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A review by somberlittleman
A Brother's Price by Wen Spencer
2.0
I really wanted to like this book. It was recommended by a friend who adores it, and moreover, the premise seemed like such an interesting one.
However.
It is at turns a pretty compelling story, and also bogged down by far too much worldbuilding. Mind you, world building is something I usually can’t get enough of, but when the world being built could easily be read as either ham-fisted and confused attempts at feminism, or as a slam-dunk for people who think the 1950s was the best era yet for gender and we must return to it posthaste? That’s not a world I want to spend time in.
One of the more obvious ‘roll your eyes and move on’ aspects of this book is the lack of queerness. Queer folks who love a high concept novel, fantasy especially, will be used to the irritation of adoring concepts and worlds which hold no concept of us; of wanting to lose ourselves in stories and magical realms which tell us that the most fantastic place of all is somewhere we broadly do not get to exist. But then this book took that a step further, by failing to mention queerness in any fashion until nearly 80% of the way through, only to immediately shrug it off as “women who lie with women are whores for the sake of others’ pleasure, nothing more” and not otherwise address it.
Yikes again. I don’t envy the random lesbian in this world, surrounded by scads of horny unmarried women, who will clearly not want a thing to do with them.
Also, unrelated to the actual structural problems of this book, this is a more petty concern but… this book takes so much care to use in-world equivalents of curses (“Holy Mothers!” Instead of “oh my god!”, etc). So why then do they turn around and say more modern things like the big four not-safe-for-TV swear words? Took me right out of the plot when I did manage to be in it for a few minutes.
However.
It is at turns a pretty compelling story, and also bogged down by far too much worldbuilding. Mind you, world building is something I usually can’t get enough of, but when the world being built could easily be read as either ham-fisted and confused attempts at feminism, or as a slam-dunk for people who think the 1950s was the best era yet for gender and we must return to it posthaste? That’s not a world I want to spend time in.
One of the more obvious ‘roll your eyes and move on’ aspects of this book is the lack of queerness. Queer folks who love a high concept novel, fantasy especially, will be used to the irritation of adoring concepts and worlds which hold no concept of us; of wanting to lose ourselves in stories and magical realms which tell us that the most fantastic place of all is somewhere we broadly do not get to exist. But then this book took that a step further, by failing to mention queerness in any fashion until nearly 80% of the way through, only to immediately shrug it off as “women who lie with women are whores for the sake of others’ pleasure, nothing more” and not otherwise address it.
Yikes again. I don’t envy the random lesbian in this world, surrounded by scads of horny unmarried women, who will clearly not want a thing to do with them.
Also, unrelated to the actual structural problems of this book, this is a more petty concern but… this book takes so much care to use in-world equivalents of curses (“Holy Mothers!” Instead of “oh my god!”, etc). So why then do they turn around and say more modern things like the big four not-safe-for-TV swear words? Took me right out of the plot when I did manage to be in it for a few minutes.