Suzanne Brockmann, you're on my list
Oct. 29th, 2008 06:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ivyficDear Suzanne Brockmann—
No gangbanging MacGuffins. Please. I don't want surprise gang rape at the end of my escapist romance novel, especially when it has this little justification.
Here's the set up for the novel: there's a plane that's been taken hostage in a made-up middle eastern country, necessitating our favorite SEAL team (the Troubleshooters) to hole up in a hotel there as they prepare to take out the terrorists. Pretty much this whole hostage/terrorist thing is an excuse for the Troubleshooters and their love interests to be stuck in a hotel long enough to hook up. Occasionally we check back in with the hostage situation, but only see that yup, they're still there. About halfway through the book Brockmann kind of gives up on justifying why our SEALs are hanging out in the hotel rather than doing their job and taking out the terrorists. After that it's just the vague "The higher ups want us to wait." Why? No idea.
There is one main hostage that we see this crisis through, Gina, but she is little more than a MacGuffin. She gets a little bit of backstory, but it's clear that she's not the center of the story. She's just there so the SEALs have someone nice to save. And then! At the end of the book, after seriously days of everyone twiddling their thumbs for no apparent reason, the terrorists gangrape Gina! As far as I can tell, this is just so one of the heroines can see her stoic man be upset by hearing the rape of a girl, proving that he is sensitive and worthy of her love. That is just…wrong on so many levels. You rape a minor female character to make your hero sympathetic? Gah! Nevermind that if the SEALs had done their fucking job instead of chasing tail, they would've prevented it!
You know, I could tell the hijacking plot was an excuse for keeping the love interests in close proximity, and I didn't really have a problem with that. Whatever. Hand-waving, it's a romance novel, if I wanted a serious terrorist plot, I'd read Tom Clancy. But that only works if the characters' preoccupation with their love lives does not cause them to screw up, and here—it does! I just don't get it!
I could see having the terrorists rape a character if Brockmann needed to prove they were bad-ass, but that was already well established. Or I could see it if the raped character was one of the main characters and her dealing with the aftermath was an integral part of the story—I mean, I'm not a fan of rape-recovery stories, but they are definitely a popular genre. (Though they usually depend on the power of the Magical Healing Cock…but that's an entirely different rant.) But this character is entirely ancillary to the story. She gets raped, and then she gets a scene in the hospital as she's contemplating having to face everyone knowing about this, since it was widely covered on the news…and that's it. We go back to the romantic pairings we're supposed to care about even though their inaction led to this girl's rape.
Ugh. Ugh. Ugh.
Add to that the heroine in this story has a tragic backstory of sexual abuse—but not actually bad abuse. It's just bad enough to give the hero a chance to be all sensitive and protective, but not bad enough that she actually has psychological damage from it cause, god, that would just be a downer, right?
Plus, the subplot about the Holocaust (really, what is it with the flashback tales of romance in the Holocaust? We're three for three in this series) was one hundred percent predictable. I actually liked the one in the last book. This one just felt like a bad remake of Swing Kids (a movie which itself is a just-add-water generic tale of the Holocaust).
So all in all, really not the best effort here. I really loved the first book in the series, and the second one was also pretty good, so I'll read the next one, but I'm not happy.
*glares at Suzanne Brockmann*
:( :( :(
No gangbanging MacGuffins. Please. I don't want surprise gang rape at the end of my escapist romance novel, especially when it has this little justification.
Here's the set up for the novel: there's a plane that's been taken hostage in a made-up middle eastern country, necessitating our favorite SEAL team (the Troubleshooters) to hole up in a hotel there as they prepare to take out the terrorists. Pretty much this whole hostage/terrorist thing is an excuse for the Troubleshooters and their love interests to be stuck in a hotel long enough to hook up. Occasionally we check back in with the hostage situation, but only see that yup, they're still there. About halfway through the book Brockmann kind of gives up on justifying why our SEALs are hanging out in the hotel rather than doing their job and taking out the terrorists. After that it's just the vague "The higher ups want us to wait." Why? No idea.
There is one main hostage that we see this crisis through, Gina, but she is little more than a MacGuffin. She gets a little bit of backstory, but it's clear that she's not the center of the story. She's just there so the SEALs have someone nice to save. And then! At the end of the book, after seriously days of everyone twiddling their thumbs for no apparent reason, the terrorists gangrape Gina! As far as I can tell, this is just so one of the heroines can see her stoic man be upset by hearing the rape of a girl, proving that he is sensitive and worthy of her love. That is just…wrong on so many levels. You rape a minor female character to make your hero sympathetic? Gah! Nevermind that if the SEALs had done their fucking job instead of chasing tail, they would've prevented it!
You know, I could tell the hijacking plot was an excuse for keeping the love interests in close proximity, and I didn't really have a problem with that. Whatever. Hand-waving, it's a romance novel, if I wanted a serious terrorist plot, I'd read Tom Clancy. But that only works if the characters' preoccupation with their love lives does not cause them to screw up, and here—it does! I just don't get it!
I could see having the terrorists rape a character if Brockmann needed to prove they were bad-ass, but that was already well established. Or I could see it if the raped character was one of the main characters and her dealing with the aftermath was an integral part of the story—I mean, I'm not a fan of rape-recovery stories, but they are definitely a popular genre. (Though they usually depend on the power of the Magical Healing Cock…but that's an entirely different rant.) But this character is entirely ancillary to the story. She gets raped, and then she gets a scene in the hospital as she's contemplating having to face everyone knowing about this, since it was widely covered on the news…and that's it. We go back to the romantic pairings we're supposed to care about even though their inaction led to this girl's rape.
Ugh. Ugh. Ugh.
Add to that the heroine in this story has a tragic backstory of sexual abuse—but not actually bad abuse. It's just bad enough to give the hero a chance to be all sensitive and protective, but not bad enough that she actually has psychological damage from it cause, god, that would just be a downer, right?
Plus, the subplot about the Holocaust (really, what is it with the flashback tales of romance in the Holocaust? We're three for three in this series) was one hundred percent predictable. I actually liked the one in the last book. This one just felt like a bad remake of Swing Kids (a movie which itself is a just-add-water generic tale of the Holocaust).
So all in all, really not the best effort here. I really loved the first book in the series, and the second one was also pretty good, so I'll read the next one, but I'm not happy.
*glares at Suzanne Brockmann*
:( :( :(
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no subject
Date: 2008-10-30 02:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-30 04:29 am (UTC)Especially, as I said, since the purpose it served in this story was to humanize the men, which is just another variation of women in refrigerators.