Chill Factor by Rachel Caine

[meganbmoore]

I don’t quite feel like a proper writeup of this, so just a quick rundown of some points:

1. Still no signs of the typical urban fantasy trend of revolving door love interests and constant triangles. I continue to approve of this. I am giving Lewis suspicious looks, though. Not much romance at all in this one, actually, as David was mostly off page.

2. I’m glad Jonathan is seeming to be set up more as a bastard with good points than an angsty woobie, and that he isn’t strictly portrayed as right or wrong in his actions, just as having very different priorities.

3. Lewis is finally given purpose. In the first two books, he was mostly just…there. Now he’s finally a character and we’re learning what his motives and goals are, and what he was up to. The Ma’at is an interesting idea-or at least, the ideas behind them are interesting, I’m not so sure I care for the Ma’at themselves-and has potential, though I hope the series doesn’t turn into them and the Wardens yanking Jo between them.

4. Very, very glad Rahel isn’t gone.

5. Very much not sure yet what I think of Jo’s pregnancy. On the one hand, I’m amazed a UF author was allowed to make her main character pregnant. And still have her that way at the end of the book. I have no illusions about the chances of this being a normal pregnancy resulting in diapers and 2 a.m. wakeup screams, but I’m amazed the “P” word got past the UF editors. It could interfere with the skintight leather wearing and half dozen sexy vampires and werewolves and similar Others lusting after her. Oh wait, this is about the only UF out there without that. (Me? Have issues with the most popular tropes of the genre and be suspicious of anything that resembles them? What gave you that idea?) On the other hand, from what I gather, David deliberately made Jo pregnant when djinn supposedly can’t do that, knowing that’s what she thought. It’s a little too close to a person telling their partner there’s no need for birth control because they can’t have children, when they know they can have children. (Which often comes with a “well, once we’re pregnant, s/he’ll want the baby” mindset.) I think I need to see how it plays out before I really have a solid opinion of it. 

Comments

[redbrunja.livejournal.com]

I agree about the pregancy, especially in a book with the rape subplot.

Speaking of, what did you think of it? I hated it, because I felt like there were no hints in prior books, and that that was the kind of thing that should have been hinted at earlier. Plus, I get so, so fucking sick of the strong women who was raped in her past trope.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

Well, the rape subplot as a theme(in terms of the servitude of the djinn is little more than rape) has been there from the start. I wasn't as annoyed by it as I would normally be, because the emphasis was on the torture as a whole, not that, and because it isn't something she focuses on. It isn't the "I became strong to overcome my trauma and never have that happen to me again" thing. She largely seems to have dealt with it and moved on with her life, instead of dwelling on it and keeping herself from living because of it. In addition, the situation (abduction, torture for information) would clearly have existed for a male, too. I read it as she was already strong, it was a situation anyone would have suffered in, and she refused to let it ruin or rule her life. (Compare it to, say, the heroine of Vicki Petterson's[sp?] books, where her entire life is built around having been raped, or the Mercy Thompson books, where the entire subplot existed only because she was female and a female specific trauma was needed...had Mercy been male, nothing would have happened to her.)

I'm sick and tired of the trope myself (put down a book yesterday the second I saw it had the trope as a main motivating factor) but I think this was a better handling of it.

[redbrunja.livejournal.com]

Granted, it is handled better than it normally is, but I still hated that section of the book. And I'm so suck of women being raped as torture, or threatened with it.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

*sigh*

Yes. It's automatically assumed in fiction that any female who doesn't sit at home baking cookies will, at somepoint in time, face attempted rape. And sitting home and baking cookies isn't safe, either, because some enemy may want to give your boyfriend extra angst.

The few years after I started reading fantasy, most of my fantasy reading was from the school library, and I managed to avoid books like that at the bookstore somehow (though, as this was age 12-16~, I most likely missed some stuff in the books.) But then I started going to the public library and used bookstores and it ws in almost every book I read. Actually, I think I stopped reading it for about a year or so after that.

[redbrunja.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I think I had a similar experience. Where it's just not there, or not in the books I'd read, and suddenly I keep running into it over and over against and I just want to gut somebody. It's one of those things that if I run into it early or it looks like I will from the cover jacket, I'll stop reading.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

One of the books I read recently (which came out in the 80s) handled it in a way that makes me think she was us at the time. It is part of her past, but she doesn't care about it. The one who cared was the guy who was her obvious future love interest. He kept expecting there to be some trauma from it or some sign of victimization and kept fretting and worrying over it, and she was basically "shut up, that's my past and my life and none of your business. Spend your time obsessing over your sexist idiocy instead of this idea of me as a fragile, abused little flower before I kick you in the nuts again. Both literally and figuratively."

[redbrunja.livejournal.com]

I remember reading those.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

The Tiger and Del books?

I've only read the first so far, but it's interesting because it's from Tiger's perspective, and he's a sexist moron, so I wanted to strangle him a lot, but it seems to be written that way to emphasize how all the guys of the time (in fantasy novels) were like that.

[redbrunja.livejournal.com]

Yep. And the fact that Del was raped and stuff that happened because of that and spoiler spoiler becomes more of a plot point later.

It's not quite as subversive as the author intended, I think.