Reading While Black

I don’t know why, but I am supremely irritated by an Anonymous post made at Karen’s blog. In regards to the topic, which is a spin-off of Gwyneth’s post about the love shown for Sheikh’s but not black men, Anonymous, after stating her non-issue with fantasizing about black men, completely negates her input to the topic by saying “if I marry a black man, then my sons would also be black men. And they would enter life and live it with all the discrimination and ugliness that go with it, just by being black men.”

Wait a minute, now I know why I’m upset–because my experience as a black woman, and more so, according to this poster, the experience of my brothers, my uncles, my cousins, my grandparents, my friends, is “ugly”. Ugly is defined thusly:

1. very unattractive, repulsive.
2. displeasing to the eye, or ear, or sensibilities; unsightly.
3. not aesthetically pleasing.
4. Ugliness is possessed by physical things that are unappealing to the senses, especially visually. It often indicates that something provokes revulsion or horror.

The opposite of ugly is beauty.

From a writer’s perspective, word choice is one of the most important decisions you have to make. One false word can shift the entire meaning of a sentence or image you want to show. While I’m fairly certain the poster didn’t mean it the way it sounded, they further put their foot in their mouth by saying a black man would have to be a brain surgeon for her to be willing to overcome the trouble her family would give she and her half-black family, “so yes, I guess, in a way, reality is also intruding here”, which further implies in the vein of the topic, that the poster can’t read “black” romances because the reality of their own situation (which I take to mean that black men must be brain surgeons or whatever for her to feel they are “acceptable” fantasies in “black” romances)–never mind the fact that it’s a book–would intrude.

The Anonymous poster’s opinion further solidifies the existence of “black tax”–black people must work thrice as hard as non-blacks to be considered “acceptable” by society–even if that black person is from the black elite (you know…Jack & Jill, summers at Oak Bluffs in Martha’s Vineyard, Cotillions, and all that). And even then, you’ll still be “just a nigger” (as seen in Brian Copeland’s wonderful, hilarious book Not A Genuine Black Man), someone whose life experience is destined to be “ugly” compared to the “beautiful” existence of a non-black person.

SMH

Blurb: Louisiana cocktail waitress Sookie Stackhouse has her hands full dealing with every sort of undead and paranormal creature imaginable. And after being betrayed by her longtime vampire love, Sookie must not only deal with a new man in her life-the shapeshifter Quinn-but also contend with the long-planned vampire summit. The summit is a tense situation. The vampire queen of Louisiana is in a precarious position, her power base weakened by hurricane damage to New Orleans. And there are some vamps who would like to finish what nature started. Soon, Sookie must decide what side she’ll stand with. And her choice may mean the difference between survival and all-out catastrophe.

Charlaine Harris’ Sookie Stackhouse is one of two paranormal series I will buy in any format (the other being L.A. Banks’ Vampire Huntress Legends–The Cursed out in July!) and with All Together Dead, she has not disappointed me. Many long-time readers gnash and moan over Sookie’s love life but I for think I’m one of the few who reads for the development of Sookie and the unique cast of characters Harris has drawn around her and this book proves a turning point for Sookie’s role in human and supernatural society.

We pick up after Definitely Dead, in which Sookie was witness to a vampire King’s death, is recuperating from betrayal and has a new roomate in the clean-cut witch Amelia Broadwater. She’s still a cocktail waitress at Merlotte’s, but she’s no longer seen as a huge freak–well, not much. In typical Harris fashion, the plot leading up to Sookie’s departure for the vampire summit is full of twists and turns: her were-panther brother Jason marries his were-panther girlfriend, she finally consummates her relationship with were-tiger Quinn and gets her first inkling about his mysterious past, and comes face to face with the result of her know association with vampires in the disapproving reactions of her human friends when they learn of her invitation to the summit. But Sookie has a lot more to worry about than married brothers, secretive boyfriends and sneering friends. As the sole living witness to the melee that destroyed the King of Arkansas’ kingdom, she finds herself under the thumb of the Queen of Louisiana and her bodyguard Andre–not a place anyone wishes to be.

Harris has subtly drawn Sookie deeper into the vampire world, and with Pam sharing her human past, as well as the Queen telling Sookie about her own–not to mention her relationships with Bill and Eric–Sookie no longer possesses the ability to view vampires as the “monster in the closet”, instead seeing them as…well…”human”. Because of this, Sookie is torn between the human world she never fully belonged and the supernatural world where she is viewed as special, and even further, between the vampires and the weres, who do not get along. The tone of ATD is much more somber and ominous than any other previous Southern Vampire Mystery installment, and the disastrous results of the growing animosity between vampires and intolerant humans explodes–literally–at the end of this book.

What left me shaken by the end of ATD was the subconscious knowledge that Sookie will be forced to choose where she stands in the world of humans and supes. I can’t help but notice that Harris tied up loose ends on the human side and has placed Sookie’s only human relative into the “supe” camp, further tying Sookie’s hands when it comes to what choice she makes. I’m going to go out on a limb and go beyond reader speculation that Harris has used the human and supernatural worlds to parallel the prejudices between ethnicities, sexual orientation, and religion, and say that the lines being gradually drawn mimic a spiritual battle between Good and Evil, or God and Satan.

Despite the sparse prose and the general up-beat tone to the series, when probing beneath the surface Harris has superbly drawn a world filled with contradictions and shades of gray that are destined to separate into black and white. Brava Ms. Harris, Brava. A

The Georgian era has always fascinated me (after the Edwardian and Restoration periods). Wigs. Seduction. Satin. Men in heels. I just love the dichotomy of a wig, patches and powder on a handsome man. The period is also one of bawdy wit, which I feel Hughes captured very well with the Tete a Tete gossip column she uses to open each chapter.

Blurb:

SIX NIGHTS OF PLEASURE . . .

Georgianna Exley’s passionate nature has always been her undoing-and for this reason the beautiful young widow allows her lovers only a single night in her bed. But Ivo Dauntry has come home to England, and for him she’ll break her most sacred rule: granting him six nights of sensual bliss, one for every year he’s given up for her . . .

SIX YEARS TO WAIT . . ..

As a gentleman born, Ivo risked his reputation and his life in a duel to defend Georgianna’s honor. Now, returned from exile, Ivo discovers that she has proved to be less than a lady . . . and soon, his daring seduction becomes a sensual contest of wills. But the long-ago duel that bound them forever has fueled the hatred of a madman determined to make Georgianna pay for her misdeeds with her life, and once again, Ivo must risk everything to save the woman he loves . . .

The premise that leads into Lord Sin is one that pushes my “yes” button: the stoic, innocent type of man absolutely fascinated and upended by the scandalous heroine. With Ivo’s return to English shores much tension was expected on the part of Georgianna, a woman who took sex where she wanted with no regard for the emotional side. Basically a female Corinthian, George Exley had the potential to be a fascinating heroine whose cheerful promiscuity could have contrasted starkly against the torch Ivo Dauntry carried for her, but she wasn’t and Ivo was even more flat of a character than she was.

Lord Sin opens with Ivo and George exchanging a brooding glance over a pugilist match. The next they meet is at the house party hosted by George’s father-in-law. They exchange more broody, lustful looks while smoking, riding, and eating, while barely speaking to one another. While George and Ivo circle one another like a pair of duelists, out of the blue comes a villain I can barely say is a cartoon because I’ve seen better cartoon characters. What makes the villain even worse is that he is villainy–your basic mustache-twirler while doing dastardly deeds like killing while ranting over the object of his anger–but the the character affected by his actions doesn’t react to it until a number of chapters into the book.

Meanwhile, Ivo feels George owes him six nights for each year of his exile in between his brooding over his grandfather’s hatred of him and George’s occasional twinges of emotion over her dead husband and the protectiveness of her male best friends. On the subject of the secondary characters, I must say that I was left confused by at least one of them, and “Angelstone” and “Brimstone” (the two male BFFs) failed to lend any texture to the character of George and came across as walking sequel-bait. The sex scenes are fairly nice in this story and one can tell Hughes has a good grasp on the clothing of this era, but the lack of any conflict between George and Ivo (he decides fairly early that he wants her and she falls in with his plans) and the tacked-on suspense sub-plot that had neither rhyme nor reason to the plot other than to stretch the book another 50 pages made this book a complete chore to read. The prose had moments of beauty and I could tell the author had a few good ideas, but Lord Sin failed on so many levels, which is why I’ll have to give it a D.

From the author’s website: How does a hedonistic, hellbound L.A. sophisticate like bad boy rock star Bryan Spencer woo young, gifted and black sweet home Alabama belle Callie Lawson? What type of magical voodoo draws him to her magnolia-scented bosom? Seduced by the unhurried pace and a lifestyle that is the antithesis of his own, he finds that he cannot break away from the seductive spell of a woman who soothes the deepest recesses of his tortured soul. Bryan, guitar god extraordinaire, is compelled to retreat to the small town when he is devastated by the loss of his best friend and band mate. The peaceful tranquility, not to mention unaccustomed celibacy, is slowly driving him mad until he meets Callie Lawson, budding tycoon, aficionado of black entrepreneurship and owner of the local bookstore. He quickly discovers that Callie is one of the few people he’s met who doesn’t have her own agenda for befriending him. Far from the cloying adulation he is accustomed to, Callie is totally focused on her own career goals and is reluctant to have anything to do with a ‘long-haired rocker from California.’ Bryan overcomes her misgivings with an old-fashioned courtship that belies his L.A. rocker origins. He introduces this Sunday School girl to some truly high-powered sex and decadence. The question is which one wins: Southern Sunday School or L.A. sin? Just when they’re certain everlasting love is firmly in their grasp, they are rent asunder by treachery and betrayal of the most staggering kind. They must defy egregious stereotypes and false perceptions to embrace their own sweet Alabama love.

Interracial love is a sticky topic to pull off. An author must be true to her characters and their experiences while fighting against stereotypes and generalizations about race. Holcomb pulls this off quite nicely, Bryan and Callie never falling into the “white people can’t dance, black people like watermelon” schtick we tend to see on our TV screens. Mostly set in present day Alabama, the novel introduced me to a place as foreign as 19th century London. At its heart, Rock Star is less about the conflict that arises through lovers of different races, than about the difficulties that arise when two people come from completely different worlds–in this case, Bryan Spencer is a celebrity–the sort of conflict and friction to which anyone can relate.

Unfortunately this compelling story fell short of my expectations. Despite the fertile field sown by the setting of small-town Alabama, I never got a true sense of the town. Callie explained it was a small town, that everyone knew everyone’s business, but I never felt it. I never caught the mingling sensation of claustrophobia and comfort of living where “everybody knows your name” that would have made the second half of the book so much more poignant for me during the exploding media frenzy and town hypocrisy when Bryan and Callie’s relationship went public.

I also found the conflict on the tepid side. Callie spent a good portion of the first half believing Bryan’s insincerity about pursuing her because of his celebrity when we were never shown anything to the contrary about his character. One thing that really stood out for me as unbelievable was her complete ignorance of his celebrity–of celebrity life in general–in this day of Access Hollywood, celebrity gossip blogs, US Weekly, and celebrity stories splashed on homepages of popular search engines. Callie’s naivety about the extent of his celebrity would have felt more believable if the novel was set ten years ago, but it left me scratching my head in befuddlement–particularly since her younger sisters were such huge fans of Bryan’s music.

For being such a major celebrity, Bryan came across as the boy next door. Alright, some celebrities may appear down to earth and unaffected, but something about mega-success and access to anything one wants has to rub off on the way a one would perceive things as well as how one would react within certain situations.

However, I found Callie and Bryan at their most real when the perils of dating a celebrity wedged itself between them. How can she adjust? What could he do to not loose her? Is this even lasting? Finally, the real conflict of a regular person falling for a celebrity. The questions raised in the end and how they struggled with this new conflict raised my initial impressions of the novel and despite the stylistic and characteristic troubles I found in the book, I look forward to reading more from Holcomb and grade Rock Star a solid C.