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A review by being_b
Written in Red by Anne Bishop
1.0
A lousy book with a premise rooted in white supremacy.
This book is bad on every level a book can be bad:
a) The writing is sloppy-- words are misused, dialogue is clunky.
b) The pacing is molasses-slow. We spend immense amounts of time hearing about people forgot to put on their shoes before rushing outside and now their socks are wet, so they make plans to go back to their house to pick up dry socks and maybe a sealed container of soup for lunch and on and ON.
c) The characters are shallow and characterisation is inconsistent. The villain is a cardboard Sexy Stupid Bad Girl. The MC is the Mariest of Sues. We're told the male lead is a decisive far-thinker but we spend most of the book seeing him throw tantrums about trivial things such as the smell of the MC's hair dye.
d) The world-building is lazy, uncreative, and unconvincing. The Others (vampires, werewolves, Elementals, etc) dominate the globe. Humans were "created" in Europe, and live in circumscribed enclaves elsewhere in a system that recalls the reservations the US imposed on Native Americans. Despite this, humans have developed cell phones, cars, the internet, etc. We're told the Others dominate the land, but we mainly see the non-human characters trying to accommodate to the human system while the humans go about pretty much oblivious.
e) The plot is bog-standard color-by-numbers Bad People try to get MC, Good People protect her, Showdown, Victory, end. Still probably the best part of the book as unlike everything else it isn't broken, just boring.
And the racism? Well, if "humans" only ever existed in Europe before "discovering" North America... then basically every non-white non-Western human has been erased from this universe. In their place we have the monstrous, human-eating terra indigene, the Others. Basically, "white Europeans" are the stand-in for all of humanity, and monsters are the stand in for everybody else.
If that doesn't bother you (!!!) then maybe this will. I mentioned earlier that human society and technological development in the novel is basically identical to what we have today- cell phones, cars, internet, etc. This implies that all of human societal and cultural development IN OUR WORLD NOW is the result of white European ingenuity and effort, and EVERYONE ELSE IN THE WORLD is totally extraneous. This is a standard white supremacist argument, and grotesquely untrue at every level.
I wish I could be shocked that such a sloppy, lazy, and fundamentally bad book came from a major publishing house-- I will definitely be more cautious in buying books from Roc in the future.
This book is bad on every level a book can be bad:
a) The writing is sloppy-- words are misused, dialogue is clunky.
b) The pacing is molasses-slow. We spend immense amounts of time hearing about people forgot to put on their shoes before rushing outside and now their socks are wet, so they make plans to go back to their house to pick up dry socks and maybe a sealed container of soup for lunch and on and ON.
c) The characters are shallow and characterisation is inconsistent. The villain is a cardboard Sexy Stupid Bad Girl. The MC is the Mariest of Sues. We're told the male lead is a decisive far-thinker but we spend most of the book seeing him throw tantrums about trivial things such as the smell of the MC's hair dye.
d) The world-building is lazy, uncreative, and unconvincing. The Others (vampires, werewolves, Elementals, etc) dominate the globe. Humans were "created" in Europe, and live in circumscribed enclaves elsewhere in a system that recalls the reservations the US imposed on Native Americans. Despite this, humans have developed cell phones, cars, the internet, etc. We're told the Others dominate the land, but we mainly see the non-human characters trying to accommodate to the human system while the humans go about pretty much oblivious.
e) The plot is bog-standard color-by-numbers Bad People try to get MC, Good People protect her, Showdown, Victory, end. Still probably the best part of the book as unlike everything else it isn't broken, just boring.
And the racism? Well, if "humans" only ever existed in Europe before "discovering" North America... then basically every non-white non-Western human has been erased from this universe. In their place we have the monstrous, human-eating terra indigene, the Others. Basically, "white Europeans" are the stand-in for all of humanity, and monsters are the stand in for everybody else.
If that doesn't bother you (!!!) then maybe this will. I mentioned earlier that human society and technological development in the novel is basically identical to what we have today- cell phones, cars, internet, etc. This implies that all of human societal and cultural development IN OUR WORLD NOW is the result of white European ingenuity and effort, and EVERYONE ELSE IN THE WORLD is totally extraneous. This is a standard white supremacist argument, and grotesquely untrue at every level.
I wish I could be shocked that such a sloppy, lazy, and fundamentally bad book came from a major publishing house-- I will definitely be more cautious in buying books from Roc in the future.