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Ben January #16: Cold Bayou
A new Benjamin January book has been out since May and I haven't read it! So I devoured that yesterday.
Verdict: Engaging as always, actually better than some of the recent ones as far as the general mystery/suspense plot, but I missed the main ensemble.
Though it was nice to get a focus on the Henri-Chloe-Dominique set of characters again. I cannot believe how much the author has made me (and Ben, apparently) like Henri over the course of 16 books. Also, Ben needs all the hugs in the world after this one.
But dammit, I missed Rose and Hannibal and Shaw A LOT. Couldn't they have shown up during the climax, at least? I worry a little bit that Rose is getting sidelined (necessarily, but still) due to how much of a married woman's life in this era was wrapped up in being pregnant and taking care of small children. I also feel like we're overdue for another Shaw-heavy book, or at least one where he appears in more than a scene or two. (Or not at all.) *fingers crossed*
Still, this was a really solid book, and the isolated and flooded plantation was a really great setting, very atmospheric and unique.
I'm not quite sure how to feel about how Chloe was handled in this book. In general I really love the uneasy but "it works for them" resolution to the Henri-Chloe-Dominique love triangle, and I appreciated this book dealing with the problems it's causing them from the outside, but I don't know quite how to feel about Ben's narration hammering home a view of Chloe as frigid and unlikable. I think in general it comes across as being a Ben thing more than an objective thing -- Ben doesn't like her, which I think is interesting considering how incredibly sympathetic he can be towards people who have been much worse than she has. I think there's plenty of between-the-lines subtext to indicate that Chloe actually does care about people, she just doesn't express it much (she literally risks her life to help the lovers in this book, which aren't really the actions of the borderline-sociopath that Ben seems to think she is).
So basically I kinda feel like Ben's uncharitable view of Chloe might be not how we're objectively supposed to read her, but his narrator's eye running headlong into his assumptions/prejudices about women, which he really doesn't have much of, but he's got to be biased about a few things. And he seems to be a lot more okay with men who are cold or low-affect (Shaw comes to mind here), less so with those qualities in women. It's not like the books don't have an abundance of cold, ruthless women, but it's not often that someone who is generally on his side gets the kind of suspicion and generally "holding at emotional arm's length" that he does with Chloe here. (The fact that she's a white plantation owner obviously has something to do with this, but so are a number of female characters throughout the books that he seems more sympathetic to.)
Speaking of ruthless women, one thing I liked about this book was seeing some vulnerability in Livia -- the situation she was in was ghastly (I like the way these books hammer home the fragility and horror of the circumstances in which even free people of color lived in the 1830s), but we rarely see her off balance like that, and it made me like her better. Livia is terrible, but it's easy to see how she got that way.
Verdict: Engaging as always, actually better than some of the recent ones as far as the general mystery/suspense plot, but I missed the main ensemble.
Though it was nice to get a focus on the Henri-Chloe-Dominique set of characters again. I cannot believe how much the author has made me (and Ben, apparently) like Henri over the course of 16 books. Also, Ben needs all the hugs in the world after this one.
But dammit, I missed Rose and Hannibal and Shaw A LOT. Couldn't they have shown up during the climax, at least? I worry a little bit that Rose is getting sidelined (necessarily, but still) due to how much of a married woman's life in this era was wrapped up in being pregnant and taking care of small children. I also feel like we're overdue for another Shaw-heavy book, or at least one where he appears in more than a scene or two. (Or not at all.) *fingers crossed*
Still, this was a really solid book, and the isolated and flooded plantation was a really great setting, very atmospheric and unique.
I'm not quite sure how to feel about how Chloe was handled in this book. In general I really love the uneasy but "it works for them" resolution to the Henri-Chloe-Dominique love triangle, and I appreciated this book dealing with the problems it's causing them from the outside, but I don't know quite how to feel about Ben's narration hammering home a view of Chloe as frigid and unlikable. I think in general it comes across as being a Ben thing more than an objective thing -- Ben doesn't like her, which I think is interesting considering how incredibly sympathetic he can be towards people who have been much worse than she has. I think there's plenty of between-the-lines subtext to indicate that Chloe actually does care about people, she just doesn't express it much (she literally risks her life to help the lovers in this book, which aren't really the actions of the borderline-sociopath that Ben seems to think she is).
So basically I kinda feel like Ben's uncharitable view of Chloe might be not how we're objectively supposed to read her, but his narrator's eye running headlong into his assumptions/prejudices about women, which he really doesn't have much of, but he's got to be biased about a few things. And he seems to be a lot more okay with men who are cold or low-affect (Shaw comes to mind here), less so with those qualities in women. It's not like the books don't have an abundance of cold, ruthless women, but it's not often that someone who is generally on his side gets the kind of suspicion and generally "holding at emotional arm's length" that he does with Chloe here. (The fact that she's a white plantation owner obviously has something to do with this, but so are a number of female characters throughout the books that he seems more sympathetic to.)
Speaking of ruthless women, one thing I liked about this book was seeing some vulnerability in Livia -- the situation she was in was ghastly (I like the way these books hammer home the fragility and horror of the circumstances in which even free people of color lived in the 1830s), but we rarely see her off balance like that, and it made me like her better. Livia is terrible, but it's easy to see how she got that way.
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