Betraying Season by Marissa Doyle

The sequel to Doyle’s Bewitching Season, this is a case of a sophomore effort that doesn’t quite live up to its predecessor.

After years of not being as good at magic as her twin sister, Persephone, Penelope Leland has come to Ireland to officially study magic with her former governess’s new father-in-law. Her fellow students-all men used to thinking of women as having “inferior” magic-react to this in a number of ways, none particularly flattering (More toned-down versions of fairly realistic ideas of what elite young academics would have thought in the real Victorian era when asked to study with a young society girl in 1838.) and an elegant woman, Lady Keating, takes an interest in her.

Lady Keating, it seems, needs a young woman with magic to assist her in a plot against the newly-crowned Queen Victoria. Her own daughter, Doireann, was meant to fill this role, but no longer can. To draw Pen into her plots, Lady Keating asks her son, Niall, to woo Pen and draw her into the family, not expecting Niall to actually fall for Pen. Many parts of this are awesome, particularly Doireann’s bitterness and the mystery of what she’s up to, and Niall’s being annoyed at having to act like a mysterious romantic figure. Add in Pen’s adventures as a decided non-academic trying to be an academic and dealing with the fae in the basement and a courtship that manages to be charming despite being based on deceit, and, for the most part, you have a pretty engaging book.

Where it falls short for me is that Bewitching Season was about Pen and Persy being sisters and having adventures and being on a quest to save another woman and Persy being confused about her love life while Pen madly tried her hand at hooking Persy up with the cute boy next door. Betraying Season, however, falls into the typical metanarrative theme of pitting the virtuous heroine against the evil worldly villainess, and making all of Pen’s active allies male, as the other prominent women are either bedridden or antagonistic.

I do like how things turned out in the end, but I can’t help but sigh at how a book that cheerfully shunned irritating gender-based metanarrative themes has a sequel so willing to embrace them.

Everything from Marlene Dietrich to Italian resistance fighters.

But the movies tell us the only way women contributed to WWII was nursing.

(no subject)

I have a vague longing for fiction set around the War of the Roses, Tudor/Elizabethan, or the English Civil War.  And, you know, in between.  (Such a narrow timeframe...)  Book, movie or series.

Recs?

Dollhouse 2.04

Wow. Joss Whedon, you just managed to offend me on levels I didn’t know I had while simultaneously boring me to tears. I didn’t know that was possible.

I should mention that this episode is the FOURTH TIME that this show has had a man assault a woman with “good” results. Possibly more. I did skip two episodes, after all. This is particularly pertinent because every time I’ve watched/read something and a man and woman fought in the last few weeks, I’ve flinched and expected him to hit her, and I realized the other day that that started after I watched the first episode of the season.

Also, I was told this episode was about PRIYA not about Topher and his PAIN. Because the PAIN of a human trafficker who sees people as toys and gets his jollies from programming people to be sexbots that exist to serve another’s pleasure is just such riveting storytelling.

Somewhere, Whedon probably has a script depicting Jack the Ripper as the savior of humanity.

Want spoilers?

( though not cutting would be more along the lines of performing a public service )

Also, Dichen Lachman is lovely, and a good actress. Call me when she gets a role on something worth being committed to paper, much less actually make it to the TV screen.

And now I shall purge my harddrive of anything vaguely related to this show, and distract myself from a mini-bonfire of Whedon DVDs in the parking lot (I could get in trouble for that) by consuming fiction in which women are allowed to have personalities and agency without being rapists and human traffickers under the foot of the patriarchy, and all but one man doesn’t need to die a horrible, bloody death. And that one only gets by due to being an infant in an adult’s body.

I don't think this is the reaction you were looking for.

So, I was poking around Amazon and stumbled across this. The description is this rather negative review from Publisher's Weekly:

In Australian academic Larbalestier's first book, a critical study of American SF's formative years, 1926 to 1973, some gobbets of original and entertaining insight glitter through the viscous prose, but glimpsing them requires slogging through thickets of abstractions bristling with parenthetical documentation, feminist jargon and such unhappily strident images as "white heterosexual male insecurity" in the face of women "as walking sex organs." Inspired by a Joanna Russ article on this theme, the author buttresses her thesis, that male SF writers saw keeping women subservient as the only solution to eternal male-female conflict, by examining many more texts than Russ did, from out-of-print magazines and fanzines to correspondence. Larbalestier also explores semiotics, American studies and histories of sexuality, especially trying to connect battle-of-the-sexes texts with later, overtly feminist SF texts. She sees the James Tiptree Jr. (aka Alice Raccoona Sheldon) Award, which celebrates feminism, as a continuing battleground where sexual warfare is "reworked and transformed." Despite amusing jacket art, some period illustrations and a formidable scholarly apparatus, including a 26-page bibliography, this dense study needs far more than its sporadic dashes of the playfulness with which the Tiptree Award - occasionally given in the form of a typewriter cast in milk chocolate - attempts to leaven a sometimes sententious genre. (June) FYI: This title is part of Wesleyan's recently launched early Classics of Science Fiction series.

Emphasis mine.

I'm pretty sure the intent was to warn me away, not make me want to read it.