Working on the To-Be-Read Pile
Jun. 6th, 2019 07:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kraitOne down, a million to go. :D
I finished A Brother's Price, by Wen Spencer, last week.
This book is one that I sought out because I'm always interested in worldbuilding with very different takes on marriage and sexuality. The premise of the worldbuilding in A Brother's Price is that male children are very, very rare; as consequence, women marry in groups that share one husband. Usually a group is a set of sisters: the entire bunch of them, or in very large families they may divide the family into two halves that each take a husband, with 10-20 sisters in each half.
As further consequence, families are arranged and labeled differently. Because many women share one man, all of their offspring are 'sisters' and all of the man's wives are 'mothers' - any given child has mothers and a father, rather than a mother and a father and aunts. (This also means the set of women marrying a man may actually be half-sisters, or even less genetically close if their mothers became pregnant by different men, either by losing a husband and marrying another, or by becoming pregnant without a husband.)
The rarity of men is one of the driving forces behind this world and the family of the main character, who are landed gentry but too poor to buy a husband; their only hope is to trade their brother Jerin for another family's brother, or sell him and use the price to buy a husband of their own.
The other driving force is never explicitly laid out, but the entire culture appears to be heavily influenced by, and have strong taboos around, sexually transmitted diseases; there are hints that this may be a post-apocalyptic world, or some other event caused a tight genetic bottleneck in the human population. Women who can't afford a husband may patronise 'cribs,' risking infection through sex with a captive male prostitute in the hopes of a pregnancy resulting. (Hence there being "sisters" who are only distantly related; if their mothers were half-siblings or less, and each was fathered by a different crib slave, they're less related than cousins.) There's a strong cultural imperative on men to remain virgin, and on women to protect the chastity of male relatives - a 'used' man could be infected, and his sisters won't get a good price for him.
All the worldbuilding we get is well-thought-out and was probably my favourite part of the book. It's woven into the narrative on every level, and given the choice between being infodumpy or leaving some things unexplained (such as the post-apocalyptic/population catastrophe), the author chooses to maintain character POV and not explain.
This is the third thing I've read by Spencer, and I have come to some conclusions.
It turns out that I generally come out of a Spencer novel with the feeling, Well, that was an interesting idea. Overall I enjoyed the story, but the underlying idea that inspired it always catches my interest more than the story itself. A Brother's Price might be the strongest case yet.
All that lovely and original worldbuilding didn't have as complex a story attached as I'd hoped. The characters were good, but the plot was a little slow to build and a little quick to resolve; there were a couple places where the tension was dropped instead of building, and several things I would have liked to see more of. It was a quick and enjoyable read - I even reread it! - but ultimately my reaction is "gimme ABP!AU fanfic for my favourite canons" rather than "gimme fanfic for ABP."
The other Wen Spencer novels I've read (Endless Blue and Tinker) gave me much the same reaction. Notably, Tinker has several sequels which I did not go on to read, and after Endless Blue all I could think was that both Tanya Huff and David Weber had done that plot - oddball group trapped in an alien environment they must escape - better, Huff with Valor's Trial and Weber with his co-written March Upcountry series.
I don't know if I'll read any more of her works, but at least I got a cool AU idea out of it and can cross something off my To-Read list!
I finished A Brother's Price, by Wen Spencer, last week.
This book is one that I sought out because I'm always interested in worldbuilding with very different takes on marriage and sexuality. The premise of the worldbuilding in A Brother's Price is that male children are very, very rare; as consequence, women marry in groups that share one husband. Usually a group is a set of sisters: the entire bunch of them, or in very large families they may divide the family into two halves that each take a husband, with 10-20 sisters in each half.
As further consequence, families are arranged and labeled differently. Because many women share one man, all of their offspring are 'sisters' and all of the man's wives are 'mothers' - any given child has mothers and a father, rather than a mother and a father and aunts. (This also means the set of women marrying a man may actually be half-sisters, or even less genetically close if their mothers became pregnant by different men, either by losing a husband and marrying another, or by becoming pregnant without a husband.)
The rarity of men is one of the driving forces behind this world and the family of the main character, who are landed gentry but too poor to buy a husband; their only hope is to trade their brother Jerin for another family's brother, or sell him and use the price to buy a husband of their own.
The other driving force is never explicitly laid out, but the entire culture appears to be heavily influenced by, and have strong taboos around, sexually transmitted diseases; there are hints that this may be a post-apocalyptic world, or some other event caused a tight genetic bottleneck in the human population. Women who can't afford a husband may patronise 'cribs,' risking infection through sex with a captive male prostitute in the hopes of a pregnancy resulting. (Hence there being "sisters" who are only distantly related; if their mothers were half-siblings or less, and each was fathered by a different crib slave, they're less related than cousins.) There's a strong cultural imperative on men to remain virgin, and on women to protect the chastity of male relatives - a 'used' man could be infected, and his sisters won't get a good price for him.
All the worldbuilding we get is well-thought-out and was probably my favourite part of the book. It's woven into the narrative on every level, and given the choice between being infodumpy or leaving some things unexplained (such as the post-apocalyptic/population catastrophe), the author chooses to maintain character POV and not explain.
This is the third thing I've read by Spencer, and I have come to some conclusions.
It turns out that I generally come out of a Spencer novel with the feeling, Well, that was an interesting idea. Overall I enjoyed the story, but the underlying idea that inspired it always catches my interest more than the story itself. A Brother's Price might be the strongest case yet.
All that lovely and original worldbuilding didn't have as complex a story attached as I'd hoped. The characters were good, but the plot was a little slow to build and a little quick to resolve; there were a couple places where the tension was dropped instead of building, and several things I would have liked to see more of. It was a quick and enjoyable read - I even reread it! - but ultimately my reaction is "gimme ABP!AU fanfic for my favourite canons" rather than "gimme fanfic for ABP."
The other Wen Spencer novels I've read (Endless Blue and Tinker) gave me much the same reaction. Notably, Tinker has several sequels which I did not go on to read, and after Endless Blue all I could think was that both Tanya Huff and David Weber had done that plot - oddball group trapped in an alien environment they must escape - better, Huff with Valor's Trial and Weber with his co-written March Upcountry series.
I don't know if I'll read any more of her works, but at least I got a cool AU idea out of it and can cross something off my To-Read list!
no subject
Date: 2019-06-07 03:25 am (UTC)I really loved A Brother's Price, mostly because it felt like a romance novel *from* that setting, which was intriguing. (I did not think of it as post-apocalyptic, but now that you mention it, yeah, I could see that. I had an idea there was some kind of mass extinction event, probably related to an std, so I should have thought of it that way, but for some reason, didn't. this might be because if there was an apocalypse, the characters don't know it, and I am slow.)
I loved Tinker and the sequels, though Woodsprites was...odd. So very odd.
no subject
Date: 2019-06-07 04:25 am (UTC)Same here. Love the concept, but something in the execution just wasn't working for me. Normally culture clash and oddball teams would be right up my alley! I haven't read anything by Jo Clayton that I can recall, so maybe I'll add that to the stack...
I think you're right that ABP feels like an in-universe romance, but I still wish there had been more tension and emotional depth. Lots of romances are intense and fraught, despite the reader knowing that the ending will be happy! (On reread I was able to pin some of the dropped points down, like Jerin being convinced that his kidnapping meant his sisters had no choice but to sell him to a crib - this was resolved about a page and a half after it came up! Way to kill what could have been a strong emotional element.)
The population drop and genetic bottleneck I osmosed because of how widespread genetic defects seem to be. Jerin emphasises to his future wives how none of the Whistler family have died of physiological flaws (and one person asks outright if his father died due to a weak heart), and there's the plot point about some of Kij's family having an extra toe, and it's pretty clearly implied that inbreeding is a concern across all levels of society - from the peasant Brindles who are inbreeding but try to hide it, to the royal princesses won't marry their cousin because the bloodline is too close.
It's possible that there wasn't any one catastrophic event, and the bottlenecking is just due to the skewed gender ratios playing out over a long enough time period, especially given the religious imperative against adoption (and the clear example of the Brindles inbreeding while outwardly concealing the fact; they're not the only ones to make that choice).
But there's the mention early on of a Stetson hat, an Actualfax Thing from our world, which suggested to me that this might be intended as a post-apocalyptic setting on our world rather than a fantasyland based on a general real-world period.
no subject
Date: 2019-06-07 05:19 am (UTC)What I meant, and failed to convey is that it didn't feel like a post apocalypse because post-apocalyptic stories usually heavily reference the previous culture/the lost and fallen civilization/the disaster(s) that ended said civilization. Bujold's Sharing Knife for example is definitely a fantasy set in a post magical apocalypse for example. So for that matter is Lackey's Heralds of Valdemar, though that's something that's slowly revealed over the course of the various series.
This seemed more like an alternate history, because there's no mention of a fallen civilization/series of disasters. (Unless the stds count.) And there's not mention of how this might have happened, unless Jerin wistfully considering sororicide of one of his more annoying sisters to the tune of the one good thing about living in a society where women ran things and there weren't many men is that he could get away with strangling a sister (not a direct quote) counts.
I would not have thought fantasy based on real world time period. Maybe something like in David Drake's General series, where various planetary civilizations/lost colonies mysteriously correspond with certain historical periods. Because historian.
no subject
Date: 2019-06-07 08:45 pm (UTC)The Stetson stood yout as really weird to me, because everywhere else the author carefully avoids including any real-world companies or branded items! All of the clothes and boats and guns are generically described (the guns are 'six-shooters,' not 'Winchesters', etc.) except that one hat.
I spent a lot of time pondering whether it was an early-draft thing that got left in by accident - maybe the author originally started with a more obvious postapocalypse in mind - or a clue we were supposed to pick up, or maybe the author just didn't know how to describe the hat?
There's room for either a post-apocalyptic or alternate-Earth reading, though, and I appreciate the author not pushing for one or the other. (That way lies often tedious As-You-Know-Bob scenes of characters reciting history lessons!) It gives the world a more 'real' feeling to me.
Jerin wistfully considering sororicide might be my favourite bit of worldbuilding, honestly! The way he concluded it, with nobody blaming him because 'after all, it was only a sister, and he... well, he was a boy' (lightly paraphrased) really gives a strong indicator of how people feel about men in this world!