Sarah Beauhall has more on her plate than most twenty-somethings: day job as a blacksmith, night job as a props manager for low-budget movies, and her free time is spent fighting in a medieval re-enactment group.
And as if things weren’t surreal enough, Sarah’s girlfriend Katie breaks out the dreaded phrase… “I love you.” As her life begins to fall apart, first her relationship with Katie, then her job at the movie studio, and finally her blacksmithing career, Sarah hits rock bottom. It is at this moment, when she has lost everything she has prized, that one of the dragons makes their move.
And suddenly what was unthinkable becomes all too real…and Sarah will have to decide if she can reject what is safe and become the heroine who is needed to save her world.
Blah, blah, blah. I chopped off one paragraph from this synopsis, because fuck who cares about this pedestrian shit. “Pedestrian” is indeed the best word to apply to this book which, despite its rarity in being one of the few pro-published UF featuring a lesbian, is a giant bag of meh with some nice racefail balls to go with it.
Oh, and JA Pitts is, of course, a man using initials to obfuscate his gender from the book-buyer’s first glance. Tsk, tsk. Him and Daniel Abraham with that “MLN Hanover” schtick.
Urban fantasy is a cesspit of heteronormativity, misogyny, and ethnocentricism. That there’s a need for this paradigm to be fucking smashed on the faces of those who produce it as an industry cannot be stressed enough. In the case of Black Blade Blues it can be charitably said that it manages roughly two out of three, but on the third point it fails so miserably that I want to smash a hardback copy of the book into the writer’s face.
It also doesn’t help that the writing is pretty terrible.
Now it’s not quite this shit, if only in the sense that I could finish Black Blade Blues whereas Throne of the Crescent Moon was a show-stopper by page seventy. This isn’t because JA Pitts writes appreciably better than Ahmed, but simply that whereas Ahmed’s prose is overstuffed, belabored and painfully clunky yet entirely devoid of substance, Pitts’ is of the breezy, pedestrian sort–not much more substance on or between the lines, but not half as in love with its own verbiage. Bad in different ways, albeit a similar authorial core: one that doesn’t care about language, about smart turns of phrase, about any of the things that turn words from merely text on a page into memorable, lasting images that adhere to the imagination. But, because it’s light and more-or-less tolerable, I made it to the last page only pausing to cringe every three paragraphs or so.
To the book’s substance: Sarah Beauhall, blacksmith, is a lesbian who having been raised by a fuckbats fundie daddy internalizes homophobia like whoa. Her girlfriend Katie is trying to get her out of that phase, with limited success, and not much helped along when Sarah reforges a blade that turns out to be Fafnir’s bane, Gram, which gives Sarah wild mood swings and bursts of berserk rage. Then there are dragons and a bunch of SCAdians’ dream comes true. If I sound apathetic it is because I am: there’s a layer of general triteness spread evenly over the text, the characters, the plot–nothing in it is especially believable, and while I haven’t much to complain about the way Sarah and Katie are written there’s the inescapable sense that everything was done by tickboxes.
Yes, the lesbian thing is written in a non-creepy, non-fetishizing way more or less; yes, Sarah is a pretty decent female character in the most general terms (she’s a blacksmith, and obviously, very muscled); yes, she has good, positive relationships with other women. But while all those are commendable, I can’t shake the feeling that it’s all done by the checklist method. Sarah’s internalized homophobia may be relatable to those who grew up with a fundamental Christian family, I don’t know, but to me it’s just a bit too pat, a bit too hackneyed. Empty of nuances. Having said that, it’s nice I suppose that there are quite a few gay women in this thing–a couple of lesbian cops and a Valkyrie who hits on Sarah, the latter quite adorably.
But all this couldn’t override the paper-thin characters, the ridiculous plot, the awful dialogue, the awful prose. I had a hard time telling anyone apart, the excuse for the SCAdians not being able to use guns–”too much magic” making firearms malfunction–is a transparent excuse for the author to write amateurs going at trolls and giants with swords (and not consistent, considering said trolls and giants arrive in helicopters), and at the end of it the writing style–
It was a glancing blow, barely a scratch, but it was a game of tag at this point. Who gets in first, who gets in last. Speed was the game. He had me on size and strength. I was cuter, but that goes without saying.
–is nothing if not egregiously bad, with the usual faux-wit and one-liners you’ll find in any work of urban fantasy. Then there’s the racefail:
Most shows had crappy knockoff weapons made in Pakistan, so I had a market.
There’s a quip about shoes made in China by little children later on. DOHOHO, THIRDWORLDIA!!!
Her father’s Middle Eastern heritage colored her exquisite features, but it was her mother’s Icelandic ancestry that lent [Qindra] the breathtaking beauty.
Or how about her “lovely caramel hand”? The elder dragon Qindra serves also has a couple of trained Chinese girls under her employ, one of whom she kills in a burst of random, murderous rage. We are at one point introduced to Juanita, “a slightly dumpy Hispanic woman who had told me she wanted to marry JJ so she could get her green card.”
A knee-length cloak swirled around her in varying shades of blue, giving her the illusion of moving in murky shadows. She pushed back a fur-lined hood to reveal an exotic beauty: pale hair and dark, dusky complexion. Around her neck hung a necklace of feathers and leaves.
You know, to go with that lovely caramel hand.
For the second book, JA Pitts gives us this wonderful little dedication:
Alan did a stint in the Navy… Lou retired from the Navy recently.
I’d like to thank both of these guys for the service they’ve done for our country. It isn’t everyone who can dedicate a significant portion of their lives so we can enjoy the freedom we have grown accustomed to.
Who the fuck believes this? Other than propaganda-fed jingoist bigots that think Fox News is reality? Black Blade Blues also has this exchange:
”I just can’t kill an investment banker from Portland, or anywhere… That is just murder.”
No one spoke for a moment, and Gunther was the first. “ Sarah, if the president of the United States can invade another country based on a suspicion, I think you can move out on probable cause here.”
JA Pitts, shut the fuck up. Now.
The writing is otherwise strewn with cliches (“Another Kodak moment”) to faux-fantasy speak from the SCAdians’ and the magical people’s mouths that doesn’t sound good in any context (“Jean-Paul is a nasty creature, full of hatred and the need for darkness”), and attempts at poetic prose that results in lines like:
The sound of the engine cooling, the pinging of metal, sang a song to me – a song of sadness.
The temperature dropped by a good ten degrees when the sun set, and I felt the transition of the day into the mystery of twilight.
Cruelty played in that noise, evil and vain.
There was the power of love. That was what sacrifice was worth.
Which suggests Pitts graduated right out of D&D novelizations, Tolkien, Tolkien’s clones and similar genre writers who think they are great stylists but are in truth godshittery. There’s a near-rape too, where Sarah has an out-of-body experience and a couple of men decide to take advantage of it, that doesn’t serve any real purpose and fails to even inject tension other than inducing “for fuck’s sake, not another rape trope” teeth-gritting from the sensible reader. And the evil dragon, naturally, kidnaps Katie and holds her hostage in exchange for the sword Gram. Flip to any random page and you’ll find your head shoved neck-deep into cliches and insipid speech.
There, in short, isn’t much this novel has to offer: it’s entirely predictable, it’s sprinkled liberally with unsurprising fail, and simply not written anywhere near well enough to outweigh all those flaws. Lesbian protagonist aside, it’s hard to recommend this other than for novelty.
jwilliamcarroll
/ May 2, 2012Is any reason given why the girl looks like she could be Elric’s daughter?
acrackedmoon
/ May 2, 2012Nope. It’s not even mentioned that she dyes her hair. “The Dream Thief’s Daughter: Lesbian Blacksmith”?
braak
/ May 3, 2012Probably the cover artist just Googled “black blade,” and sat through the Blue Oyster Cult slideshow.
the twisted spinster
/ May 2, 2012“The sound of the engine cooling, the pinging of metal, sang a song to me – a song of sadness.”
Well leave the car running if it upsets you that much. What does that even mean.
shardbaenre
/ May 3, 2012When my engine cools, it sings a song of sixpence. At least, I described the sound to a distinguished lady and she said that it was a song of sixpence. Then I was ok with the world because it was a rather jaunty tune.
shardbaenre
/ May 3, 2012I give this one a hearty racefail because of this:
“Her father’s Middle Eastern heritage colored her exquisite features, but it was her mother’s Icelandic ancestry that lent [Qindra] the breathtaking beauty.”
That is a “but” clause, which is just profoundly gross. White beauty is clearly superior to all other beauty. Her Middle Eastern heritage did nothing more than give her a permanent tan over those breathtakingly beautiful white features. This is a massive RACEFAIL! Thoroughly disgusted right now.
You get no points, Pitts. No. Points.
phnxprmnt021
/ May 3, 2012Right? That was so blatantly racist that I had to do a double-take and reaffirm that Icelandic people are indeed white.
Although even if they weren’t, that’d still be an icky implication.
acrackedmoon
/ May 3, 2012“Colored” was a great choice of language there, too.
Darius Wilkins
/ May 3, 2012Don’t say I didn’t warn you! The struggling with internalized homophobia was what bugged me the most. It’s hard to make that interesting rather than repellent, and depends on an ability to write with good characterization. Pitts? Not so good.
acrackedmoon
/ May 3, 2012No see, the internalized homophobia I could actually put up with, it’s the racefail that is fskjglskjgslhkj what the fuck (i.e. Shard’s comment). That and the writing quality.
It’s a terrible shame, really. I guess he got some Feminism 101 pounded into place, but didn’t learn much about anything else.
Darius Wilkins
/ May 4, 2012Actually, I’m pretty used to this kind of mixed-race racefail in paranormal romance. Most of them fail pretty badly in ways just like this, especially in terms of RedFace. I’ve actually complained about this facet of sff pretty heartily once upon a time, garnering nothing more than a “Whatsoever are you talking about?” It’s long been a cheap way for incompetent writers to amp up a character’s “specialness”, a means to capture the reader’s attention. As someone who is irregularly taken for being mixed-race, and who was often taken to be a “safe person”, I am at least slightly aware that mixed race people are not half this, a quarter that, another quarter this, with split up properties, like what you see in a fantasy. The personal histories and the off-angle relationship with all the people they know, tend to define such people far more than the physical characteristics. SFF writers tend to treat such characters pretty much like a manga writer does gender-bending. A vacation from the “burdens of whiteness”.
Take internalized homophobia. For example, Charles Stross isn’t the most brilliant of writers, but his character of Anwar in Rule34, while not all *that* much more than a cut-out in terms of fleshiness, is not nearly as tiresome as a homophobic gay man character. In part, that’s because he’s not a Gary Stu, and he has successes and missteps (far more of the latter). Sarah Beauhall is a butch Gary Stu with a complex who isn’t filled out enough to be, say, Thomas Covenant, and I don’t like Stephen Donaldson. At least the book was, like you said, easy reading, but I’ve yet to pick up the sequel.
Nonny Morgan
/ May 5, 2012The internalized homophobia due to fundamentalist family was very difficult for me to read, personally, because it is very accurate. It brought back a lot of bad memories for me, and I honestly think I read most of the first book in a triggered state, so I’m not really surprised I didn’t pick up on the other issues. :-\
I do think that the second book is better, in general. For me, it was worth it (reading the second) to be able to read what, sure, is a popcorn urban fantasy with a lesbian heroine who has a healthy relationship with her girlfriend, with tasteful love scenes. I thought the second definitely improved; the plot was easier for me to follow, and it seemed a little less disjointed. I probably wouldn’t have picked up the second if my library hadn’t had it though.