Tooth and Claw, by Jo Walton

It's a Regency romance novel with cannibalism! The characters are all dragons, who eat each other:

"You wouldn't dare," she said. "To be known as the Exalted Lord who ate his mother when she was strong and well?"


He's expected to eat her when she dies naturally, see. There'll be troubling social repercussions if he doesn't wait that long - he'll probably have to rusticate for a season or two.

Also, when female dragons lose their virginity, they turn pink, and if they turn pink before they're married they are Fallen Dragons and cast out of their homes, and other dragons can eat them with impunity. The children of the poor are also eaten pretty much whenever by the upper classes, as are elderly servants, and their wings are often bound to keep them from flying. The more other dragons you eat, the bigger you get, so that dragons of the upper classes are the only ones who regularly grow longer than seven feet, making it easier for them to dominate the lower class dragons, and by the way are these metaphors clear enough.

Yet it's not an obtrusively didactic book. The cannibalism and turning pink is gracefully established the rules in the first couple chapters, without any special emphasis, and Walton follows them precisely throughout the book - but none of this actually changes the character of the Regency era as-seen-in-romance-novels much. It just reads like a Georgette Heyer novel. It's appropriate to call it satire, but it's that sneaky kind of satire that can just as easily be enjoyed as an example of the medium it's poking holes in.

Superior v 1-9, by Ichtys

The hero Eksa has been sent to destroy the Demon Queen Shira, with whose forces the humans are at war. Shira sees him coming, and on her second-in-command's advice decides to spy on him a little to ascertain his weaknesses before trying to kill him. She does this pretending to be a weak demon-in-distress who needs his protection. This works pretty well on Eksa, who actually wants to make peace with the demons, and hates killing.

Though the Demon Queen finds this idea baffling and contemptible, she against her will falls in love with him in chapter one. Her thinking on this is basically, "Darn it, this is going to make it hard to kill the guy... Oh, well." Still hiding her identity from him, she goes off and has adventures with him, Shira struggling with alien human ideas like "you can't eat everyone you don't like" and Eksa anxiously trying to make peace between the demons and the humans.

Because all fantasy-manga adventurer parties should consist of four people, I guess, they shortly acquire a womanizing swordsman guy and a short-tempered magician girl. Because all fantasy-manga adventurer parties require a Boss Fight to look forward to at some point in the future, Shira makes a golem that looks like herself to take her place while she stays with Eksa, and the golem turns on her, declaring itself the true Demon Queen. Its name is apparently just Copy, though. It should change that.

It's honestly pretty stupid; though it starts as comedy, there are volume-long collapses into limpid angst. Most of it is a pattern of Stupid Pratfall, Stupid Angsty Fight Scene, People Express Inane Ideas About War While Weeping For Like The Whole Chapter. All kinds of sparkly shoujo tears; the whole cast does it.

But I finished it up because Shira does stuff like this:

Shira: It's not a problem if it is right or wrong, you just beat the ones who say otherwise. That's how I gained control of the entire world.

I find this refreshing in a shounen manga heroine. It ends at volume nine in the middle of a plotline, but there's a sequel series called Superior Cross, which I may go ahead and read.

I've decided to start grading translations, by the way; as you may have guessed from the panels above, none of the various scanlation groups that have worked on this get more than a C from me.

(Hoshin Engi is in same situation, and I include the regrettable official Viz translation in this judgment. I seem to recall that some scanlation project working about eight years ago did a decent job on the first few volumes, but I can't find those particular scans now.)
Georgette Heyer wrote a lot of romance novels about rich Regency-era people solving each others' problems and falling in love. Compared to some historical romances, where the conflicts might involve rape, kidnapping, murder, and abused illegitimate children - possibly all smushed in together - the problems that Heyer's characters face tend to be more mundane. Charles is nice, but he's engaged to a mean girl! Kitty's grandfather is miserly, and she wants to buy pretty dresses!

That's not to say that the books are realistic - with one exception I've found so far, Heyer's fiction is intended as an accurate psychological depiction of human beings in exactly the same way that Winnie the Pooh is intended as an accurate depiction of ursine behavior. Her characters are one-dimensional, charming, funny, and, once you've read enough of the books, impossible to distinguish from one another. You could glue labels on them: "The Self-Possessed Girl With Practical Skills And No Sense of Romance," "The Girl Who Is Easily Distracted By Hats And Poetry," "The Serious And Responsible Young Man Who's Kind Of A Bigot," and "The Foppish Dandy, Who I'm Guessing Is Supposed To Be Gay."

(I'm not knowledgeable about the history of the Regency romance genre, but I assume that Heyer is at least partly at fault for the frequent occurrence of these character types elsewhere in the genre. The only regency trope I haven't yet been able to pin on her is the emotionally wounded former spy. He would be tricky to pair up with any of her stock female characters. "He's too melodramatic for the Sensible girl to bother with, and not responsible enough to take care of the Flighty one. I may have to set him up with one of the horses.")

The Grand Sophy seems to be the top contender for The Internet's Favorite Georgette Heyer Book, with good reason. Its conflict is probably the most minor of any of her books: a family is beset with children who make bad romantic choices (but not too bad) and get in money trouble (but not too much). Their cousin Sophy arrives with a monkey, a gun, and no shame, and sets about fixing all of it, to the resentment of the stiff young patriarch Charles.

It's not a short book, but there are no wasted scenes - all of them push the plot forward somehow, and all of them, with one exception, are adorable and funny. The scene that is the exception is the source of the other Internet Discussion Constant about this book: it turns out that Heyer was really anti-Semitic. After the general pleasantness of the rest of the book, it's a little shocking.

Cotillion's heroine Kitty wants her moody, handsome, romance-novel-hero-like cousin Jack to propose to her; when he doesn't, she convinces her well-dressed, silly, apparently-asexual-or-gay cousin Freddy to do it instead. Her aim is to make Jack jealous, and failing that, to make Freddy take her sight-seeing in London for a month. Freddy, whose primary interest in life is clothing and who declares himself "not the marrying kind!," agrees to the plan reluctantly. They go off to London and immediately set off solving other people's problems - all of them, as with their own, partly Jack's fault.

Characters similar to Kitty and Freddy show up in most of Heyer's books, but I think this is the only time she makes them the heroes. Understandable, since it's such a difficult task, but she does it well. I'm not sure that the book's actually a romance - we're given no real reason to think that Freddy's interest in Kitty extends beyond picking out clothes for her, or that Kitty actually understands what marriage entails - but it's extremely entertaining regardless. Like Sophy, Kitty matchmakes, but her connection to reality is so thin that her successes are pure accident. Fortunately, her victims have even less common sense than she does.

The books where Heyer does go in for something more complicated, plot-wise, tend to be the weaker one. Like any normal person, I would ordinarily be overjoyed by the idea of an English historical romance novel using the plot of the Torikaebaya Monogatari - but compared to many of Heyer's other works, The Masqueraders is very weak.

For reasons that may make sense in some alternate universe, a brother and sister come to London disguised as members of the opposite gender, in order to help their father, a grifter, run a new con that he refuses to entirely explain. Heyer does not seem to have been comfortable with this sort of story - there are long sequences that drag, the father is not as funny as he needed to be to carry the book, and the siblings feel undeveloped as characters, like Heyer couldn't quite pin down why they were doing this stuff. I understand the feeling.

A Civil Contract is a book about actual human beings. If you were to read it immediately after the other three books, you might even question whether it was written by the same person. In the three afore-mentioned books, despite the hovering threat of unpleasant arranged marriages, all of the characters - even all the villains, I think - married for love. In this one, the protagonists enter into an actual marriage of convenience.

Adam and Jenny barely know one another, and Adam wants to marry someone else, but he needs her money to care for his family. Jenny admires Adam and wants to please her father - he wants her to have a title, which Adam has - but hasn't got much self-confidence, and goes into the marriage knowing that she'll be judged harshly for marrying above her station. They live together, learn to get along, get over some of their problems - sometimes together and sometimes alone - and eventually come to a deeper understanding of one another than I think any of Heyer's other characters ever could.

Her stock characters are here, too, but they're treated with a thoughtfulness that's unusual, as if they're being infected by the protagonists' humanity. The heroine's father is Heyer's Vulgar Bourgeois Businessman - whom she usually treats only slightly better than she does the Wicked Jew - but because she wants to make us understand the heroine, who loves him, she has to make us understand him a little, too. The same is true of the hero's first love, the Flighty Girl. Ordinarily, she would be a comedic figure or a villain, and she is here, too. But it's not impossible to believe that there's something going on in her head.

Most of Heyer's books are not particularly ambitious, but within the limits she's created for them, she does them perfectly. There are very few writers for whom you can say that.
The Anvil of the World, Kage Baker

A former assassin named Smith, a master chef named Smith, and several other people named much more improbable things attempt to run a business in a fantasy world troubled by Dark Lords, demons, and caustic drain cleaning products.

Epic fantasy is one of the most humorless genres of fiction in existence; nonetheless, when I say that this is the most sarcastic work of epic fantasy I've ever read, you need to understand that it is really sarcastic. Extremely. I love it. The earthy irreverence the book has for the most familiar of its fantasy elements reminds me a lot of PC Hodgell. But Baker's a cleaner, more polished, and much more cynical writer, and thus much less affectionate towards her characters and enamored of her id.

(I first read this five years ago; I was rereading it because I just read the prequel.)

The House of the Stag, Kage Baker

Prequel to The Anvil of the World. A very angry young man undergoes various trials, and inadvertently becomes the Dark Lord. A moderately angry young woman is born to be a Saint, and undergoes various trials as a result. They get married. They do this somewhat less sarcastically than the last book did everything, but it's all still pretty sarcastic.

This one didn't work as well for me; the tone wanders all over the place, and what ought to be the most important scene in the book was skipped entirely. Both of these things were definitely intentional choices, and I have no earthly idea why they were made - they don't accomplish anything. I think Baker outsmarted herself here.

Lord of Scoundrels, by Loretta Chase

Sebastian Ballister, the Marquess of Dain, a notorious rake, blackmails bluestocking Jessica Trent into marrying him! You know, I don't know how to make this book sound good.

It totally is, though.

Jessica comes to Paris to remove her stupid younger brother from Sebastian's "clutches," goes on to embarrass Sebastian by outwitting him in a business matter and buying a piece of pornography he'd attempted to upset her with, and worriedly confides in her ahistorically sexually liberated grandmother that she might have "fallen in lust" with him. He throws temper tantrums and orgies in an attempt to irritate her, so she shoots him. But she feels a little bad about it later, when she realizes he's basically a spoiled little boy in an adult's body.

So it's a dirtier version of Georgette Heyer's Devil's Cub, basically. I would not object too strenuously should every regency romance novel choose to follow this pattern from today forward.
Outside of the Capital South metro stop, some people had a sign which said, on one side, "Are you a spy for the English?" On the other side was a picture of Obama with a tag attached to him saying "Made in England," and a Hitler moustache markered on.

There were three or four of these people, and they seemed fairly organized: they were covering all parts of the station entrance pretty effectively, they had pamphlets, and they'd made up a catchphrase to use when offering them to people. (Though it was something like "Are you ready and waiting for a solution to the present crisis?", which, I think you will agree, is not a very good catchphrase.)

This being the case, I feel that it's only right to assume that the sign is the result of deliberate planning, and that it accurately conveys the group's message. Their message is that Obama is Hitler, that Hitler was, apparently, English, and that we may all be English spies. I think this is reasonably clear. My only questions, really, are 1) whether we have recently overturned some scheme of Bonaparte's, and 2) whether we will be romancing any bluestockings. If so, then I am obviously all for it.

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