I finished reading the book I was half way through last night.

Points that bothered me then boiled down to
a complicated set of issues around the central female character, including how she doesn't interact with women very much, it's usually about men, she hates her own body, and while she seemed headed for getting to accept herself the method seemed very likely to be Because Men Like Her

and a weird thing about use of the word 'racism' to include things that felt a bit odd.

Second point first... the book was going somewhere with that. The central character has been describing other races in absolute terms, like Elves ARE xyz and Faery ARE abc and Demons ARE jhg. So then around about when I gave up for the night the central character realises She Is A Racist, especially against Elves, and gets all embarrassed and starts to change her ways. So yaay, I think, it was going somewhere I agree with. And then there turns out to be a big magic threat to the elf kingdom which is because they're being racists at everyone and keeping everyone else out. So yaay for diversity. And then... there's a say/do problem. It's all very well saying she has been horribly racist for thinking All X ARE Y, but then what we actually see happen fits the description. Which... clashes rather.
And then there's the thing which niggles at me horribly, which is that she learns the error of her racist ways by learning not to hate white skin people that think they're superior.
Darker skin people, in shades of green and blue and red, just turn up acting in stereotypical ways that match the earlier descriptions of them.
It's... It's like I hate to notice this, but I can't un notice.

So. Onwards to the feminism stuff.

The central character, from the back of the book, looked like a really kick arse combination of cyberpunk meets magic.
There's a couple of kick arse action sequences, but they're *always always* described in terms of her losing control, giving up control, having the machine take over.
She kind of sort of saves the guy she was set to bodyguard, but the part of the plan that was hers puts him in danger, and the parts that were handed to her by random magic entities or were done through her by others are the parts that work.
We get to the end of the book and I am left with an overwhelming impression of a character who gets things done to and through her, achieves most by getting out the way and keeping quiet, and messes things up whenever she tries to take control.
The only exception is medical, where she does manage to heal two man.
And it's a bit odd that she ends up shagging both of them.

The first guy she ends up shagging left me boiling mad. It is one thing to forgive the soldier who blew you up; it is even arguably admirable to forgive the enemy agent who blew you up, tortured you, and threw you back in pieces so you have to be rebuilt with metal parts. It is quite entirely another to shag him. Especially when he ends up betraying her again. But hey, she understands, he's trying to save his people! Urgh.
And then she kills him and feels horribly guilty about it.
The man burned and tortured her. Sexual attraction and guilt seem really odd responses.
Also? The moment she calls herself a racist? Is the moment when she decides she's been hating this guy for no good reason.
I say again, burned and tortured. And yeah, he says it was the only way to save her life and he's feeling all guilty now, but he tells so many contradictory stories I don't see why that's any more likely than the others.

So I rather hate that bit.

The second guy she has sex with is just rather unprofessional. She's there to save pretty boy life, not shag him. Plus it's irritating that the climax of the book isn't the destruction of the evil tyrant or returning to base with mission accomplished, it's sex with the pretty boy and deciding not to go back to base just yet. I'm trying to file it with numerous similar Bond films but somehow it doesn't read the same.


So, thus far, we have a physically powerful yet passive woman who only starts to accept her own body because men (including the one who caused the injuries in the first place) fancy her.

Does she make up for it in insight? Not so much. Does she solve mysteries? Not really.
Men teach her things. There's a significant difference.

And then there's the bit where she gets possessed by a male dead guy.
She keeps control of her body unless she hands it over to him. She frequently hands it over to him.
This irritates me.
But it irritates me much more that I can't see any reason this spirit couldn't be of a dead woman, which would up her time interacting with women about the task at hand by a really high percent.

In the second half of the book we meet two, and only two, female characters.
There's three main men, the two with the sex and the one with the possession
and also a dragon of indeterminate gender.

One female character is only there for a couple of pages and is the possessing spirit's sister.
She exists to wring her hands and look distressed about her brother.

The other is the Evil Queen. Who is Evil. You can tell. She has people tortured. And ignores men who tell her things, when those men inevitably turn out to be right. (Which is annoying because it looks incredibly gendered, since she's supposed to be the local knowledge expert, but this bloke swans in and says she's All Wrong and just randomly is right). And, also, she is Beautiful. So there's a thing where the kick arse chick thinks herself ugly and only believes otherwise cause all these pretty men tell her, and the Evil Queen is beautiful. That feels just as body hating as the other, like there is no win.

I was going to say that interactions with the Evil Queen make for Bechdel pass, but thinking about it I rather think it dodges that. The Evil Queen talks to the protagonist about the men, but when they're talking politics and magic and all that she's actually talking to the possessing entity, the ghost, who as previously mentioned is a man. That's... actually seriously annoying.

What else... oh yes, random dead gay dude. Or bisexual, because he shags the protagonist too. But there's hints that the spirit was sort of in love with the torturer guy, and they're both dead. And the torturer guy used a phrase that may or may not have meant he was lovers with the guy she was bodyguarding. That guy survived. So, hey, 2/3, not like it's 100%...
*sigh*

So, anyways.
There were so many layers of niggly irritation.


I do not like books where the central protagonist thinks she's ugly and everyone else tells her she's pretty and she's continuously surprised and then there is sex. It's... where does this come from? Is it just not allowed to be powerful and comfortable in your own body? Blah.

I could read the whole story from a different angle and try and make it about how she gets over being tortured and left with prosthetics by... shagging her torturer and letting him magic up her prosthetics so they don't hurt? No, sorry, that's still freaky.

So, conclusion by end of the book:
This version of 'racism' still gives me a sandpapery feeling, even though it seems to really be trying
and this central female character... annoys.

There's a thread about how the bad guys are the ones who don't like mixing so the good guys are the embodiment of mixing. I could live with that. Except being mixed makes them miserable, sometimes in pain, and possibly unwell or even addicts. That's... not good.

Eh.
does nothing for me and I'm not going to read the next book.