ugh, this book
Jun. 15th, 2021 10:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kitewithfishSPOILERS Behind the Cut!
Good: The main character is pretty engaging. In what I can only describe as a bizarre marketing choice, many descriptions of the book treat their intersex condition and their nonbinary gender as a Surprise Reveal, but it's really obvious from the first few chapters. So if you want to read book with a nonbinary intersex main character, this might be for you! If you're willing to read generously.
Really Big Spoilers:
The Bad: Oh, god there's so much bad with this book.
-The alternating viewpoints of Gene and Micah are, uh, really clearly the same person, because the writing is not good at all.
I suspect that this was interpreted as a twist, but it's really very obvious that Micah's concerns in the summer plot are extensions of Gene's concerns from the spring plot - to the point where I was surprised when reviewers on Goodreads mentioned that this was a "surprise twist." It's simply not. They are the same person, who is intersex and presenting as different genders in different contexts. That's it.
-There's a huge amount of clunky exposition that is trying to pass as worldbuilding.
It grinds interesting scenes to a halt, comes at the reader with no emotional connection, and worst, the book doesn't signal which parts of the worldbuilding are actually important to this book's plot. As part of a trilogy, I suspect the deeply longwinded meander through the history of this kingdom's monarchy will matter down the line, but it's just stuffed into this book with the side effect of making the more immediately important details seem like they are thrown in carelessly as well. I truly think this book, at nearly 400 pages, would benefit tremendously from being cut to a tight 300. There's far too much exposition in the style of, "Well, as you already know, Susan...."
-The emotional scenes of the book are oddly glossed over.
The author is not interested in her character's emotional life, except on a few issues. For example, there's a male love interest who is introduced in the first section of the book, largely forgotten in the middle, and then dredged back for the last third in a truly mechanical way. So while in theory, Micah/Gene spends a good deal of time with him over the course of the novel, none of it has emotional weight. They spend a lot of time rehearsing and performing a play in the last third of the novel, but almost none of the rehearsals get onto the page.
The parts of the play-within-a-book that do get onto the page are mostly awful poetic couplets and Micah/Gene's judgmental views about the female lead failing to be assertive enough - tho Micah/Gene is kissing this love interest every night in the course of this play's performance!
It's only when the male love interest is revealed to be bisexual (aka, a person who would clearly be totally cool dating an intersex person, which is, uh, a leap!) after their last performance that the book bothers to include him regularly in the narrative. Nearly all of the emotional heft in the book comes from Micah/Gene fearing discovery, feeling isolated and afraid, and judging the fuck out of (other) women for failing to free themselves from systemic repression as Micah/Gene has been able to do.
-There are no sympathetic women characters in the book who don't die. (Very Big Spoilers for the last 40 pages)
This books paints women in the shallowest, least sympathetic light possible. Tho Gene is raised as a woman in a restrictive society, and chafes at that restriction, all the other women who are living in the same society are portrayed as complete simps who are fools for being perfectly happy in their socially assigned roles. There are no other women who are unhappy in Gene's level of society - they are either innocently conforming or they are social-climbing harridans who Gene judges very harshly. The men and boys in this society are treated with sympathy and are much closer to full characters - this includes Gene's father, brother, and his friends. Gene's mother has no friends and Gene has no intimate social ties with women. This books feels very much like it was written by someone who thinks that "You're not like the other girls" is a compliment.
This trend of shallow and unsympathetic portrayals of women is not just limited to Gene's half of book that focused on high society and its social strictures - the lower classes and the circus staff are also full of women who are sketched without sympathy or interest. The only exceptions are the female love interest, and the circus owner's wife.
The circus is run by a man who beats his wife, Frit, and relies on her to make his financially ruinous decisions feasible. It's known to everyone in the circus that he is a drunk and abuses her, because he does the same thing to the circus staff, and makes no efforts to conceal his treatment of Frit. Rather than helping her, or showing any sympathy for this situation, when Frit disappears, Gene/Micah thinks that she ran off and thinks that it was selfish of her to take the circus's money.
But Frit didn't run off! Frit was murdered, by her husband, as is revealed in the climactic scene of the book, and it's shown that the nice bisexual male love interest HELPED THE HUSBAND HIDE THE BODY. Gene is less upset by the male love interest being an accomplice to murder than when it appears the male love interest may have killed the murdering husband deliberately, and Micah has this thought just after the murdering husband KILLS THE FEMALE LOVE INTEREST WHO GENE HAS SPENT MONTHS ROMANCING.
Like, the fuck? The final scene of this novel manages to fridge TWO WOMEN, two! And Gene/Micah FORGETS halfway thru the climax that the real body count here is three people - the abusive murdering husband, his dead-offscreen battered wife, and Gene/Micah's love interest for most the book. The book's bisexual romantic lead character is revealed as an accomplice to murder and literally the only two sympathetic women in the novel are murdered by an abusive husband whose cruelty and violence were open secrets for the entire novel.
In summary: This book is a debut novel; it shows. Lam doesn't seem to like women very much. The start is slow and kind of bad, but the ending is rushed and worse.
