booksthatburn's Reviews (1.46k)

Both books I’ve tried by this author have sympathetic/well-meaning cops as characters. I’m uninterested in pinkwashing cooaganda.

Ava Reid is one of a small group of authors who I trust when reading a new story that deals with abuse and the precarity of survival. A STUDY IN DROWNING deals with institutional misogyny, sexual abuse, and societal dismissal of complaints about the same, all while telling a gripping story that delves into perception, unreality, and the difficulty of knowing what’s real or imagined when you’re dismissed out of hand as hysterical or crazy. Any summary or specific explanation that I could provide pales in comparison to just how fucking good this book is. It has a specific focus on abuse by men in power on young women who are technically women, and that they're legally adults but are in that strange zone where any signs of maturity are taken as indications that they knew exactly what they were getting into, but they can still be conveniently dismissed as children in an instant when it's convenient for their abusees. Even this thought is an inadequate paraphrasing of the way that this position is described in the text. 

A STUDY IN DROWNING is a story of uncertainty and a shaky sense of reality, figuring out how to name and shame abusers who use their power, position, and (often) gender to obscure and diminish their abuse, and to cultivate uncertainty as to whether they did what they did, and if they did it, if it even was wrong. The fantastical setting allows for a recursive reinforcement of themes of decay, drowning, and rot as the specter of the Fairy King is invoked, threatened, and manifested in turn to build a story where the water is certain, death is inevitable, but drowning is slow. In that gap is room for denial and obfuscation as the water rises.

Effy is obsessed with the works of a particular author, and of his novel, Angharad, in particular. It tells the story of the Fairy King seducing his human bride from the perspective of that girl. Effy has the text largely memorized, and many lines in it are deeply meaningful to her, whispered as talismans against the sexism of her daily life. In a country where she has to go to the architecture college because no women are allowed in the literature college, the idea that one of the most famous writers in her country would have written this book with such a careful and nuanced understanding of a female perspective is deeply meaningful and inspiring to her. The college bars women because of misogynist nonsense about their minds being unable to handle understanding or producing great works of literature. Though she is admitted at the architecture college, Effy is the only female student there. The few girls in her dorm who are studying at the music college where they are admitted in greater numbers. 

At first, Effy has a xenophobic reaction to learning that a boy from an enemy nation was admitted to study at the literature college at the same time she was denied because of her gender. She ends up meeting him, and it turns into a rivals to lovers scenario where they work together to get around the sexist institution and call abusers to account. Gradually it becomes clear as Effy is able to think and process more specifically that one of the professors abused her. She feels unable to go to anyone for help, or even necessarily to be certain in herself, that it was wrong. The other students assume she used her body to get where she is, that somehow she doesn't deserve to be in the same halls as them.

A STUDY IN DROWNING has cemented Ava Reid on my must-read list for her consistently nuanced handling of themes of abuse and coercion in ways that leverage the strengths of fantasy to help deal with traumatic realities surrounding sexism and abuses of power. 

GREENWODE is a queer and intricate retelling of Robin Hood's story, using the lesser-known character of Gamelyn as his rival (and perhaps lover), with Marion as his sister. Rob and Marion are of the Old Religion, something which manages to escape Gamelyn for a long time as he assumes, with a colonizer's confidence, that people he likes would of course believe the same things as him, even as reality shows that they do not. Rob and Marion are learning their roles from their parents, the current Hunter and Maiden. Their father is an important person in the Old Religion as well as having authority over the wood through the legal authorities. The antagonists who gradually (or not so gradually) become apparent end up driving much of the escalation of danger and distress, eager to stamp out the Old Religion by any means necessary, writing off any participants as tainted by evil. It doesn't matter to them that this includes almost everyone in the Greenwode, what matters is that they think God is on their side and that death is better than living in sin. 

The afterword describes GREENWODE as the beginning of a duology, but as of the time of this review there are five books in the series. Regardless, it is the first part of a story, and does a wonderful job of telling a complete tale while setting the stage for something deeply complex to follow on its heels. I grew up religious and had my own journey away from a descendent of Gamelyn's faith, complete with its rancid homophobia, misogyny, and distaste for other beliefs while holding up its own rituals as important and meaningful. This lent a degree of believability to Gamelyn's inner turmoil, as otherwise his back and forth over whether to just be a freely sexual being with someone who loves him seems strange and illogical. That's because it is illogical, you can't reason someone out of something they didn't reason themselves into, and Gamelyn didn't reason himself into homophobia. It was part and parcel of his intense devotion to God, a facet previously unspoken  woven into his foundational beliefs. For this part, Rob is bewildered by Gamelyn's internalized homophobia, as it clearly hurts him and Rob can't see anything helpful or meaningful in a religion that encourages someone to feel badly about things that are wonderful and good. I like Marion as sister to Rob while having her own friendship with Gamelyn that exists next to their relationship with each other. 

I love this and I'm eager to see how things develop.  The ending manages to simultaneously close up things in a very satisfying way and set the stage for more to happen. 

A NOBLEMAN'S GUIDE TO SEDUCING A SCOUNDREL is tense, witty, and very sexy, existing as a sequel to wrap up few things left hanging from THE SECRET LIVES OF COUNTRY GENTLEMEN while delivering a full story in its own right. I won't be more specific in this review, because it it's pretty far into the book before this is stated explicitly and it operates on several levels. The biggest thing that's continued is that Luke, who was a child in the first book, is a main character now as an adult and is half of the romantic pair at the center of the story. It's interesting because as I was reading the first one I thought that it was a complete story, and then this sequel makes it feel more like the two books are halves of a whole. The weird part for me, when trying to assess whether this can stand on its own, is that if taken from Rufus's perspective, it really does. He doesn't know any of the previous events, and so someone who read this book without reading the first one would have an experience closer to Rufus, and anyone who has read the first one would be closer to Luke's understanding of the situation.

I love Luke as a secretary, the characterization is so precise that it firmly establishes his adult self in this new story on his own terms. Rufus fits him well, and I like them as a pair. The worldbuilding is consistent with the first book, but it assumes a familiarity with the Marsh and takes for granted that either the reader won't need a great deal of explanations, or is satisfied with the level of information which Rufus acquires.