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chocolatepot) wrote2022-07-28 06:07 pm
chocolatepot) wrote2022-07-28 06:07 pm
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A Lady's Guide to Celestial Mechanics
Despite my busy schedule of reading fanfic, writing fanfic, and thinking about what I should do next in the fanfic, I managed to finish reading a book! A Lady's Guide to Celestial Mechanics, by Olivia Waite. I think my final verdict is "it's okay, but it could have been a lot better."
Basic synopsis: Lucy Muchelney has been working as her astronomer father's scientific assistant and in fact doing much of the work. She meets Catherine, Countess of Moth, who is a new widow and former victim of spousal emotional abuse, and tries to make it as a scientist in her own name with her new patroness. The official, misogynistic scientific society is against her, but her pop-published translation of an important French work takes off, leading them to try to embarrass her in a debate with the original author - only to inadvertently champion the cause of minorities in science. A happy ending!
To start with: it's well-written. Like, the text is never clunky, the prose is very nice. That's more than I can say for a LOT of romance novels. It's lacking all the romance-novel clichés that I hate!
But ... that's also a negative. The romance novel clichés, it turns out, are extremely boring to me when they're het - I'm always like, "why can't the man and the woman actually get along when they're not kissing/having sex? why can't they support each other? why can't things happen that aren't directly related to the deep erotic blaze they feel?" when I make the mistake of picking up a straight romance novel, and Lady's Guide does a great job of saying, "they can!" Unfortunately, this means that there is no tension or conflict between the characters until close to the very end, and it only lasts about a chapter. It turns out that I am actually super into those clichés as long as it's with a queer romance! As my AO3 output will show, frankly.
But yeah, the characters are kind of doe-eyed and supportive of each other and the story barely has anything to do with their romance, which is a cardinal sin in Romancelandia. They meet, Lucy comes to live with Catherine, they both dart glances at each other like "is she ... ?" and then they give in and kiss, and then they have sex. The obstacle comes in when they meet Lucy's ex, Pris, who got married to a man at the beginning of the book - cribbing a bit from Anne Lister, it's a Marianna situation except that Lucy finds it pretty easy to resist her - and Catherine is jealous and they don't communicate briefly, confusing them into thinking the other is done with the relationship before they explain and come back together. More grievously still for me, they just seem very samey. Their personalities seem pretty similar and if they had different aesthetics I didn't pick up on it or forgot.
Which brings me to my next point: it might just be that I knew the third book in the series was about working-class suffragists (which is extremely Social Justice Approved), but I felt like so much of this characterization and plot was determined on the basis of "what would make this book Feminist and LGBTQ+ Positive?" Lucy is introduced with her dickish painter brother threatening to sell her telescope, and the men of the scientific society are all wankers who condescend to women, promoting a well-connected (white) male idiot to do the official translation over Lucy and a biracial man. Pretty much every female character has some kind of passion or talent that is being stifled by society, which they turn into something lucrative by the end, and Waite is careful to not focus just on STEM but to have characters announce that Embroidery Is Art, Too and so on. One of the reasons that Catherine and Lucy seem so samey is that they are carefully constructed to walk a middle path between butch and femme, closer to the femme side, which avoids the cliché of historical women hating gowns and corsets etc.
And I hear you saying, but Cassidy! It sounds like she did everything you complain about authors not doing! This is true. However, it felt like it was done specifically to make discourse-savvy readers happy rather than because it was true to characters that appeared in her head. (Also, I freaking love a strong butch/femme dynamic, I am high femme and I swoon at the thought of a tall, chivalrous butch, particularly if she sometimes dresses in historical male clothing. GOD. In general I like "opposites attract" ships, really.)
This all being said, I loved the twist of the French author turning out to be a titled woman of color - it was really well handled. I didn't think at all about their identity, just assumed they were a Macguffin, and so the reveal blindsided me. Very little in romance novels is actually surprising, so that was great. But on the whole, I didn't feel the feelings I ought to have felt in reading. And maybe my standards have been off because I've been reading OFMD fic that really makes me feel things lately, but IDK.
Basic synopsis: Lucy Muchelney has been working as her astronomer father's scientific assistant and in fact doing much of the work. She meets Catherine, Countess of Moth, who is a new widow and former victim of spousal emotional abuse, and tries to make it as a scientist in her own name with her new patroness. The official, misogynistic scientific society is against her, but her pop-published translation of an important French work takes off, leading them to try to embarrass her in a debate with the original author - only to inadvertently champion the cause of minorities in science. A happy ending!
To start with: it's well-written. Like, the text is never clunky, the prose is very nice. That's more than I can say for a LOT of romance novels. It's lacking all the romance-novel clichés that I hate!
But ... that's also a negative. The romance novel clichés, it turns out, are extremely boring to me when they're het - I'm always like, "why can't the man and the woman actually get along when they're not kissing/having sex? why can't they support each other? why can't things happen that aren't directly related to the deep erotic blaze they feel?" when I make the mistake of picking up a straight romance novel, and Lady's Guide does a great job of saying, "they can!" Unfortunately, this means that there is no tension or conflict between the characters until close to the very end, and it only lasts about a chapter. It turns out that I am actually super into those clichés as long as it's with a queer romance! As my AO3 output will show, frankly.
But yeah, the characters are kind of doe-eyed and supportive of each other and the story barely has anything to do with their romance, which is a cardinal sin in Romancelandia. They meet, Lucy comes to live with Catherine, they both dart glances at each other like "is she ... ?" and then they give in and kiss, and then they have sex. The obstacle comes in when they meet Lucy's ex, Pris, who got married to a man at the beginning of the book - cribbing a bit from Anne Lister, it's a Marianna situation except that Lucy finds it pretty easy to resist her - and Catherine is jealous and they don't communicate briefly, confusing them into thinking the other is done with the relationship before they explain and come back together. More grievously still for me, they just seem very samey. Their personalities seem pretty similar and if they had different aesthetics I didn't pick up on it or forgot.
Which brings me to my next point: it might just be that I knew the third book in the series was about working-class suffragists (which is extremely Social Justice Approved), but I felt like so much of this characterization and plot was determined on the basis of "what would make this book Feminist and LGBTQ+ Positive?" Lucy is introduced with her dickish painter brother threatening to sell her telescope, and the men of the scientific society are all wankers who condescend to women, promoting a well-connected (white) male idiot to do the official translation over Lucy and a biracial man. Pretty much every female character has some kind of passion or talent that is being stifled by society, which they turn into something lucrative by the end, and Waite is careful to not focus just on STEM but to have characters announce that Embroidery Is Art, Too and so on. One of the reasons that Catherine and Lucy seem so samey is that they are carefully constructed to walk a middle path between butch and femme, closer to the femme side, which avoids the cliché of historical women hating gowns and corsets etc.
And I hear you saying, but Cassidy! It sounds like she did everything you complain about authors not doing! This is true. However, it felt like it was done specifically to make discourse-savvy readers happy rather than because it was true to characters that appeared in her head. (Also, I freaking love a strong butch/femme dynamic, I am high femme and I swoon at the thought of a tall, chivalrous butch, particularly if she sometimes dresses in historical male clothing. GOD. In general I like "opposites attract" ships, really.)
This all being said, I loved the twist of the French author turning out to be a titled woman of color - it was really well handled. I didn't think at all about their identity, just assumed they were a Macguffin, and so the reveal blindsided me. Very little in romance novels is actually surprising, so that was great. But on the whole, I didn't feel the feelings I ought to have felt in reading. And maybe my standards have been off because I've been reading OFMD fic that really makes me feel things lately, but IDK.