Vanora Bennett’s The People’s Queen

GabriellaLeave a comment

I particularly enjoyed historical writer Vanora Bennett’s Queen of Silks. Protagonist Isabel Lambert is driven and sympathetic, attempting to rejuvenate 15th century England’s inefficient silk industry and, while ultimately failing, it still comes across as interesting, with a woman lead you can root for and groan with when her efforts come undone.

The same, however, cannot be said for her newest novel, The People’s Queen, and protagonist/anti-heroine Alice Perrers. Perrers was mistress to King Edward III in the 14th century, a woman who accumulated a lot of wealth through Edward’s favour and her own political savvy but ultimately lost the lot. True, she lost it because the men she was in ‘business’ with (and I use the term loosely – today we’d call them crooks) hung her out to dry, but it’s impossible to feel any sympathy for her. Alice is greedy and a back-stabber to a point that you know she’s left a trail of paperwork behind her that will eventually prove her undoing. (So she’s not even a smart crook – or at least too greedy to think straight.) And unless Bennet was being ironic, the title is somewhat misleading: Perrers grated against the nobility and alienated the people with her flashy, indulgent ways. She cheats on her husband with the King, she cheats on the King with poet/courtier Thomas Chaucer. So when it all comes crashing down, instead of any sympathy for her, my thoughts were ‘ha, she got hers’.This book did nothing to explore a more nuanced idea of Perrers beyond the stereotype of her as a greedy, grasping royal mistress. Hell, if Jean Plaidy can bring sympathy to Marie Antoinette, surely more can be done for Perrers?

Ironically, Bennet captures fourteenth-century England well: the opulence, the corruption, the waste, the arbitrary powers of the King and the disconnect between the nobility and the people. If you like 14th century English historical fiction, read this book. If you like 14th century FEMINIST English historical fiction, don’t read this book. If I wanted to read about Alice Perrers the greedy, grasping royal mistress, I’d have saved mysef the trouble and gone to Wikipedia.

Assault on Reproductive Freedom Continues

firephoenix827 Comments

They call it death by a thousand cuts. The assault on reproductive freedom continues, at the state government level, and unfortunately, it is not just about whether a woman should have the freedom to get an abortion.

Indiana has enacted a new law that cuts off federal money to Planned Parenthood in the state, although as we all know, that money does not go to pay for abortions. Instead, it pays for medical exams and treatment for women who can’t pay for these things. If you have ever been prescribed birth control, you know you cannot have the prescription without the exam, and if the exam comes back abnormal the doctor generally still won’t give you the prescription until the abnormal test result is checked out and taken care of – all very expensive if you don’t have insurance.

The Indiana law has an exception for hospitals, so this law is very specifically targeted at Planned Parenthood. That organization challenged the law in court, but U.S. District Judge Tanya Walton Pratt allowed the cuts to go into effect immediately, denying the request for a stay.

The new law also bans abortions after 20 weeks, 4 weeks earlier than the previous law. It is thought that Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas are likely to quickly follow Indiana’s lead.

Betty Cockrum, president of Planned Parenthood Indiana, said:

The court’s ruling today means that 9,300 Medicaid patients at our 28 locations have lost services from their preferred provider.

Over 30 anti-abortion laws were enacted just in April.

Abortion banned at or after 20 weeks: Kansas, Idaho, Oklahoma.

Required counseling that included inaccurate information about links between abortion and breast cancer risks: North Dakota.

Required counseling women that abortion ends “the Life of a Whole, Separate, Unique, Living Human Being”: Kansas.

Requires an ultrasound before an abortion: Arizona, North Dakota.

Abortion coverage limited in health care exchanges: Idaho, Virginia, Oklahoma.

Amended legislation to further restrict minors’ abortion access: Kansas, North Dakota.

Amended abortion reporting requirements: Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, North Dakota, Oklahoma

I read a story (read the comments at the salon.com story with caution) recently about a woman who experienced a placental abruption, and was bleeding out at a hospital where the doctor refused to perform an “abortion” although the fetus was either dead or not able to be saved, and the woman was dying. There is some confusion in the comments over whether the problem was no one else knowing how to perform the procedure, or whether ordinary medical procedures used to care for women after natural miscarriages just weren’t applied. In any case, another line of attack is the education of doctors: if they believe it is okay to let women die in an emergency room rather than refuse to hurry the dying of a non viable fetus or remove a dead one, if, as one medical doctor states, medical schools don’t talk about applying the procedures to these situations because they are afraid and the first time the idea occurs is in the emergency, and if the government limits funding for medical schools on the basis of whether they train doctors to perform abortions.

From the woman herself:

You shouldn’t need to know the details of why a woman aborts to trust her to make the best decision for herself.

No Mercy by Sherrilyn Kenyon

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This book really didn’t grab me; I found the pages of narration about how the main characters wanted to fall all over each other sexually to be overkill, and the plot meandered toward what seemed like the major point – and epic quest – that is finished rather quickly and easily and then the plot just takes another corner and wanders on.

I also found the blonde, green-eyed Amazon (an immortal Night Hunter) from ancient Greece rather jarring, especially when nearly every other woman and female demon or werebeast in the book is described as blonde as well, and blonde werebears? Really?

I counted only three female characters with other than blonde hair – the goddess Artemis with red hair, the Chinese Night Hunter with black, and a demoness with black hair.

The book is set in New Orleans, and the only character described as humanly non-white (some demons are blue or purple or red) is a Chinese Night Hunter. One would think if werebeasts can be blonde and blue-eyed, they could be black, especially if they are in New Orleans – and there are normal humans present in the Sanctuary bar.

Throughout the book, several women are described as unreasonable and/or incompetent. The male main character has a mother who blamed him as a child for his brothers being murdered by a rival werebeast clan – she blamed him for surviving, although they instructed him to save his sister, which he did. Not only did she do this in her grief at the moment, but she held it against him all the centuries of her life. His sister frequently has moods all the men of the family just ignore, and she is responsible for erasing the memories of oblivious humans who see what they shouldn’t in the family’s bar – and she is not competent, and harms them, and they let her do it anyway, and just feel sorry for the people.

When the epic quest comes around in the latter part of the book, the werebeast, the Amazon Night Hunter, and two male Night Hunters go to achieve the goal – the female Chinese Night Hunter is left out for no apparent reason, although she is at least as capable as the men, and was responsible for the Amazon’s protection detail as much as the men were (she’s the focus of the quest).

I did like the description that is given of Amazonian society, freedom and security for men and women alike to do what they want. It is described as very egalitarian in some ways, although the women are in charge – not like some of the legends.

Also, the two female Night Hunters kick ass quite well on their own, and the Amazon only needs help because she’s become the focus of some serious bad guys none of them could fight alone. The story does focus on her letting go of some pain from the ancient past – but does not focus on her learning she needs a man.

I do not know how common in the genre are stories based entirely outside the Christian mythos, but I found that part refreshing. Everything was located within the fantasy and Greek mythos – gods, demigods, demons, Daimons, werebeasts, etc.

John Marsden’s ‘The Ellie Chronicles’

GabriellaLeave a comment

While I Live, the first in John Marsden’s The Ellie Chronicles trilogy, picks up where the last of the Tomorrow series left off: the war is over, much of Australia has been ceded to Indo – I mean, Nameless Enemy Country – and Ellie Linton and what remains of her friends must find a way to adapt. The Lintons live on a border property, and early on in Live, Ellie’s parents are  brutally murdered in what may or may not have been a guerrilla retribution attack on Ellie. While I have no idea what it’s like to live in an area so recently decimated by war, I think Marsden captured well the unease of living in a border area: each side distrusting each other and feeling they’re entitled to the other side’s stuff, as well as constant skirmishes that have varying degrees of authorisation by their governments. There’s plunder and rape for no better reason then they felt like it – although, of course, the plunder and rape is only commited by Nameless Enemy. Australians don’t commit such horrific crimes, no sirree.

So, Ellie must continue on her own with the assistance of Gavin, a boy she and her friends took under their wing during the war who is, for all intents and purposes, an orphan. However, her parents‘ financial advisor – I forget the guy’s name – has his eye on her Linton property and engineers against her will to become her gaurdian and sell the farm for a song to a crony who at best would be called a war profiteer. Ellie, as a seventeen-year-old, has no redress and it looks like all is lost, but the way she eventually circumvents this is so cool and ingenious it could only come from a seventeen-year-old.

The trilogy also brings back Lee and Homer, with Fiona making the occasional appearance. (Kevin is nowhere to be seen; he’s not even mentioned.) While I would have liked to see more of Fi – these two girls/women went through hell together, and she barely gets a mentioned? – at least it was partially justified by the fact that Fiona has always been a town girl, while Ellie and Homer are farm kids. So instead of Fi (and Corrie and Robyn) we get Shannon, Jess and Bronte. They’re OK – although there’s a pretty good twist involving Bronte towards the end of the third book, Circle of Flight – but one thing I missed about the Tomorrow series was the closeness between the women.

Something I love is that Ellie doesn’t become InstaMum to Gavin (who is only 7-10 years younger than her, anyway). At best, it’s InstaBigSister. Taking care of another human being doesn’t come naturally to her, like some would have you believe having two X chromosomes would. But at the end of the day, they’re both devastated when protective services split them up. (Protective services, haven’t you read the last nine books? Don’t you know it’s a dumb idea to come between Ellie and hers?) I loved Ellie’s relationship with Gavin. They fight, but at the end of the day, they love each other and work together to defeat a common enemy – whether it be weeds, Nameless Enemy, Gavin’s step-father or protective services.

There’s plenty of actions, of course – it wouldn’t be an Ellie Linton novel if she didn’t leave a 24-style trail of destruction in her wake at least once per book. It would be so easy to portray her as superhuman to the point of caricature, a kind of hybrid of Ellen Ripley and McGyver, deep in alien territory, shooting at whatever evil creature gets in her way, all with whatever bits and pieces she has handy. (Bonus points if she doesn’t use those bits and pieces in the way they were intended.) Instead, she comes across as a person who is very human, very fallible – including getting badly injured and suffering from exhaustion – but keeps going because it’s in her nature to keep going until she’s either dead or captured.

Random Cool Bit #1: When Ellie’s parents are killed and Fiona’s have turned her request for guardianship down – citing geography, I believe – she then goes to Homer’s, who accept. I believe the line is ‘if I couldn’t have Fi for a sister, the next best thing was having Homer for a brother.’ I love how this reinforced their very close but strictly platonic relationship, maintained through most of the Tomorrow series and all of the Ellie series. Homer and Ellie share something pretty special that is entirely non-romantic or special. Marsden never hints at anything else; they may as well be brother and sister. Which brings me to…

Random Cool Bit #2: When Ellie’s new boyfriend Jeremy is jealous of Ellie and Homer’s relationship, he has a sulk and tells her to choose because he wants to be the #1 priority in her life. Riiight, like running a farm, playing an unofficial role in a resistance movement, studying fulltime and caring for a disabled child while legally a child herself aren’t worthy pursuits, no, she should make him #1. Ellie is hurt, confused and angry – particularly in light of the fact that she is hardly his #1. But she tells Jeremy where he can stick his ultimatum, because like hell is she giving up a mate of untold years – and fellow survivor of the Tomorrow series – for a boyfriend of a few months. I loved how for Ellie, there was no choice, even if Jeremy were being reasonable. Which it makes clear he isn’t. (What would have been even cooler? Had it been Fi that Jeremy was asking her to ditch. ‘I’m your man, ditch the girlfriend’. Yeah…no.)

If I have a gripe, it’s that Flight feels like it was hurriedly finished, as if Marsden woke up one morning, realised he was sick of Ellie and co and wanted to see the back of them. I can’t say I’d blame him if this was the case – combined, it’s a ten-book series written over fifteen years – but it still feels a little rushed. Particularly the resolution of Ellie and Lee’s tumultuous relationship – I never got the impression that they had addressed what had gone right and wrong in the past and how to err on the side of right. 

But for all that, I prefer the The Ellie Chronicles to the Tomorrow series, I think because this is primarily Ellie’s story and not fractured by those of Fi, Corrie, Kevin etc. And I liked that Ellie had a more definite resolution than Tomorrow did; while not exactly ‘and they lived happily ever after’, Circle of Flight leaves you with the sense that anyone who can go through what Ellie has gone through, fought for what she’s fought for – and won a chunk of it – and still has the spirit to out-maneuver a bureaucrat… is going to be fine.

The few controlling the many

betaproxy12 Comments

Someone sent me an interesting article about how US workers get so little vacation compared to workers in other developed nations. The article makes the usual points: US workers get typically 2-3 weeks, at best, while Germans get 6 weeks and loads of countries provide four. Part of the reason, of course, is that other nations’ laws require businesses to provide paid time off, while US laws do not. Many workers get no paid time off in the US – not even sick time, and I think too few middle class Americans are aware of this fact. Retail workers, customer service workers, temp workers, contract workers – quite a few jobs only pay you if you show up, so bring your nasty flu and come on down if you want to afford the doctor you have to pay out of pocket because you also get no health care. Viva America!

But the article asks the question: why?

“There is simply no evidence that working people to death gives you a competitive advantage,” said John de Graaf, the national coordinator for Take Back Your Time, a group that researches the effects of overwork.

He noted that the United States came in fourth in the World Economic Forum’s 2010-2011 rankings of the most competitive economies, but Sweden — a country that by law offers workers five weeks of paid vacation — came in second.

This is nothing new. We’ve known for a while that longer hours don’t equate to heightened productivity, and can even correlate to a drop in productivity as stressed-out employees take sick leave to deal with stress-induced ailments. Employees working long hours should suggest to a CEO not that everyone’s motivated and productive, but that a lot of time is being wasted.

We know these things. Law makers know these things. If CEOs don’t know these things, they are not paying attention. The human brain cannot focus in high gear for a neat 8 hours a day with a lunch break. We can’t be productive five days a week and then rest on the other two. Our work and everything else in our lives is all jumbled together in our brains, which haven’t evolved to compartmentalize for pre-arranged blocks of time. So why does American culture value working long hours and taking little time off as a signal of good work getting done?

Answer: because that myth furthers the real goal behind a job-based economy.

Employment isn’t about enabling people to fend for themselves more comfortably than our ancestors had to. It might seem like a much nicer arrangement than having to grow crops and hope the weather doesn’t wreck them, and hunt meat and grow livestock and worry all the time about whether it’ll be enough. And it can be. But employment merely shifts your dependency on Mother Nature to dependency on some company continuing to employ you – and in some cases, your chances would be better with Mother Nature.

And even good companies who nurture and respect employees have to lay people off sometimes, and employees know this. The dependency on the job is always in the back of your mind, coloring your thought processes and decisions about your entire life.

The net effect of employment is not to empower you, but to make you dependent. That dependency ensures a few things:

  • You’re less likely to whistle blow than you would be if you had another way to make ends meet.
  • You’re less likely to complain if you’re mistreated, which can give your company a significant unfair advantage against other companies.
  • If you’re harassed, you probably know complaining is more likely to result in your being let go than your harasser being let go, so you just take it. Nice perk for the company’s pet bullies!
  • You have less time to devote to family and community, let alone grass roots movements that might challenge the establishment. That’s good for the establishment!
  • You’re probably too stressed out to do anything but take shit and convince yourself it’s not so bad.

The point here is not to suggest every company takes full advantage of this dependency – many don’t. My point is that the system is engineered to create a dependency that works out really well for those few people who are living most luxuriously at the expense of the vast majority. How do you oppress a huge majority of people? Keep them exhausted. Keep them dependent. Keep them frightened. It’s what family abusers have known for years – how else would one person ever manage to abuse a spouse and one or more kids? It happens all the time, because abusers intuitively know the rule: keep them exhausted, dependent and frightened.