain. (Mmmmm, brain parasite comparisons FOR THE WIN!) Temeraire is a delight; he’s charming, independent, funny and hugely intelligent--in many ways, his intellect outstrips Laurence’s. And Laurence himself is a breath of fresh air. Romancelandia is populated with rogues--in Dungeons and Dragons terms, most heroes are either Chaotic Good or Chaotic Neutral. Laurence, on the other hand, is just a touch stiff-rumped (though it unstiffens somewhat as the book proceeds, and we all know how much I loves me some unstiffened rump); he loves his proprieties, and he’s a big proponent of order and discipline. He comes across as an utterly convincing product of his time and upbringing, and I hadn’t realized how heartily sick I was of the alpha hero who forges his own path, devil take the hindmost, until I encountered Laurence.

But the best part of the book by far is the unfurling of Laurence and Temeraire’s relationship. The dragon-aviator bond is all-consuming--even mildly creepy at times, when you see the lengths to which some captains will go to ensure their dragon is taken care of--and Novik does an excellent job of portraying how that relationship develops, and making you feel that bond, that camaraderie and affection.

I said of Neverwhere that it made me read like a child, with a sort of captivated, wide-eyed wonder and an utter belief in the universe the author has created. His Majesty’s Dragon inspires the same in me. A good indicator of how well a fantasy world has worked for me is how much I wish the world were real after I close the covers and turn the final page. By that measure alone, this book is a resounding success. If you haven’t read this series yet, the fuck you waiting for? FUCKIN’ GO. READ IT. You won’t be sorry--that is, unless you for some perverse reason don’t enjoy reading things that are, y’know, UTTERLY GODDAMN AWESOME.

Candy: Working for the Devil is much more polished than Dark Watchers, which was the first book of Saintcrow’s that I read and reviewed--and funnily enough, the hero of that book was named Dante, too. Ultimately, Working for the Devil was too flawed a read for me to give it anything more than a B-. Why? Mostly because Dante got on my tits too much. It’s not that I didn’t like her, because I don’t have to like somebody in order to read about them--or even root for them (witness my love of the Flashman novels). Mostly, it was because I didn’t find her convincing as a bad-ass warrior and martial artist, and here’s why:

She’s too angry.

No, more than that, she’s utterly lacking in any sort of calm. She keeps making assumptions and turning into Berserker Woman Who Will CUT CHOO LIKE A PIG, BITCH. Now, that could work to keep her alive for a while--a good long while, even, especially if you have the psi advantages Dante does--but I don’t buy that she can be THAT GOOD. The best martial artists learn to work with their surroundings and to go with the flow. One of the cornerstones is striving for clearheadedness--and Dante is anything but. She’s a royal mess, and she spends all the book literally in knots from stress and fucked-up headspace issues.

I mean, I can see why she’s a ball of neuroses, based on the glimpses of the past we’re provided, but her consistent inability to communicate clearly and her refusal to listen reminded me of those feisty old-skool heroines. She’s not stupid, she’s just impatient in a really irritating way, and I felt that her frustrating refusal to just slow down and listen was sometimes a way to artificially prolong the conflict.

Another problem I had with the story was how I felt strangely distant from Dante. I had ready access to her mental and physical space, but not really her emotional space. I find this difficult to explain, because on looking back, it’s difficult for me to pinpoint what exactly is keeping me from how she feels, because this is a first-person narrative, and it’s not as if Dante held back on what she really thought about things, even when she was obviously being an unreliable narrator.

It’s one thing for me to not like a character. It’s another for me to not be convinced by her. And for large portions of the book, Dante just didn’t strike me as being true, and having her be the sole voice of the book started to grate on me after a while.

Oh, and Japhrimel’s reason for falling in lurrrrve with Dante? Didn’t totally buy it. What he did was wildly romantic, but there was too much telling ("You treated me like an equal!") and not enough showing, especially given the incredibly short time span of the book--the bulk of the action takes place in, what, a week? Dante was a dick to Japhrimel for a good proportion of that time, and when she finally softened up--well, I just didn’t buy that a demon, and not just any demon, but SATAN’S RIGHT HAND AND GODDAMN ASSASSIN, would soften up after such a short time, and for so little. If we’d had Jaf’s perspective, I might’ve bought into the scenario, but on the other hand, the emotional punch of what he did wouldn’t have been as great.

So really, if we’d had more time with Dante and Jaf to see their relationship develop, and if Dante hadn’t been such a stressed-out freakball, this book could’ve easily been in the A territory. Because it was a pretty good adventure yarn, and it says quite a bit that I was able to finish it in only a few days despite not being convinced by Dante as a character.

Sarah: I concur about the book’s readability. It definitely kept me interested, even as it kept me irritated.

YES and insert used of “Pwned” here re: Japhrimel’s sudden fall into the liquid hot magma of luuuurve™. I would understand a lot of dark fearsome lurkery from him, as Satan’s hot dude, with some inexplicable kindness out of nowhere that seemed to physically pain him because dude he’s a DEMON and he cannot be NICE, but the sudden, “You treat me like an equal!” was way too pat and said too much about Dante too easily. She treats him as an equal! Ergo he loves her! Ergo ergo - she is just too amazing for words and look at the generous river of honey-flavored love that flows through her soul that she treats a Demon who is, again THE RIGHT HAND OF SATAN, as an equal!

My problem was how the book dealt with the Obvious Comparisons. This book will Obviously be Compared to the series about Her Royal Humptyness, Anita Blake, and it marks an opportunity for a talented author - and this is not a throwaway compliment because Saintcrow is damn hell talented like damn hell whoa - to do a necromancer heroine Differently without so much damn sex. A wise friend of mine, and I’ve quoted her before, said that one of her chief complains about Blake was that she “collects magic powers like charms on a charm bracelet,” and that the acquisition of greater talents comes far, far too easy.

For Dante, she doesn’t easily walk through the book and pick up additional talents without consequence or effort, but there’s a similar sense of “it comes damn easy, don’t it, honey?” when it comes to her psi powers. She can animate a very dusty dead dude for an unheard-of amount of time and there’s no explanation as to why - where that surge of ability is coming from, whether it’s attributable to the presence of a Demon augmenting her already-strong ability, or whether it’s a sign that she has untapped depths of talent. When someone has powers that extraordinary, and then even among those with that set of strengths she’s even MORE extraordinary, I want to know WHY. I’m tired of psychic and psi-talented heroines just being extra more gooder just to set them apart as admirable. It’s like Harry Potter Syndrome: identify the hero by his/her extra more gooder specialness, even in a world where s/he is already special!

And here, a lesson for the copyeditor of this book on motherfarking comma splices because deeeeYAM was that distracting.

Note: I don’t actually blame the author. I blame the multitude of people whose freaking JOB IT IS TO KNOW THE RULES OF GRAMMAR WHEN PUBLISHING A BOOK THAT PEOPLE PAY FOR. If I can teach the concept of comma splices to remedial college composition students, surely someone whose JOB IT IS should not need a refresher. But alas, it seems it is true.

The official definition on Wiki:

A comma splice is when two independent clauses are joined by a comma.

This means two complete sentences that are strong enough to stand on their own are joined by a comma. A COMMA is NOT STRONG ENOUGH to JOIN THEM.

Here is a test as to whether your clause is independent:
1. It has own car, or job.
2. If you walk up to a stranger and say the clause aloud, it is a complete thought on its own.
3. If you walk up to a stranger and say the clause aloud, you still look like a treebat crazy person, AND the stranger waits for you to complete your crazy thought.

E.g.: Comma splices are the devil, I can’t stand to see them repeatedly in a novel.

EITHER you need an “and” or some other conjunction to join those two clauses, or you hook yourself up with another punctuation mark. As I told my students: the comma, it is not strong enough. Your comma needs to lift weights. Consider the semicolon: ; A comma that is lifting a barbell to PUMP IT UP. *clap*

I did not ever say I was not a completely dorky professor.

/ end rant

Candy: Yeah, the comma splices were pretty distracting. Thanks for the lesson, perfessor. Hee.

And good point about Dante getting superpowers and hot demon mens with amazing ease (and hot human mob boss mens of unspeakable wealth and power, for that matter). And actually, the ease with which Dante seemed to attract people, given she was about as cuddly as a titanium cactus, kind of puzzled me--until it occured to me that Dante is a sub-species of Mary Sue. Instead of being perfect and saving the world and having everybody in the world lurrrrve her, Dante is imperfect and angry and often downright awful to the people who care about her, but everybody in the world still lurrrrves her and she still saves the day. An Angry Sue, if you will. But the very fact that she’s so difficult to be around makes me wonder why she’s so compelling. She’s apparently a charismatic bitch, but I didn’t feel the pull of her personality the way I have other charismatic bitches in romance who did things that made me uncomfortable, like, say, Melanthe of For My Lady’s Heart.

Speaking of Mary Sue: Jace Monroe. I liked the fantasy of having this extremely hot and hugely wealthy bad-ass dude in the wings--and motherfucker had unlimited resources in the book--but I did wonder how in the hell he got this far. And the Big Misunderstanding between him and Dante was rather laughable but, given what an incendiary asshole Dante is, actually kind of believable.

OK, so we’ve bitched on and on about the book, we should probably talk about something it did right, yeah?

I really, really liked the action scenes. They’re some of the best I’ve read, and I’m in awe at how Saintcrow conveyed the chaos of being in a huge balls-out all-or-nothing fight while still keeping the action coherent. Fight scenes are freakin’ hard to write, and much respect to Saintcrow for pulling so many of them off without losing or confusing me.

The plotting was tight, and the twist was quite excellently twisty. And extra special bonus points: Saintcrow even had a decent excuse for Villain Exposition. None of that “And now, Mr. Bond, before I kill you in this unnecessarily elaborate way, let me explain to you in excruciating detail why I’m doing this; I do this not because it’s essential for my plan, but for no discernible reason other than I adore giving my enemies time to collect their senses and attempt an escape” nonsense.

I mean, I still rolled my eyes a little when the Big Reveal came, but it actually made sense for Santino to reveal what he did to Dante, so all was forgiven.

And speaking of Santino: I liked that he was a thoroughly despicable villain with very little to recommend him, but he had utterly convincing motivation. Very few people get villains right, especially romance authors, and Saintcrow did a great job.

And this one’s sort of spoilerish: I also really liked and was intrigued by the glimpses of the love story between Dante and Doreen that we sort of got to see via flashback. OMG HOT LESBIAN PSION SEX? One can only hope so, but we’ll see.

The world-building was really interesting, despite a tendency to infodump and an over-fondness for tacking the word “synth” in front of a buncha crap to indicate it’s something from the FUTAR. I like the concept of an Awakening for humankind; I’m curious to see what triggered it, and I hope the future books will elaborate on this.

Sarah: While I wish that the individual members of her posse were more developed, I like that Dante surrounded herself with people who in small ways took care of her, but also had a substantial amount of their own backstory to be revealed. They weren’t pawns for the present story but seem to have large story arcs of their own, which is always enticing.

And like you, I really dug the blocking and the pace of the fight scenes. Writing action is probably as hard, if not harder, than shooting it for film, and being able to see the action in my mind while ALSO getting a sense of the quick emotions going on at the time - well, Saintcrow did a damn fine job mixing tension and terror and her fight scenes kick ass.

Yes on the reveal, yes on the twisty twist, and yes yes on the larger story of Awakening that hasn’t been fully explained yet. But equally intriguing to me were the current-day themes of evil/good and the status thereof as very mixed up in wealth, privacy, and talent - such that this Awakening created a new hierarchy but enough of the “old” one remains to confuse things. So the reader doesn’t really know where anyone stands, and that fluidity in society is both chaotic and scary but intriguing and addictive to read about.

My grade on this book: C+. It was eminently readable, and certainly there is room for the series to pick up as a whole, but it was entirely too easy for me to identify what I perceived as flaws even after some time past my reading it.

Candy: I found the writing too compelling to drop it to a C. Most of the time, I take forever to finish B- and C+ books; they’re not bad enough to fascinate me with their trainwreckiness, but they’re not usually good enough to suck me in and keep me engaged. This was an exception, because once I got past the first 50 pages or so (which took me a couple of weeks to read), I finished the rest of the book in two big sittings, which is a rarity for me nowadays. I’m-a stick with the B-.

The pace is fast, and the methods used to reveal the technical details of a world far, far into the future work without visible bumpy seams. There’s no info dumping. There’s clever uses of teacher/student dialogue to educate the reader, and there’s explication that makes sense in context. It seems like such an obvious rule: Don’t Dump Backstory on the Poor Reader. Backstory is heavy and I don’t have enough grocery bags in the house to carry it all. And yet so many stories set in worlds that require building lift up the dumptruck and let it all slide down in the first 15 pages. Barry? Oh no. Her dumptruck is lean, mean, and moves at the speed of light, dropping morsels of information that not only set up the universe in which the story is set, but entice the reader with clues to the characters’ strengths and skills. I can’t underscore how much I have learned to appreciate good world building since reading for this site has expanded my reading into fantasy, sci-fi, and future-set romances.

The story opens on Torrie Masters, only daughter among the heirs to Masters Shipping, on her maiden voyage as Captain of one of the fleet vessels. Her crew has abandoned ship on her orders, and she’s chosen to stay behind to try everything she can think of to stop the engine core from melting down. Meltdown = ship explodes into billions of itty bitty pieces, Torrie included. 

The ship’s control console goes dark, the computer’s mellifluous female voice is silent (after Torrie repeatedly threatens to turn the voice into a man’s due to the computer’s inability to multitask effectively), and Torrie is left in silence gazing at millions of stars, waiting for the ship to blow up - only it doesn’t.

A huge pirate ship blots out the stars in front of Torrie’s window, and assumes command of her ship remotely, allowing the pirates to board and take over control of her ship. Qaade, the pirate captain, comes aboard to take over the ship and search the cargo hold. Torrie, however, is not going down without a fight.

This is about the point where Sarah wanted to repeatedly smack herself for not giving space romances (say that with the echo pedal on- spaaaaaace roooooommmmaaaaaaaaaance!) more of a chance. Barry combines several sharp elements, such as a strong, smart, and clever heroine, a tortured, noble hero, and sets them in a blisteringly fast paced story that touches on ethics, slavery, corporate responsibility, and lawlessness serving up more effective justice than the law itself. Unmasked is written with facile interweaving of several different story threads such that each person’s narrative advances at the same time - there’s no division of chapter where this one is about the hero and heroine, and the next is about the heroine’s best friend and her secondary romance. Barry expertly maintains a whuppass pace while maintaining the story of each character, and never letting the reader lose interest or lose track of what’s happening to who, and how come.

As usual, a strong and ass-kicking heroine meeting a strong and ass-kicking hero makes for excellent romance, but in this case, the ass-kicking comes from different sides of the law, and therein lies a great deal of conflict. Torris is bound by her own moral code and sense of honor based on law, family loyalty, and professional behavior in light of her family’s company. Qaade is bound by his own sense of honor based on commitment to save the lives of slaves, ambition to build his cause without interference from the law, and solve his own personal mystery. Qaade considers the law and the slave traders equally his enemy.

Finding their way to a happily ever after therefore involves the possibility of compromising personal ethics. Torrie has to accept Qaade’s piracy and what that means to her company, and also the potential truth that her family’s corporation and the society in which she lives have been advancing slavery by unknowingly trafficking in memory-washing drugs. Further, she herself may be complicit by being quiet when other sectors legally allow people’s memories to be washed away so that the remaining person is an empty shell to be commanded and directed at will.

Qaade has to accept that it’s time for him to accept help and trust other people - even people who live within the law - to make a significant difference in reducing the trade of human slaves in his galaxy, and that he cannot continue his mission to eradicate slavery on his own.

Even with the complicated personal issues working between the protagonists, my enjoyment was derived from Barry’s plot, in that it dealt with a question I think about frequently: what is the most effective way to create a change when said change must be made? As I said in an earlier entry, sometimes change requires operating quietly from within the system you want to change, slowly working to shift the direction of progress so that people working along side you adopt your methods and work as a team to create a difference. Sometimes, you have to storm the castle from the outside and scare the crap out of people, forcing them to adopt a new way of action.

In this novel, the issue is slavery and human trafficking. Qaade is used to storming the castle: stealing ships, evading the law, and doing what he pleases as an outlaw to the police and an enemy to slave traders, knowing that his actions serve a greater good that only he and the slaves he frees can wholly understand. Torrie works within the law alongside friends in intergalactic law enforcement, and her family stands to lose a great deal if she chooses illegal methods in her efforts to help Qaade. Finding a balance between the two characters, their respective missions, and their moral codes makes for taut reading. Add to that a quick moving plot that involves ethical questions that don’t have simple answers, and ahoy, thar be compelling reading.

The only problem I had with the characters involved Qaade’s refusal to be flexible, even if bending would allow him the chance to be with Torrie. It fits entirely with the noble solitude of his character, but there were times that he treated Torrie shabbily to the point where he needed to grovel more than he did. However, even if I wanted to smack him upside his stubborn head, Torrie understood his character enough to forgive and move on, allowing them both to grow in ways that make for satisfying romance.

A lot of discussion lately has revolved around rules of romance, and what can or cannot, should or should not be done - and if there are rules, how to break them. This book, which won the 2006 BWAHA Award for Best Paranormal: Sci-Fi/Fantasy Novel, follows some of the more essential rules of writing good romance. The characters should allow each other to evolve in such a way that, without the other, each one would be less than when the book started. There’s a satisfaction in seeing attraction and love heal, grow, and develop people into even better versions of themselves, and that satisfaction is certainly found in this book.