Draw of the day: rest of the year

I'm behind on Wyntercraft's 30-Day Tarot Challenge and I don't really care.

The draw question for day 27 was "What will the rest of the year bring?" I drew the Queen of Wands, which I've already seen in the Fairy Tale deck as the awesome story "The White Cat." The Queen of Wands is a boss bitch who gets shit done, so that's a plus. According to the Hunt book, this queen radiates confidence and should inspire me to engage my own leadership skills, despite perceived limitations (such as "I hate leadership; I'm a lone wolf" type thoughts, probably). According to Biddy, this Queen lives and active and busy life--which I do--and is highly energetic and vibrant--which I'm not, or I feel like I haven't been, so maybe that will pass. Overall, it looks like my diagnosis for the rest of the year is to step it up and do more movin' and shakin', possibly as I come out of my winter funk. An auspicious draw, I think.

Glamourists of the Caribbean

I astonishingly had spare time between book club reads and work review reads, and so I decided to be super productive and finish a series that I had let languish in a mostly-finished state for about two years now. I think the social media conversations I'd had recently about how dreadful most romantic subplots are had also reminded me that there's a grand total of like, two series where the romantic plot was actually a main plot but I liked them anyway. The first is Outlander; the second is Mary Robinette Kowal's Glamourist Histories. I had stopped reading Outlander after the third book because a) the show is superior and b) the third book had some awkward treatment of the various non-white groups that populated mid-18th-century North Carolina, in a way that I felt was sort of white-saviory and at times voyeuristic. So I went for the other series, finally picking up my copy of Of Noble Family.

 

I did not read the summary before I made this decision because it turns out that this book is about Vincent and Jane going to Antigua to take care of some management business on Vincent's father's sugar plantation. While I am generally of the opinion that white people should stop writing extended liberal-guilt thought exercises about how they would handle ~very unexpectedly~ become slaveowners, I will concede that Kowal handled this particular thought exercise better than Gabaldon did, and certainly better than the guy who wrote the Bloody Jack books did (still a Problematic Fave of mine, but... ugh, he needed to not go there). Jane is also pregnant through almost this entire book, which is also not usually super high up on my list of Plot Devices I'm Particularly Interested In, unless it's written as body horror. This isn't body horror, but it is a fairly unsparing look at the hardships of pregnancy and childbirth in the eighteenth century, which is... actually pretty close to being body horror. 

 

This probably all sounds like I'm complaining. I am not complaining! The Glamourist Histories are overall quite a testament to the power of Doing Things Properly, since, after five books, I've found myself invested in all sorts of things that I usually don't enjoy reading about that much, in addition to the things that I do usually like that are why I started reading the series in the first place (i.e., magic, a female lead, period dresses, people being good at their work, and absurdly convoluted intrigues) (and pirates; I started this entire series because of the pirates in Valour and Vanity). It doesn't even matter that Vincent has a lot of traits that I don't find attractive at all, because... Vincent is Jane's husband, not mine! Vincent and Jane are both well-developed enough characters, and their relationship is developed enough, that understanding what Jane gets out of her relationship with Vincent is actually an entirely different thing than determining what I would get out of it, because Jane isn't just a reader cipher. (This is especially important because I don't think I'd get along so hot with Vincent. He has too much character development to be dismissed as an angry potato (h/t Lyndsay), but he has no chill, and I lack chill enough for two people.) Anyway. Writers of shitty tacked-on romantic subplots, take notes.

 

The glamour stuff continues to be a lot of fun, even though Jane can't do glamour for most of the book. She learns about the differences between formal European and what is generally dismissed as "folk" glamour; by this point, the reader knows enough about the glamour system that all this shop talk makes perfect sense and is really interesting. It is heavily implied, though never outright stated, that working glamour essentially functions as birth control for men; Vincent never quite figures this out. 

 

There is also a plot, of course. This one involves intrigues such as Vincent's father only pretending to be dead, the plantation's overseer embezzling from the property, some forgeries, an explosion, and stuff like that. The embezzling overseer also has an excitable English wife who likes to quote Byron at people; she's a third-tier character but she's absolutely hilarious. The network of house and field slaves that Jane has to figure out how to not be racist to is heavily populated by illegitimate relatives of Vincent; considering how messed up the Hamilton family's dynamics were to start off with, you can imagine what intrigues adding a whole new branch of it adds, especially considering the spiteful, supposedly-dead Lord Verbury literally owns most of them. 

 

While I enjoyed this series very much I am not particularly devastated that it's over; perhaps now I can finally get around to reading Ghost Talkers.