So Many Books... - June 21st, 2009
Jun. 21st, 2009
10:26 am - Love! Of Oktapodi and trees
via ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
coffeeem.
And check out myntti's set of pics - trees outside her flat (in Finland) going from almost bare to incredibly lush and green in three-day increments...
04:16 pm - Yet another Sartorias-sparked ramble
AKA 'another one of those nice confluences to which serendipity sometimes treats us'; in this case, 2 books and 1 post. I recently finished Elizabeth C. Bunce's A Curse Dark as Gold, which I liked a lot, with some reservations. Then sartorias posted this about paranormals. More than ever after reading comments I'm unsure about the differences between the various types of books involved, but what Sherwood said about romance in historicals was very interesting, and I was chiming in with many others on the dislike for the Big Mis as the keep-'em-apart device for the romance. Meanwhile I was reading Madeleine E. Robins' Point of Honour, and finished yesterday, though a crashing headache kept me from doing more than a quick Goodreads rating then.
Short version is that the two quite different books - one decidedly fantasy (based on the fairy-tale 'Rumplestiltskin') and the other only fantastic in being a slightly alternate Regency England - won me over big-time for the same thing, and disappointed me in the romances which they could be said to inherit from their (much-changed) original sub-genres. The win-over: both took a type of story in which economic realities are either brushed over sketchily or have protagonists who are poor but will by the end of the story marry out of poverty. Both books treated economics very seriously indeed, dealing with a particular level of society usually ignored in their sub-genre of origin: the small, struggling mill-owner determined to keep the business alive in Curse and the 'Fallen Woman' who manages to maintain her independence in Point of Honour. In neither case did marriage rescue the heroine from her financial troubles, though the marriage of the fairy-tale did take place, in recognisable form.
( Longer version )
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