Happy October!
Oct. 1st, 2021 09:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
walkitoutI was supposed to walk with two friends today, however, it’s not happening. I expect I’ll walk with M in a bit.
I’ll be doing catchup blogging in a bit, probably mostly about books I have been reading.
I am apparently procrastinating about finishing up my taxes. Oh well! Probably the whole house will get cleaned before I actually finish.
ETA: Today, I read _Full Bloom_ by JAK, and wow, this one is tricky! There are soooooo many elements that get reused. Morell pops up as late as _Zinnia_, for example, where he is Luttrell. A _lot_ of _Full Bloom_ turns up on St. Helens. Jacob Stone’s marriage to Leanna, for example, is ended by Leanna’s relationship with a politician — shades of the Eatons and Daria Gardner. Jacob Stone having so much fun beating up Morrell is not unlike Nick Chastain’s dustup with Rex Eaton. And just as Emily is doing just fine running her florist shop, and Zinnia does just fine with her interior decorating, both of them have family in the background who are highly committed to them Marrying the Right Kind of Man. Obviously, _Full Bloom_ and its flowers echo into the Zinnia / Amaryllis / Orchid series. Oh, and Emily wins a floral arranging contest with a minimalist arrangement that evokes a jungle pool!
Chastain / Luttrell is a lot subtler than Stone / Morrell. And honestly, there’s probably even more in common between Wizard and Full Bloom, in terms of a woman dating but not sleeping with one man, and overlapping into a new relationship with someone who she very promptly sleeps with. Perhaps the most fascinating sequence in Full Bloom is where Morrell manhandles Emily as she contemplates just how much she is going to have to do to get him to leave (a set of decisions she is _far_ more capable of making than even the reader realizes at the time) followed by Stone appearing and kicking Morrell out. Morrell’s and Stone’s thoughts and comments are startlingly similar — the only really big difference lies in what Emily thinks of what is going on (honestly, pretty similar to the difference between the cowboy in Wizard and the Wizard in Wizard). Later books cloak the possessiveness and aggression. The similarity in the behavior of the good guy and the bad guy — the difference lying exclusively in what the woman wants — is in the older books the entire point. Later books back way down, to get out of territory that increasingly feels like a consent violation. Full Bloom may be one of the most precisely on-the-cusp books I’ve ever run across — it manages to be absolutely in every way about a woman with agency and power and who is consciously using it, while simultaneously having such a foot in the old world where the woman’s agency was often so covert that her resistance had to be overrun for her to get what she truly wanted, that it will be super-tricky to impossible to ever reprint it.
Fascinating stuff.
I’ll be doing catchup blogging in a bit, probably mostly about books I have been reading.
I am apparently procrastinating about finishing up my taxes. Oh well! Probably the whole house will get cleaned before I actually finish.
ETA: Today, I read _Full Bloom_ by JAK, and wow, this one is tricky! There are soooooo many elements that get reused. Morell pops up as late as _Zinnia_, for example, where he is Luttrell. A _lot_ of _Full Bloom_ turns up on St. Helens. Jacob Stone’s marriage to Leanna, for example, is ended by Leanna’s relationship with a politician — shades of the Eatons and Daria Gardner. Jacob Stone having so much fun beating up Morrell is not unlike Nick Chastain’s dustup with Rex Eaton. And just as Emily is doing just fine running her florist shop, and Zinnia does just fine with her interior decorating, both of them have family in the background who are highly committed to them Marrying the Right Kind of Man. Obviously, _Full Bloom_ and its flowers echo into the Zinnia / Amaryllis / Orchid series. Oh, and Emily wins a floral arranging contest with a minimalist arrangement that evokes a jungle pool!
Chastain / Luttrell is a lot subtler than Stone / Morrell. And honestly, there’s probably even more in common between Wizard and Full Bloom, in terms of a woman dating but not sleeping with one man, and overlapping into a new relationship with someone who she very promptly sleeps with. Perhaps the most fascinating sequence in Full Bloom is where Morrell manhandles Emily as she contemplates just how much she is going to have to do to get him to leave (a set of decisions she is _far_ more capable of making than even the reader realizes at the time) followed by Stone appearing and kicking Morrell out. Morrell’s and Stone’s thoughts and comments are startlingly similar — the only really big difference lies in what Emily thinks of what is going on (honestly, pretty similar to the difference between the cowboy in Wizard and the Wizard in Wizard). Later books cloak the possessiveness and aggression. The similarity in the behavior of the good guy and the bad guy — the difference lying exclusively in what the woman wants — is in the older books the entire point. Later books back way down, to get out of territory that increasingly feels like a consent violation. Full Bloom may be one of the most precisely on-the-cusp books I’ve ever run across — it manages to be absolutely in every way about a woman with agency and power and who is consciously using it, while simultaneously having such a foot in the old world where the woman’s agency was often so covert that her resistance had to be overrun for her to get what she truly wanted, that it will be super-tricky to impossible to ever reprint it.
Fascinating stuff.