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!
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Date: 2019-06-09 02:34 am (UTC)