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jemerylI really wanted to like this book - the premise is that a human girl, Sam, gets into an arranged marriage with a space nonbinary catperson, Orla, but they get into a love triangle with Orla's best friend Sorcha, who's been mutually in love with Orla for a long time but they couldn't be together because of sci-fi reasons.
I have three main problems with this book:
In a book about an arranged marriage, I would expect there to be some tension between the newly married couple as they settle into their new, forced arrangement and get to know each other. This never happens - they click right away and commit to each other, so there's no tension, no pining. The promised love triangle never really emerges, either. Everyone is too much of a good girl to actually act on their desires, so there's never any danger of the characters crossing lines.
Sorcha doesn't even realize she's attracted to Sam until the last third of the book. Sam realizes even later than that - and only because her mother tells her and suggests they get into a polycule. Then her AI tells her how to go about it, Orla agrees, they go on a date, and that's it. Resolved. There's no pining. There's no juice. There's no drama. All the characters act maturely, process their emotions fast in a healthy way, talk it out and make adjustments based on that.
Which is perfectly fine, and it's how a secure relationship functions in real life! And in a novel that's fine too, but the drama has to come from somewhere, and in this book it's nowhere to be found.
This means the book reads like you're going from one conversation to another. The problem is that because you know exactly how each conversation is going to turn out, there's no point reading what they're saying to each other (and sometimes they repeat themselves, like Sam telling two different people about her feelings for Sorcha). All the characters solve their problems by talking it out with each other; which firstly isn't very convincing because we all deal with problems differently. It also becomes extremely dull, pacing wise.
The whole reason Sam goes offworld is because Earth has been colonized by an alien empire, and her mother has decided to send her to another planet because she's read about how bad colonialism is. Sam also abandons life on earth, everything she's ever known, including her best friend who's just been revealed to be madly in love with her, because... she's read about how bad colonialism is.
Which is fine. Colonialism is awful. I actually buy it. The problem is that here, its only purpose is as a plot device to get Sam offworld, so she feels forced into this situation. She winds up living on the Sionnach (space NB catpeople) homeworld, which has seemingly limitless resources and amazing technology. She never interrogates where they get these resources from, which, under the colonialism is bad theme, must be the other worlds in the empire they've exploited. This is never examined. She returns to Earth at the end of the book to develop and market human technologies to the galaxy for a Sionnach corporation. So is she a collaborator who's selling her fellow earthlings into exploitation, or is she here to subvert colonialism and protect Earth from the Hegemony's colonial yoke? This question is never answered. It never even enters the character's minds.
And, since Sam and her mother are both white, they don't have to interrogate this. They're only affected on an intellectual level. Perhaps it would be different if Sam's mother were, for example, Palestinian and Sam was Palestinian-American. Or anything other than white.
This is a sapphic romance novel, so I know I'm expecting too much out of this. For context, before this book I read Black and British and after it I read Culture & Imperialism. The way cultural works like novels interact with imperialism are very fresh in my mind, so the fact that this work includes colonialism in such a shallow way, and codes all its characters as white (even the space NB catpeople), unsettles me.
It's not even the driving force of the book - that's Orla's family political drama and the Sionnach aversion to touch. It shouldn't be in there if it's not going to be addressed. Its position at the start of the book, as the main character's primary motivation to go off-world, falsely sets it up as an important theme and it's never addressed after Sam gets married. Cultural critique aside, that's just not satisfying to read.
I wish the author had either given Sam a different motivation to go off-world or actually tackled the topic and had Sam confront Sionnach culture and make some sort of change - which she could do, since by the end of the book she's so god damn rich.
My issue is that this is so emblematic of the way (white) middle and upper-class people act in general. They're comfortable, so they're not motivated to do anything about social issues despite having the power to do so. That's probably why I find this aspect of the book so frustrating.
What did I like? I think the setup had a lot of potential. I think the Sionnach are pretty cute with their space cat-person stuff. I like the pseudoscience of the calamity that destroyed 90% of the Sionnach homeworld and gives them a reason to be finding offworlders to repopulate with. I do think the gifted child struggle of Sam is very real, as is Orla feeling like a letdown to her parents and suffering under the touch-starvedness of the Sionnach society. Unfortunately that's not enough to warrant a re-read. I'm not leaving this as a review on the website because this is all pretty negative, so it's going to stay on the blog.
I have three main problems with this book:
In a book about an arranged marriage, I would expect there to be some tension between the newly married couple as they settle into their new, forced arrangement and get to know each other. This never happens - they click right away and commit to each other, so there's no tension, no pining. The promised love triangle never really emerges, either. Everyone is too much of a good girl to actually act on their desires, so there's never any danger of the characters crossing lines.
Sorcha doesn't even realize she's attracted to Sam until the last third of the book. Sam realizes even later than that - and only because her mother tells her and suggests they get into a polycule. Then her AI tells her how to go about it, Orla agrees, they go on a date, and that's it. Resolved. There's no pining. There's no juice. There's no drama. All the characters act maturely, process their emotions fast in a healthy way, talk it out and make adjustments based on that.
Which is perfectly fine, and it's how a secure relationship functions in real life! And in a novel that's fine too, but the drama has to come from somewhere, and in this book it's nowhere to be found.
This means the book reads like you're going from one conversation to another. The problem is that because you know exactly how each conversation is going to turn out, there's no point reading what they're saying to each other (and sometimes they repeat themselves, like Sam telling two different people about her feelings for Sorcha). All the characters solve their problems by talking it out with each other; which firstly isn't very convincing because we all deal with problems differently. It also becomes extremely dull, pacing wise.
The whole reason Sam goes offworld is because Earth has been colonized by an alien empire, and her mother has decided to send her to another planet because she's read about how bad colonialism is. Sam also abandons life on earth, everything she's ever known, including her best friend who's just been revealed to be madly in love with her, because... she's read about how bad colonialism is.
Which is fine. Colonialism is awful. I actually buy it. The problem is that here, its only purpose is as a plot device to get Sam offworld, so she feels forced into this situation. She winds up living on the Sionnach (space NB catpeople) homeworld, which has seemingly limitless resources and amazing technology. She never interrogates where they get these resources from, which, under the colonialism is bad theme, must be the other worlds in the empire they've exploited. This is never examined. She returns to Earth at the end of the book to develop and market human technologies to the galaxy for a Sionnach corporation. So is she a collaborator who's selling her fellow earthlings into exploitation, or is she here to subvert colonialism and protect Earth from the Hegemony's colonial yoke? This question is never answered. It never even enters the character's minds.
And, since Sam and her mother are both white, they don't have to interrogate this. They're only affected on an intellectual level. Perhaps it would be different if Sam's mother were, for example, Palestinian and Sam was Palestinian-American. Or anything other than white.
This is a sapphic romance novel, so I know I'm expecting too much out of this. For context, before this book I read Black and British and after it I read Culture & Imperialism. The way cultural works like novels interact with imperialism are very fresh in my mind, so the fact that this work includes colonialism in such a shallow way, and codes all its characters as white (even the space NB catpeople), unsettles me.
It's not even the driving force of the book - that's Orla's family political drama and the Sionnach aversion to touch. It shouldn't be in there if it's not going to be addressed. Its position at the start of the book, as the main character's primary motivation to go off-world, falsely sets it up as an important theme and it's never addressed after Sam gets married. Cultural critique aside, that's just not satisfying to read.
I wish the author had either given Sam a different motivation to go off-world or actually tackled the topic and had Sam confront Sionnach culture and make some sort of change - which she could do, since by the end of the book she's so god damn rich.
My issue is that this is so emblematic of the way (white) middle and upper-class people act in general. They're comfortable, so they're not motivated to do anything about social issues despite having the power to do so. That's probably why I find this aspect of the book so frustrating.
What did I like? I think the setup had a lot of potential. I think the Sionnach are pretty cute with their space cat-person stuff. I like the pseudoscience of the calamity that destroyed 90% of the Sionnach homeworld and gives them a reason to be finding offworlders to repopulate with. I do think the gifted child struggle of Sam is very real, as is Orla feeling like a letdown to her parents and suffering under the touch-starvedness of the Sionnach society. Unfortunately that's not enough to warrant a re-read. I'm not leaving this as a review on the website because this is all pretty negative, so it's going to stay on the blog.
