Heroine Complex
May. 22nd, 2018 08:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraHeroine Complex, by Sarah Kuhn, is superhero chick lit. I mostly hate the "chick lit" label (see "suppress women's writing, how to") and considered writing a nice euphemistic substitution like "is a breezy, relationship-centered story about a twentysomething woman learning to accept herself and find her voice", but honestly I think the people who would like this book can deal with it and the people who are put off by it probably wouldn't like the book, so why skate around it.
Genre is a funny thing... I read and enjoy romance (although I don't read as much romance as I might like to, because I care more about trying to find hot new sff; I keep putting romance novels on my big reading list but at low priorities that don't actually get them read) but what I'm expecting and looking for when I'm reading a romance is different than what I'm expecting and looking for when I read sff. I was surprised, in picking up this Campbell-nominated novel, that it read more like a romance than sff to me. I mean, it really read a *lot* like the kind of romance that incorporates sffnal elements like goddesses or magic or ghosts or whatever - think Jennifer Crusie's collaborations. Unfortunately I just wasn't into the couple, so it didn't land for me as a romance, and the kind of stuff I'm into in superhero stories (exploration of clever powers, origin stories, grappling with ethics, metaphors) wasn't really what this book was doing.
I'm worried that if I say I'm surprised she's up for a Campbell, it will sound like I'm dismissing this kind of story as a valid part of sff, and I don't want to do that! In a lot of ways I think it's great when Hugo nominators look at the edges of our genre, where we overlap with other genres, to see the interesting work happening there. But I am surprised that Hugo nominators did actually do that here - I feel like I remember some people thinking Hundred Thousand Kingdoms was too romancey despite also being hardcore epic fantasy, and the sff element of this feels comparatively slight. (ETA: Where it's strongest is probably in the other relationships besides the romance - the protag's relationship with her boss, sister, friends, etc. I realized I wasn't clear in the first paragraph that this is a book about all of her relationships, not just the romantic pairing. (Another way it reminded me of Crusie.) And also her "relationships" to food/clothing/her powers, stuff like that, although content note for unexamined disordered eating when food comes up.)
Because the Campbell is a person award rather than a work award, I looked briefly into what else Sarah Kuhn has done. Turns out she wrote a story for the first volume of the comics anthology Fresh Romance, which I happen to own - I enjoyed that story more than Heroine Complex, although it may have had more to do with Sally Jane Thompson's adorable blushy art than Kuhn's writing in particular. And a romance novella, and she's written some essays for Uncanny and Chicks Dig Comics and stuff. She seems like she would maybe be a really awesome con panelist and would have interesting observations and cool recs! But I'm not really interested in reading her sequel to this book.
Genre is a funny thing... I read and enjoy romance (although I don't read as much romance as I might like to, because I care more about trying to find hot new sff; I keep putting romance novels on my big reading list but at low priorities that don't actually get them read) but what I'm expecting and looking for when I'm reading a romance is different than what I'm expecting and looking for when I read sff. I was surprised, in picking up this Campbell-nominated novel, that it read more like a romance than sff to me. I mean, it really read a *lot* like the kind of romance that incorporates sffnal elements like goddesses or magic or ghosts or whatever - think Jennifer Crusie's collaborations. Unfortunately I just wasn't into the couple, so it didn't land for me as a romance, and the kind of stuff I'm into in superhero stories (exploration of clever powers, origin stories, grappling with ethics, metaphors) wasn't really what this book was doing.
I'm worried that if I say I'm surprised she's up for a Campbell, it will sound like I'm dismissing this kind of story as a valid part of sff, and I don't want to do that! In a lot of ways I think it's great when Hugo nominators look at the edges of our genre, where we overlap with other genres, to see the interesting work happening there. But I am surprised that Hugo nominators did actually do that here - I feel like I remember some people thinking Hundred Thousand Kingdoms was too romancey despite also being hardcore epic fantasy, and the sff element of this feels comparatively slight. (ETA: Where it's strongest is probably in the other relationships besides the romance - the protag's relationship with her boss, sister, friends, etc. I realized I wasn't clear in the first paragraph that this is a book about all of her relationships, not just the romantic pairing. (Another way it reminded me of Crusie.) And also her "relationships" to food/clothing/her powers, stuff like that, although content note for unexamined disordered eating when food comes up.)
Because the Campbell is a person award rather than a work award, I looked briefly into what else Sarah Kuhn has done. Turns out she wrote a story for the first volume of the comics anthology Fresh Romance, which I happen to own - I enjoyed that story more than Heroine Complex, although it may have had more to do with Sally Jane Thompson's adorable blushy art than Kuhn's writing in particular. And a romance novella, and she's written some essays for Uncanny and Chicks Dig Comics and stuff. She seems like she would maybe be a really awesome con panelist and would have interesting observations and cool recs! But I'm not really interested in reading her sequel to this book.
no subject
Date: 2018-05-23 12:58 pm (UTC)