#28: Angel's Blood by Nalini Singh

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

My favorite part is when the heroine shoots the hero. But I think maybe it’s supposed to be?

Elena is a vampire hunter. In her world, vampires are made by angels. In exchange for immortality, they agree to become the slave of the vampire who turns them for a hundred years. When one goes rogue or runs away, vampire hunters track them down (they are, apparently, born with this ability), collar them, and return them to their owner. The most elite group of angels are the archangel’s who not only effectively rule the world, but also choose what few of the hundreds of thousands of humans who ask to become vampires are allowed to do so.

When the archangel Uram murders his entire household and goes rogue, another archangel, Raphael, contacts the Hunter Guild for Elena’s services. Since Elena can’t track Uram until he kills a couple hundred people and becomes an ubervampire (not that he bothers to explain that to her) he spends the first 2/3 of the book trying to get Elena in his bed.

Within the first forty pages, Raphael threatens to murder the infant daughter of Elena’s best friend, Sara, if Elena doesn’t cooperate. As near as I can tell, he means it. By page fifty or sixty, he’s used psychic powers to repeatedly invade Elena’s mind. When she points out that going into and influencing someone’s mind without permission because “it’s easier,” even after they’ve told you not to, isn’t much different from rape, he gets offended. By page one hundred, he’s used his psychic powers to make Elena lust after him and forget she doesn’t want to have sex with him (yet) and then shrugs it off when she accuses him of trying to rape her and says it was worth a try.

Incidentally, in the course of Raphael shrugging off attempted rape, Elena hits him (tries to beat him up, really) and pretty much runs away. (As one does when someone tries to rape one.) This kicks off about 100 pages where Elena is forced to go into hiding for committing the grave sin of hitting Raphael and denying him sex. During this, he terrorizes her friends and takes over their minds and bodies to force them to help him find her. When he finds her and is dangling her above the ground, she shoots him. Which leads to her being imprisoned and all of Raphael’s people talking about how much they were looking forward to Raphael’s torturing her for a long, long time. Much of his behavior doing that is dismissed as being part of The Quiet, which apparently is an angel in a superdriven rage state or something. It’s kicked off when another angel suggests that maybe Elena was influencing him when he tried to rape her, and he seems to take the suggestion and run. It was supposed to make him less horrible (and make it not his fault when he violates Elena’s friends and hunts her) and make us think better of Raphael’s normal behavior. I didn’t notice that he was acting much different. (Actually, it read like an allegory for a drunken rage to me.) Really, there’s a scene where Elena essentially thinks about how Raphael is a less-evil dictator than Uram that would be funny if it weren’t “Uram blinds and cripples people who cross him for life! Raphael just tortures them and leaves them with every bone in their body broken and their jaw only connected by tendons and tortured and screaming in agony while on public display for hours! But he was a vampire and could heal! It wasn’t permanent!”

In short, this is an amazingly unromantic romance. In truth, it might have worked in a non-romance where we see Raphael slowly reconnecting with humanity and, you know, maybe learning to respect Elena and regard humans as beings with merit, and then it led to a romance, but as it is, by the end of the book he still views humans as ants. Ending spoiler: The only reason they’re able to be together with any degree of equality at the end is because she’s been turned into an angel, and I never get the feeling that he has any respect for her until she’s an angel. Lust? Definitely. Emotion? Some, but not really love. Respect? Nada. To be worthy of Raphael’s respect, Elena can no longer be a human, but must be an angel, and so it isn’t her that she respects, but her status.

There’s also the vampirism/racism allegory. I’m not sure what boggles my mind more, that someone went “hey, let’s have an allegory for racism where the repressed minority is a soulless undead creature who eats people,” or that other people went along with it. Singh goes a step further, however, making the archangels the equivalent of rich white men, and having humans lining up in droves, begging to be turned into their slaves.

The cast, however, is very multiracial (while the cover makes Elena look like an albino, she’s actually half-Moroccan) without Singh making sure we noticed, as most authors are prone to do. And when Elena and Raphael do have sex, it’s completely on Elena’s terms, not his, and Singh seems to expect us to go “What a creep!” and agree with Elena’s opinions about the mental invasions. We’re just also somehow expected to still see him as the romantic lead. I have to say, though, that Elena herself is pretty tough, and actually less annoyingly obsessed with whether or not she’ll sleep with the Sexy Other (too busy trying to stop the mental invasions) than a lot of urban fantasy heroines (and this is paranormal romance…) seem to be. Except, you know, tough women have to barftastically start feeling oh-so-feminine when they meet alpha males who don’t understand the word “no.” So. Yeah.

The worldbuilding is also pretty decent, and very interesting, even if not completely coherent, and several of the supporting characters are pretty interesting, and seem to be being prepped for their own books. Though two are among the characters who were talking about anticipating seeing Elena get tortured. I hope that they, too, are shot by their heroines.

Also, angels emit angel dust from their wings. It’s an aphrodisiac.

#19 - The Story of my Life and Work, Booker T. Washington

[chipmunk-planet.livejournal.com]

This is an autobiography by the first president of Tuskegee University (called then Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute), Booker T. Washington. Born to a slave woman in Alabama and an unknown white man, he was emancipated at the end of the Civil War along with the rest of the slaves there, taking the last name of Washington the first time he went to school, when he was about ten or so. The book chronicles his journey from dirt poor to a man known internationally for his work.

There are a few things that strike me about this book: foremost, how 19th century Washington's writing style is. He thinks and speaks as a man of his day, which makes sense, but it's a bit jarring to hear him compare the "barbarous" red man to the black man who "chose life and civilization to extinction". (he actually used this analogy many times in his speeches to prove that blacks were better suited to be part of Reconstruction, joining forces with whites to rebuild the South)

The other thing that you can't fail to miss is the man's humble and cheerful attitude. He has very little in the way of negative to say about anyone, although at the end of the book he does mention times where people ignored him then later contributed to his work as the school grew. Washington's core belief seems to be that his hardships built character, and that through hard work and perseverance anyone could succeed.

He insisted that every one of his students, no matter how well-off, work at the school. The students built the school; they provided their own food, clothing, equipment, and many returned after graduation to teach as well. He himself spent most of his waking time working at the school, making speeches to raise money for the school, writing letters in support of black civil rights (even in other states, and on his vacation!), and networking with prominent white leaders. He visited several Presidents and William McKinley came to visit Tuskegee, the first time a sitting President had visited a black university. Washington also received an honorary degree from Harvard, another first.

Later in his life, he clashed with some of the other black leaders, particularly the religious leaders (and the influential W.E.B. DuBois), for his tell-it-like-it-is assessment of the condition of black America. Washington's view was that only by blacks being prosperous and useful to the country would racial tension be resolved, and that forcing social and political equality prematurely would only lead to a backlash from the majority white populace. He felt that help to blacks should come in the form of promoting both industrial and liberal arts education, because he felt everyone should know how to work with his or her hands (the university took men and women from its inception), and that it was more costly not to educate someone than to do so, both black and white.

He died in 1915 (I've seen several possible causes listed, but he had extreme high blood pressure and possibly a heart condition, and refused to stop working), outliving two wives and being survived by a third, along with many children and grandchildren.

I found this book very interesting and would highly recommend it.

'Becoming Madame Mao' by Anchee Min

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

'Becoming Madame Mao' is a novel based on the life of Mao's wife, who was heavily involved with the Cultural Revolution and became one of the most nototorious figures in the PRC. Although it is a novel, the writer, Anchee Min, states that she has tried to stick to the facts as closely as possible, using direct quotes from diaries, memoirs and letters where at all possible.

It's a really interesting read, and very accessible even if you don't know a lot about Chinese history. The only thing that slightly threw me was the style of writing. For some reason, Anchee Min keeps switching between first person and third person narrative, and I never entirely understood why. As far as I can tell, there is no third person narrator who might be adding in commentary of any kind. It doesn't jar nearly as badly as it could do, but it did confuse me somewhat.

Overall, however, definitely recommended.