cahn | The Perilous Gard (Pope) and romance in fantasy

I forget: did I make everyone read this in high school? If not, hopefully you've read it by now?

Besides having a totally awesome problem-solving heroine, and being set in Mary/Elizabethan England, which is one of my favorite time periods ever, it has basically the best romance I know of in a fantasy work. (That is, if it is really a fantasy work, which it is probably not... alternate history, or historical fiction, might be a better way of putting it. Which is another very cool point in its favor.) I've been reading a couple of complaints lately (e.g. here) that fantasy has very poor romance, and, well, they've got a point. Tolkien *really* sucked at romance, LeGuin's romance in Earthsea only came with a feminist tract attached, Susan Cooper's kids are too young for romance. Bujold rushes things too much for my taste. Mercedes Lackey, hee-- I actually like her early books in the same way I like Velveeta Cheez, but even when I was, like, 10, I understood that lifebonds were utterly dumb, and what's more, cheating.

The only other half-decent romances I can think of offhand are The Once and Future King, which probably doesn't count, and Aerin and Tor in The Hero and the Crown (though not Aerin and Luthe, which I always thought was both icky and annoying). Though Aerin and Tor have the advantage of being best friends their whole lives.

To me, Kate is believable, has believable flaws and virtues, and so does her love interest. And their relationship develops over the course of the book, and they are totally shown as learning things about each other, sometimes very subtly, and learning how to get along without killing each other. Yes, there's the obligatory misunderstanding, but even that is very believable to me, and something that has been carefully developed in her character. And the last chapter just rocks.

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No, I don't even recall you mentioning it; I didn't read it them, nor have I since.

Well, that was dumb of me. Consider yourself told :) It's a Newberry Honor book, so should be in pretty much any library. And it's a very quick light read. If you can't find it (or even if you can and you would like to own a dogeared used copy with really crappy cover art, even though it is now rereleased with much better art), let me know and I'll either send you a copy when I get around to it (I have, like, 3 because I kept buying them up in used bookstores to give to people) or give it to you when we next meet for whatever reason. Though knowing how bad I am at going to the post office, the latter is MUCH more likely to happen.

Browsing back from your Sharing Knife post - I read this book many years ago and love it to this day. It plays to my love of explaining "magic" with reason, and also with making the antagonists as compelling as the "heroes". My favorite romance plot is, "two people do something big and important,learn something about themselves and each other in the process, and oh, fall in love"; I've got to wonder if The Perilous Gard helped set the appeal of that sort of story.

yes yes yes yes!

It plays ... with making the antagonists as compelling as the "heroes".

This is one of the reasons I love Orson Scott Card's early books -- he's also a big fan of the sympathetic antagonist (up until Pastwatch... then he starts going in for the eeeevil villainous villain, which is part of why I don't much read his new stuff anymore).

My favorite romance plot is, "two people do something big and important,learn something about themselves and each other in the process, and oh, fall in love";

definitely. Do you have any good recs along those lines? :)

I can't get into Card; his perspective fails to draw me in. I read Ender's Game, the first Alvin Maker book, and at least one of his short story collections, and I keep failing to get engaged. The ideas presented are compelling, but the plots usually don't do a lot for me, and some of the prose and particular scenes do me in. (Um, the end of the Alvin Maker book with the pastor and the glass window. Notice this is what sticks in my head out of all the rest of the book.)

Do you have any good recs along those lines? :)

I really, really wish I did. I could stop reading the stupid romances! Cryptonomicon almost sort of fits the bill, but it's a case of the romance happening as part of 1,000 pages of other wackiness. I've been trying to read romances this year (check the "2007 reading" tag on my LJ) and it's been an adventure in irritation. I guess my favorite romance plot is sort of a problematic type of story: the emphasis is on plot and character, not getting it on, so when that sort of thing gets shelved, it's probably going to get stuck in a non-romance genre.

Yeah, there is that. I do love Ender's Game mightily, though I think one has to read it as a nerdy middle schooler (as I did) to really get sucked in; I know several people who read it in college or later and just really kind of didn't empathize with Ender. Also, while I don't particularly mind his prose (though don't. Get me started. On prose styles I hate, like Guy Gavriel Kay. And the way. He uses really short sentence fragments. Which drives me nuts), it starts getting old really fast that all Card's characters sound exactly the same.

oh! I have a romance rec for you, if you haven't read it yet: The Blue Castle, L.M. Montgomery. It doesn't *exactly* fit your romance profile, but I think our tastes in romance are probably close enough that you will enjoy it :)

If you hate clunky short sentences, run away from C. J. Cherryh very, very fast. (Not that this will stop me from trying to make you read Cyteen for long.)

I read the Anne of Green Gables books as a kid, and liked them. I'll give The Blue Castle a shot the next time I'm at the library.

On the Mercedes Lackey front - tangenting back a bit - if she'd ever done a proper lifebond romance, where two people are stuck with each other and have to figure out why, it would have been a great story. A mystery and a romance! (She is a snotty young nobleman! He is a herald-trainee! By the end of the story, they discover a shared passion for ... I don't know, cheese - as well as how their partner inspires them to be a Better Person (tm).)

Huh. I actually don't mind Cherryh, though I will admit that her style is not my favorite. I think it's because she uses actual sentences and not fragments. So Cyteen, huh? I've had good luck with her short stories ("Pots" and "The unshadowed land" were just... like being punched. But in a good way. I now have the Collected Stories, which vary greatly in quality, and I think I'd read all the best ones alrady) but bad luck with her novels. I think it's because (at least in Downbelow Station and Fortress of something-or-another) she tends to focus on relatively minor stories that you have to extrapolate for yourself have an actual impact on the bigger world-- you're not actually shown that impact. I'm not that smart :)

Yeah, I should've added that you ought to like Montgomery to start with, as she does write in a particular sort of style. But fortunately you do. Blue Castle is definitely on the fluff side, but romantic fluff! Oh, Possession is also exceedingly wonderful, if you haven't read it, though it really qualifies more as a romance in the archaic definition than the modern one.

You know, it's funny you say that about Lackey-- and great idea!-- because I've wondered, TSK being called "beguilement" and all, whether maybe some of the Fawn/Dag attraction isn't... externally imposed. By their, I don't know, essences mingling in the sharing knife or something, I haven't figured that out yet. And at some point they figure this out and have to deal with it.

The Perilous Gard (Pope) and romance in fantasy

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