InsaneJournal

Current mood:	thoughtful
Entry tags:	book geek, meta, thinky thoughts

Once Bitten, Not Quite Twice Shy
So I just finished reading Bitten, by Kelley Armstrong. It's the first book of hers that I read, so I have nothing to compare it to. And at the end of the day, I'm not sure how I feel about it.

On the sun hand, I feel like Elena is a very good, very accurate portrayal of a certain kind of woman. Now I know "a certain kind of woman" has become a loaded phrase, but I don't mean it in any perjorative sense, per se. She was interesting enough for me to read the whole book, which a lot of profic writers cannot claim these days. On the moon hand, she's representative of a kind of woman that I really don't like.

There are things I liked about her and about Armstrong's portrayal. I liked the fact that, although a werewolf and thus 'super-powered', Elena wasn't the biggest, baddest werewolf ever. She was stronger than some and not as strong as others. She was aggressive...but also had a strong sense of fear and self-preservation. She had flaws. She felt very real.

I really liked the way her background played into the story—the fact that the abuses she suffered were mentioned perfunctorily and matter-of-factly, rather than played for pathos and sympathy. I like that her past was presented without any "justifying" connection to her current behavior. It made sense that Elena would be so disconnected, so emotionally retarded, so uncognizant of herself and her behavior, given what she'd been through. At the same time, Armstrong created the dots and let her reader connect the lines, an assumption of intelligence (in her audience) that I appreciate after scads of authors that feel they need to spoon feed me every psychological tic and twitch.

On the other hand, infidelity is a big turn-off for me, particularly when it's handled as it is in the book, where it seems as though the trueness of her love for Clay is supposed to justify the fact that she's cheating on Phillip pretty much from the moment she walks in the door at Stonehaven.

Moreover, I really don't like the way she deals with Clay, scathing him and pushing him away verbally and then giving him physical mixed messages by being affectionate and/or sexual with him. It's something that I recognize some women DO, but I don't like it in real life any more than I liked it in the book.

But I've said more than once that I don't need the protagonist of my media (be it movies, television or books) to be a hero. Elena is a deeply flawed person, flawed in ways that would make me avoid her strongly in real life...but it also makes her interesting. Far more interesting than any monolithically good hero(ine).

Overall, I didn't think the prose was anything to write home about. Of course, it didn't make me actively cringe, either (I'm looking at you, Smeyers!), so I count that as a win. But at times, the plot devices Armstrong used to push her story definitely did make me cringe and it's a little hard for me to completely parse how much of that is bad plotting and how much of it is a failure to execute.

At one point in the story, Elena, Clay and Antonio go into town together. Now, first of all, this is the most contrived of reasons for them to leave the house (groceries), but okay. I roll my eyes and roll with it. The scenario is that Clay is going to go into the post office and Elena is going to go in the bank while Antonio waits in the car, where he can see both of them, as the bank and PO are across the street from each other. Elena goes into the bank and when she comes out, the car, Antonio and Clay are all gone. Now, me (and I will confess to a certain amount of paranoia), that would have been my sign that something was wrong. That maybe it was a trap. Certainly, my FIRST COURSE OF ACTION would be to call my missing friends on their cell phones. But no. No. What Elena does is to take off up a dark and shadowy alley when she knows there are mutts on the loose gunning for them.

The fact that this incident turns out NOT to be a trap by the mutts, after all the foreshadowing, is even more disappointing, a build up to nothing that should have served as a warning to me, the reader.

The not-even-a-contrivance that takes Clay and Elena back to Toronto is just flat-out dumb. You have Jeremy—who is presented as a cautious, reasoned CONTROL FREAK—who is losing his family members left and right, is told that Elena herself is the price of peace...and he sends her back to her home, where anyone and their mother would know to find her? Far enough that it would be difficult for anyone else in the Pack to come and help them. And he does so in the most Dumbledore-esque fashion, by not telling her what's at stake or trusting her with any information that might have put the situation in focus, which could have potentially led to less self-centered asshat behavior on her part.

The fact that she RAN AS A WOLF from Toronto to upstate New York is just kind of hilarious...but also dumb. Yes, I only have x number of hours to save Clay! Let me waste them by running overland TO ANOTHER FREAKING COUNTRY. And then get upset and blame the delay on Jeremy, who had to PSYCHICALLY LOCATE YOU and come and pick your dumb ass up. Oh, KArmstrong, no.

A further disappointment is the putative villain, Daniel. Daniel's past with the Pack is hinted at but never really brought forward (which I realize is the same technique Armstrong used with Elena's past...but where it worked with the one, it really didn't work with the other. However, perhaps I should take that as a maker's mark, if you will. Hmmm). We are TOLD that Daniel is cunning, superlatively dangerous and a match for any and all of the Pack, but in any of his appearances, Daniel is shown as sullen and pathetic, outsmarted by all parties, even his only supposed allies.

On the one hand, I feel like Armstrong was trying to make a statement about the banality of evil and how easily the tables can turn even on "great" villains or good guys like Jeremy, but, as I said above, the execution is crap, robbing the moment of any emotional power.

First of all, ALL the supposed villains were kind of pathetic. The only people that died were people that we knew next to nothing about—Logan, some club kids, etc. People that we had no reason to care anything about, no emotional connection to. Their deaths were straw puppets on a stage and while we saw Elena reacting to those deaths, there was nothing there to make us personally feel or empathize more deeply with her pain. We might have cared about Phillip, but that happens so late in the book as to be almost meaningless and Armstrong doesn't actually pull the trigger to kill him. He doesn't even seem all that badly wounded.

The end result is that we're told that the mutts are this huge threat, there's a lot of sound and fury about it, but emotionally...it signifies nothing.

So I suppose what I'm talking around is that the book lacked any sense of urgency for me. The stakes of the game were present but emotionally unsatisfying. The villains lacked menace and are defeated far too easily, with no real conflict after all that build up. Phillip was disposed off too easily and mostly offstage. I never for a moment thought that Clay was in any real danger or that Elena and the Pack wouldn't get him back. His convalescence is a handful of sentences in the "wrap up" portion of the ending. Elena's acquiescence to their True Love was as predictible as it was inevitable and the story never once deviated from that predictible trajectory. There was no surprise to the book.

All that being said, I did like the book enough to finish it. And enough that I'm contemplating acquring Stolen (just not at full price). I'm a little chagrined to find that this is YET ANOTHER book where I end up liking and empathizing with the male character much more than the female. Even more annoying because it's a female author. Which only underscores my opinions about why Fandom (which is a largely female space) is so violently antagonistic toward female characters…particularly original female characters. In essence, I really think it's much like the prejudice against first person writing; we all have our different ideas about what it means to be a woman, what qualities of femininity we like, what we think makes "real" women. When we are presented with characters that contradict those notions of what femininity is composed of, we read it as false, instead of merely different. And we resent the author for presenting us with "bad" or "wrong" examples of womandom.

I can recognize that there are women out there like Elena, but she isn't the kind of woman that I am. She isn't the kind of woman I aspire to be. And that makes her a difficult read sometimes because her actions can and do seem false or wrong. Because I'm not that woman.

Male characters, on the other hand are seen from an external viewpoint. I'm not male, I don't identify male, I don't aspire to be male. So all my feelings about what's going on with men, what they're about, what motivates them is far more flexible, because I don't have an insider's knowledge.

But in the end, I'd still much rather have a female character that I like and empathize with and cheer for. I just don't think Elena is it.