This guest review is from Babelfish, who is a California librarian, historical fiction enthusiast, lizard person, and ADHD-prone daydreamer.
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All The Triggers: sexual assault (on page for many pages) coercion, child sexual assault, magical castration, assault.
Long-time reader, first-time contributor. I find the reviews on this site some of the most entertaining writing on the internet, and the number of quotes with which I spam my coworkers (and my best friend) is a mite excessive. I *really* appreciate you people, is what I’m saying. 🙂
Y’all got me into reading romances in the first place, so I figured you were the community to turn to when I’m really confused by them. (Long, spoiler-filled review ahead, as it’s kind of hard to unpack this book otherwise.)
Passion Play was Beth Bernobich’s first novel. It won Best Epic Fantasy at the Romantic Times Reviewer’s Choice Awards in 2010 and was nominated for a Tiptree Award. If you’re new to that, like I was, the Tiptree Awards (now the Otherwise Awards) are given to works that “imagine gender otherwise.”
Gotta say, I’m not sure what the heck was “otherwise” about this book, or particularly awardable in any capacity.
So, a bit about me: Kushiel’s Dart and the rest of the trilogy are some of my favorite books of all time. Judge all you want, I invite it. Set a book somewhere I’ve never been and am unlikely to go in the foreseeable future, especially in Eastern Europe, and I make grabby hands.
So when this book
(a) mentioned a brothel setting and intrigue and
(b) presented itself as Czech-flavored, I borrowed it immediately.
Therez Zhalina, age fifteen, is the daughter of a prominent merchant of Melnek, which I think is a city-state near the border of Veraene and Karovi. She reads a lot, she’s fairly religious, and she feels like an awkward doll when dressed up. She’s busy moping over not getting to travel because the family has money issues when her father announces they’re Having A Ball with the unspoken intention of Marrying Her Off.
Her grandmother (dad’s mum) is also dying, which you’d think might put a damper on celebrations, but her father insists that Everything Go On Regardless. Incidentally, I wanted a lot more of this grandma. Emigree, gardener, sweet and savvy old lady, sarcastic mum – she makes me miss my own grandmas.
Of course, the ball rolls around, Therez entertains several suitors, some of them are Reasonable But Bland and one is Unreasonably Menacing with Intent to Own. Plus, his last betrothed hasn’t been seen for three days. Oh no!
(We hear no more about this. Therez has many suspicions, but the man himself never comes up again and neither does his lady. I want an Agatha Christie style story, where she just ran away because she got fed up with life for a week or so.)
Menacing Jerk is announced as Therez’s Intended, and we can’t have that, so she runs away with some clothes and jewelry, bribes her way onto a caravan, aaaaaand her father’s men are tracking her by the second day.
Turns out the caravan master, Alarik Brandt, has accepted quite a bit of money to…do something? He frames her for theft and offers her a choice: be sent back, or (basically) become the entire caravan’s sex slave.
When Brandt rapes her, of course, the Magic Happens and she’s No Longer Pretending To Enjoy It. (Brandt, I should mention, is not the Hero mentioned in the cover copy.)
She’s presumably a virgin at the story’s start and is being gang-raped by page 75. I’m barely 20% into the book. What about this was worth running away from her betrothed?
(Also SHE’S FIFTEEN. Alarm bells, anyone?)
A stranger rescues her and infodumps on How To Run Away, and our city girl vacillates between magical competence and Poor Pitiful Wretch for the next twenty pages, until she ends up rescued…
(and losing a pregnancy she didn’t know she was carrying)
into the household of the book jacket hero, Lord Raul Kosenmark of Valentain.
Raul is the heir to…something, presumably Valentain, which isn’t on the map so I don’t know where it is…but was made a eunuch (by magic) to become part of the King’s inner council.
Apparently several noble houses offered up their second sons this way, and if you didn’t have a second son, you were up a creek without your metaphorical mast.
Because “…the Baerne [I lost track, but I think this is the king] declared he only trusted men who spoke harsh truths in a woman’s voice.”
[Ed. note: WTF.]
Right. King demands you castrate your heir, and you just…go along with it? The question of what will happen to Valentain’s hereditary monarchy is never settled.
Raul is fully aware of who Therez is, presumably because her father has been putting out APBs on her, but he doesn’t turn her in and still – mostly – calls her Ilse. Raul also has his own lover, Dedrick, who brings Raul out of his shell but is otherwise mostly ornamental for the first 80% of the book.
Anyway, back to the plot.
Raul runs a pleasure house, but of course Therez – Ilse – screw it, Ilserez is not recruited into the pleasure part, just the kitchen. The brothel employees love her for some reason and consider her their pet storyteller. They make only occasional appearances, mostly to prompt Ilse into doing something. Really, there was no need for this to be set in a brothel, except to make it edgier and to make me wish I was rereading Kushiel’s Dart instead.
There’s a stretch full of household drudgery (and confronting the staff bully) and then Ilserez somehow gets promoted to secretary for a permanent guest – or household manager or something – Maester Hax. Somehow this also involves being Raul’s secretary, reading his correspondence, and deducing that he’s running a shadow court out of his brothel. When Raul discovers that she’s Clever enough to Deduce His Secret (which I still haven’t figured out – shadow court of what other court?), she becomes his Assistant in Matters of Spycraft and State.
The setting has a *lot* of potential, but the information is dribbled out in inconsistent infodumps that make so little sense it causes the reader (me) feel like they missed half a semester. There’s an immortal king and some stolen jewels and magic that comes and goes and a poet everyone quotes and an awful lot of gaps in the story. Past lives keep coming up but never have any implication on anything. It took me a bunch of flipping back and forth to even figure out who the king is, and I’m still not sure what he’s king of, exactly. There’s a map at the beginning of the book, but it’s incomplete at best, and while there’s a detailed inset of the capital city, what I really could have used was a Dramatis Personae. And a glossary.
[Ed. note: And I could use some Tylenol. Egads.]
After a dinner party, Raul does an abrupt heel-turn and accuses her of being a spy, for…someone…because she was the only “unknown” at a secret meeting where the King’s Mage (think evil grand vizier type) showed up. And because her body responded when Raul made out with her to give them cover for that meeting. “I wonder how someone treated so brutally could respond, even superficially, to my attentions.”
Raul, you asshat. Ilserez attempts to call him out on it:
“…Why must I be a stone forever? Why can’t I feel love or passion or even lust? You aren’t made like that. You cut off your own flesh for king and court. And then you lost everything. Why are you allowed to go on? Why doesn’t someone tell you, oh, you cannot be a lover, you cannot be a man?”
“…They did,” he said heavily. “They did tell me that.”
Yeah, I’m not sure what her argument was there, either.
Raul is a judgmental twit, but he’s honest when he makes mistakes, which is often. Really, I liked him much better than Ilserez, which I don’t think I was supposed to? The book always refers to him by last name – until chapter twenty, with no explanation – but the number of times I misspelled “Kosenmark” early on made me switch to “Raul” for this review. He refers to her as Mistress Ilse the entire time.
After the imprisonment fiasco, he gives her space and lets her make the next move, which I really appreciated. They make a vow of “blood friendship” two-thirds of the way through, but then Dedrick comes back and Ilserez gets all mad about it.
Somehow, Ilserez’s dad finds her in the pleasure house, and she claims to have hated her life at home. Dad leaves in shame, after throwing out one line about Grandma’s death. Also, Dad believes Brandt over his daughter. The lie about her theft? He swallowed that hook, line, and sinker.
Raul responds by teaching Ilserez to fight, and then somehow an old book holds a clue to a three-hundred-year-old mystery and now I’m lost again. Raul goes off to a secret meeting and Dedrick runs off to go find him because IT’S A TRAP and Ilserez runs off in a third direction and there’s a fight where they’re all heavily outnumbered? and then a cute healing and sneaking-back-home scene.
Apparently medicine involves magic, which can erase part of someone’s memory as well as reshape flesh or whatever the heck was done to Raul.
The plot unravels further in the last twenty percent. Fifty pages from the end, Ilse starts learning magic? Then Brandt is delivered into Raul’s hands by…someone?…and Raul murders him for Ilse, at which point Ilse realizes she loooooooves him. Raul, I mean, not Brandt.
Also, Raul made sure to castrate Brandt before he killed him, so that he “remembers this deed and this judgment in his next life. It’s a fair trade. His nightmares in reparation for yours.”
o_O
Then Raul breaks up with Dedrick, causing Ilse to decide to leave and then to realize Raul loves her. Forty pages from the end of the book. :p They fall shmoopily in love and he properly courts her and then her father dies and leaves her a third of his estate? Her father declared her dead but also wrote her into his will…and then Dedrick comes back and tells Raul he’s going to be a spy for him in the capital, whether Raul actually wants him to or not, and Ilse’s jealous and tense.
I think this was a different book after page 300. The beginning was all about setting up Ilserez as this naive but gifted heroine and Raul as the Tortured Lord of the Manor, and then very close to the end, Dedrick is killed and Ilse and Raul have to separate for some reason, so they have a giant staged blow-up fight about his inability to have children and they alienate all their friends in the process.
There’s some very clear hinting that All Is Not Well in the larger setting, and I understand this was the first of a trilogy. But the plot is simultaneously so convoluted and so poorly wrapped up that I’m certainly not going to seek out the rest. It’s not quite the wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am ending of a Mercedes Lackey Elemental Masters novel (also my catnip), but at least I had a clue who was who for most of those.
I’m also struggling to see what the “other” was to earn the Otherwise Award nomination. Ilserez does nothing outside her predicted gender roles. Raul is bi, so I guess that could be it? He’s a eunuch by magic, but that really barely comes into play until the one full-on sex scene, where he’s described as smoothly, magically castrated and “like a boy” in size. (I don’t want to know.)
Really, I’m not sure what that had to do with anything. These are both people recovering from harm, one by rape and one by poor decisions and politics, but I don’t know that either of those qualifies them for expanding and exploring my understanding of gender. There was nothing atypical about any of the gender presentations in this book.
I can’t fault the writing in most of the individual sentences or paragraphs. The description is lush and inviting, and the plot makes me want to learn more, if only so I can stop feeling quite so bewildered. But the inconsistencies and wild swings of “wait, where did that come from” made it impossible for me to actually enjoy it.
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The Kushiel books by Jacqueline Carey are amazing fantasy novels and people who give you hate for liking them should get in the sea. Of course, explicit consent is a HUGE and important part of those books and sexual assault is literally blasphemy in parts of Carey’s fantasy world.
Thank you for this rant!! I tried to read this right after it came out, and DNFed it somewhere 2/3 in, because what the actual F.
It was so bonkers and the first 1/3 so unnecessary. Seriously, if she just ran away from home and found herself on Raul’s door and became the kitchen servant, that would have been fine. Nothing was gained by the gratuitous abuse of a 15 year old.
1. wtf? Maybe it makes sense in the book, but this summary is a struggle.
2. The title? NOT SEXY. I mean, maybe those words don’t invoke “reenactment of the crucifixion” for all readers, but, uh…. not doing much for me personally.
^ Ms. M – I confess that’s why I picked it up in the first place, because “bwuh?” motivates a lot of my browsing. >_>
I read this Rant twice today, first in the newsletter–smirking all the way–then on the site so I could gleefully savor all the triggery spoilers or spoilery triggers as the case may be. I’ll probably read it a third time just for the sheer WTFery of it all.
I thought the Tiptree consideration for this novel was an interesting reminder of how much attitudes, definitions, and vocabularies change in barely a dozen years. On the other hand, 2010 may have been a year of slim pickings. At any rate, thanks for reading this so we don’t have to.
I find myself grateful to the author of Passion Play as well simply for inspiring Bablefish’s glorious Rant. I live for this combination of righteous rage and edgy wit, and I haven’t had such a satisfying fix since the last post by RHG. So, kudos and thank yous for your brilliant debut, Babelfish, and I hope it won’t be too long before you share with us again.
Judging from GoodReads reviews of the rest of the trilogy, this does not get much better even as it shifts from romantic fantasy to action-based fantasy. Sounds pretty generally horrendous!
I was just thinking the other day that we haven’t had a good rant for a while. This is an excellent rant.
Also, I’ve read 70’s era bodice rippers that weren’t this bonkers.
The author’s other books under a different pen name are excellent. But I will give this one a pass.