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bloodygranuaileSo I finally gave up on holding out for a mass market paperback copy of the sixth Bloody Jack book, since it appears that the Gender Police learned that Jack was a girl and so have redone all the covers for the paperback versions into trade paperbacks featuring a pretty-style, soft-focus portrait of a pretty blonde girl being cute and sweet looking and occasionally holding a violin. They would be very nice covers if it weren't a changeover, which comes across basically like "NO WE CAN'T HAVE FUN CARTOONY COVERS THAT LOOK LIKE HOWARD PYLE PAINTINGS JUST BECAUSE IT IS A GOOFY SERIES WITH PIRATES AND SAILORS!! WE MUST HAVE A PRETTY COVER OF A PRETTY GIRL SO THAT IT LOOKS EXACTLY LIKE EVERY OTHER YA BOOK WITH A FEMALE PROTAGONIST!!" Also, I am mad because I like to have complete matching sets of editions of things, and now I had to choose between half one set of paperback editions and half another set of editions, or having all the same edition but half in paperback and the rest in hardcover WHICH IS EXPENSIVE.
I have taken the expensive option in rejection of the notion that all books with girls in them must have the exact same fucking cover. I am not happy about this.
Ahem. As for the content of My Bonny Light Horseman: Being an Account of the Further Adventures of Jacky Faber, in Love and War, in this one, Jacky is forcibly hired by British Intelligence to spy on Napoleon's army officials. She spends the first bit being a dancer in Paris, and the rest of it being a messenger in Napoleon's army, in both cases pretending to be an American of French descent. In typical Bloody Jack fashion, Jacky gets in all sorts of rather ridiculous scrapes, winds up unintentionally in charge of various groups of people and earns their undying loyalty and respect, attracts the sexual and romantic attention of various pretty boys and gets in several situations that someone who is ENGAGED should probably not be in, and climbs up through the ranks of every sort of ranking that crosses her path ridiculously quickly and builds herself all sorts of a ridiculous reputation.
In this particular case, however, this mostly ends up with me being kind of annoyed and saying "JACKY, YOU ARE THE WORST SPY EVAR" because she's supposed to be, like, unobtrusive and things? As it is, she winds up taking a nap with her head in Emperor Napoleon's lap at one point. Also, she tells way too many of her own personal stories in order to entertain people, which you'd think would blow her cover eventually.
While the book is mostly as awesome as the rest of the series, I think I have either forgotten the bits of the rest of the series that I liked the least, or this book has a markedly higher dirty-old-manness factor than the rest. It is like reading fucking Piers Anthony. I do remember that Jacky tended to end up in near-rape situations, many of which sort of rubbed me the wrong way. In this book, Jacky ends up in a lot of consensual sexual situations, which still rub me the wrong way because there is absolutely zero reason for her to do so. Jacky's always been a fairly sexual character, although actually having sex is never a good option for her due to general seventeenth-century-ness, and, being an opportunistic street urchin, she isn't above using her sexuality to further her own ends, as long as it doesn't involve actual sex, and the results are frequently hilarious. In this one, however, Jacky does a lot of sexual performing for... no fucking reason whatsoever on her end. Not for her own pleasure, and not to get anything. She literally just shows her T&A off to any dude she doesn't hate just cos she hopes he'll enjoy the sight, or whatever. And literally for no other reason. Solely to fulfill the entitled male fantasy that marginally decent dudes should be amply rewarded by having their desire to objectify women indulged, because, while they might feel entitled to the consumption of women's bodies just for existing, they are otherwise non-terrible. Whoop-de-fuckin'-do. The book is written in the motherfucking FIRST PERSON, the reader is supposed to identify primarily with Jacky, not whatever random male bit character is around. When you can't figure out what in God's name a character's motive is, it screws with suspension of disbelief even worse than, say, characters taking naps in Napoleon Bonaparte's lap. (And that one stretched my suspension of disbelief fairly strongly.) And when you do have characters performing nonsensical, motive-free acts of fantasy fulfillment for other characters (see: most female characters in most movies; Edward Cullen), it's really supposed to be the secondary character fulfilling the fantasies of the perspective character, not the other way around. Also, I've spent the last five books wishing Jacky would dump Jaimy because Jaimy is a nonce; in this one, I actually found myself wanting Jaimy to dump Jacky for cheating. This is not good.
Anyway.
Besides the sexual elements being even worse than usual (I'm not even going to get started on the number of out-and-out DUELS various dudes almost get into over Jacky WHEN SHE IS PRETENDING TO BE A BOY, I don't know how she picks up so many guys that stupid), Horseman is still pretty fun. It's part spy novel, although not very much, because (a) Jacky is the worst spy ever and (b) Jacky doesn't give two shits about her mission, she's just there because the alternative was being killed, and (c) Jacky's lack of giving a shit is entirely due to the last five books' worth of severe mistreatment at the hands of her own country, including that it was British Intelligence that was going to kill her if she didn't take the mission. So most of her time in the French army is spent pretty much just being awesome in the French army, training her squad and carrying messages and becoming Napoleon Bonaparte's bestest buddy. It's mostly a straightforward war swashbuckler, and it swashbuckles very well.
The closest thing this book gets to depth is in its treatment of the ideas of country and patriotism, and what it means to be loyal. Jacky fights both for and against the French in this series, because Jacky is always fighting for whatever side she's sort of stuck on at the moment. She is always fighting for her own life and the lives of the friends she's made in whatever army or crew she's in, and there's always a tension between that and the politics of whoever's sent them out to battle, especially since Jacky doesn't usually care about the politics that much. After fighting against the French and orchestrating the deaths of large numbers of Frenchmen, Jacky ends up unable to seize various opportunities to Cause Great Mayhem And Confusion Amongst Napoleon's Generals, even if it leads to the Defeat of Napoleon, because the Defeat of Napoleon is always going to mean The Wholesale Slaughter Of The Poor Nice French Guys That Make Up His Armies, many of whom are now Jacky's friends. So she helps them defeat the Prussians instead, and I would be utterly unsurprised if in some future book she ends up fighting to defend the Prussians, after falling in with some personally nice Prussians and making friends with them. Because that is how she rolls. And because most of the troops in any given war are neither the good guys nor the bad guys, they are just normal guys with some degree of attachment to home, because most people are attached to their own homes. Wars and generals and politics and stuff tend to basically just fuck that up for everyone. And Jacky finds there's sort of no way to not be on the side of evil in a war, because she can either support Napoleon--who's kind of an imperialist bastard and has killed lots of innocent British boys--or she can deliberately get her own mates killed. And when she's not in the French army, she can either support crazy King George who is also an imperialist bastard and kill innocent Frenchmen, or she can be a traitor to her country and get her own hardworking British mates killed on purpose. Basically, to be involved in war is usually to be killing a lot of people who probably aren't bad people. These books get this, and use it to make you really uncomfortable.
While I enjoyed most of this book, I really, really hope the next one is better. Which I think it might be, because it apparently involves mermaids.
I have taken the expensive option in rejection of the notion that all books with girls in them must have the exact same fucking cover. I am not happy about this.
Ahem. As for the content of My Bonny Light Horseman: Being an Account of the Further Adventures of Jacky Faber, in Love and War, in this one, Jacky is forcibly hired by British Intelligence to spy on Napoleon's army officials. She spends the first bit being a dancer in Paris, and the rest of it being a messenger in Napoleon's army, in both cases pretending to be an American of French descent. In typical Bloody Jack fashion, Jacky gets in all sorts of rather ridiculous scrapes, winds up unintentionally in charge of various groups of people and earns their undying loyalty and respect, attracts the sexual and romantic attention of various pretty boys and gets in several situations that someone who is ENGAGED should probably not be in, and climbs up through the ranks of every sort of ranking that crosses her path ridiculously quickly and builds herself all sorts of a ridiculous reputation.
In this particular case, however, this mostly ends up with me being kind of annoyed and saying "JACKY, YOU ARE THE WORST SPY EVAR" because she's supposed to be, like, unobtrusive and things? As it is, she winds up taking a nap with her head in Emperor Napoleon's lap at one point. Also, she tells way too many of her own personal stories in order to entertain people, which you'd think would blow her cover eventually.
While the book is mostly as awesome as the rest of the series, I think I have either forgotten the bits of the rest of the series that I liked the least, or this book has a markedly higher dirty-old-manness factor than the rest. It is like reading fucking Piers Anthony. I do remember that Jacky tended to end up in near-rape situations, many of which sort of rubbed me the wrong way. In this book, Jacky ends up in a lot of consensual sexual situations, which still rub me the wrong way because there is absolutely zero reason for her to do so. Jacky's always been a fairly sexual character, although actually having sex is never a good option for her due to general seventeenth-century-ness, and, being an opportunistic street urchin, she isn't above using her sexuality to further her own ends, as long as it doesn't involve actual sex, and the results are frequently hilarious. In this one, however, Jacky does a lot of sexual performing for... no fucking reason whatsoever on her end. Not for her own pleasure, and not to get anything. She literally just shows her T&A off to any dude she doesn't hate just cos she hopes he'll enjoy the sight, or whatever. And literally for no other reason. Solely to fulfill the entitled male fantasy that marginally decent dudes should be amply rewarded by having their desire to objectify women indulged, because, while they might feel entitled to the consumption of women's bodies just for existing, they are otherwise non-terrible. Whoop-de-fuckin'-do. The book is written in the motherfucking FIRST PERSON, the reader is supposed to identify primarily with Jacky, not whatever random male bit character is around. When you can't figure out what in God's name a character's motive is, it screws with suspension of disbelief even worse than, say, characters taking naps in Napoleon Bonaparte's lap. (And that one stretched my suspension of disbelief fairly strongly.) And when you do have characters performing nonsensical, motive-free acts of fantasy fulfillment for other characters (see: most female characters in most movies; Edward Cullen), it's really supposed to be the secondary character fulfilling the fantasies of the perspective character, not the other way around. Also, I've spent the last five books wishing Jacky would dump Jaimy because Jaimy is a nonce; in this one, I actually found myself wanting Jaimy to dump Jacky for cheating. This is not good.
Anyway.
Besides the sexual elements being even worse than usual (I'm not even going to get started on the number of out-and-out DUELS various dudes almost get into over Jacky WHEN SHE IS PRETENDING TO BE A BOY, I don't know how she picks up so many guys that stupid), Horseman is still pretty fun. It's part spy novel, although not very much, because (a) Jacky is the worst spy ever and (b) Jacky doesn't give two shits about her mission, she's just there because the alternative was being killed, and (c) Jacky's lack of giving a shit is entirely due to the last five books' worth of severe mistreatment at the hands of her own country, including that it was British Intelligence that was going to kill her if she didn't take the mission. So most of her time in the French army is spent pretty much just being awesome in the French army, training her squad and carrying messages and becoming Napoleon Bonaparte's bestest buddy. It's mostly a straightforward war swashbuckler, and it swashbuckles very well.
The closest thing this book gets to depth is in its treatment of the ideas of country and patriotism, and what it means to be loyal. Jacky fights both for and against the French in this series, because Jacky is always fighting for whatever side she's sort of stuck on at the moment. She is always fighting for her own life and the lives of the friends she's made in whatever army or crew she's in, and there's always a tension between that and the politics of whoever's sent them out to battle, especially since Jacky doesn't usually care about the politics that much. After fighting against the French and orchestrating the deaths of large numbers of Frenchmen, Jacky ends up unable to seize various opportunities to Cause Great Mayhem And Confusion Amongst Napoleon's Generals, even if it leads to the Defeat of Napoleon, because the Defeat of Napoleon is always going to mean The Wholesale Slaughter Of The Poor Nice French Guys That Make Up His Armies, many of whom are now Jacky's friends. So she helps them defeat the Prussians instead, and I would be utterly unsurprised if in some future book she ends up fighting to defend the Prussians, after falling in with some personally nice Prussians and making friends with them. Because that is how she rolls. And because most of the troops in any given war are neither the good guys nor the bad guys, they are just normal guys with some degree of attachment to home, because most people are attached to their own homes. Wars and generals and politics and stuff tend to basically just fuck that up for everyone. And Jacky finds there's sort of no way to not be on the side of evil in a war, because she can either support Napoleon--who's kind of an imperialist bastard and has killed lots of innocent British boys--or she can deliberately get her own mates killed. And when she's not in the French army, she can either support crazy King George who is also an imperialist bastard and kill innocent Frenchmen, or she can be a traitor to her country and get her own hardworking British mates killed on purpose. Basically, to be involved in war is usually to be killing a lot of people who probably aren't bad people. These books get this, and use it to make you really uncomfortable.
While I enjoyed most of this book, I really, really hope the next one is better. Which I think it might be, because it apparently involves mermaids.
no subject
Date: 2011-02-21 11:45 pm (UTC)On the other hand, I continue to be ridiculously entertained by the sheer NUMBER of occupations that Jacky has racked up over, what, four years? BALLET DANCER SPY is just the end of a very long list!
no subject
Date: 2011-02-22 12:17 am (UTC)*ducks tomatoes*