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A proper post about the Ben January books :D
Okay, I keep saying I'm going to make a post about why these books are awesome, but I never do, so ... HERE IS THAT POST, DARN IT ALL. XD
Basically right now there are only two series of books that I'm eagerly pre-ordering in hardcover and dropping everything I'm doing to read when they arrive: Dresden Files (which most of you know about) and the Benjamin January books by Barbara Hambly. I started reading them last fall because they sounded intriguing -- they're historical murder mysteries set in New Orleans during the 1830s -- and before I knew it I'd been completely sucked into her sprawling cast of characters and their world.
I'll talk more about the characters under the cut, because there are some scattered spoilers for the first couple of books (it's difficult to talk about who the characters are and why they're awesome without spoiling a few things) but aside from the characters and their AWESOMENESS, here are some of the other things I love about the books:
- They have a fabulous sense of place. They neither gloss over the ugliness and dirtiness of life in the 19th century, nor fail to celebrate the beauty and wonder. They're rich with historical details and vivid descriptions that leaves me feeling like I'm standing there on New Orleans' muddy, mosquito-infested streets. And I've never been there, never was actually that interested in going there (before reading the books; now I'd love to!), but these books make New Orleans itself as much of a character as the human characters.
- They do a wonderful job of balancing the swashbuckling-adventure side of the plot with the social commentary side of the plot. By narrative necessity, since the main protagonist Ben and his family are black, the books deal heavily with life in antebellum New Orleans among the free black community, including its deep social stratifications of both race and class, and the bitterness of being an exile in your own country, unable to vote or own a weapon or even to enjoy freedom that couldn't be taken from you in a single instant of bad luck or carelessness. And the books do a really good job of keeping this in the forefront of the readers' mind, as it always has to be for the characters. (Not to mention that the author is absolutely aces at giving her characters agency; Ben is never ever a victim who can do nothing but wait to be rescued by a white character -- he always, always saves himself or at least sets the events of his own rescue in motion.)
But the books are also full of adventure and derring-do -- there are pirates and thieves and bandits, last-minute rescues, hidden treasure, kidnappings, hurricanes, floods, long-lost family, daring plots and so forth. Lots of stuff gets blown up, metaphorically and literally. :D And, as they are technically murder mysteries, each book centers around a murder or three.
The characters, though, are what absolutely makes the books for me. There is a fairly large cast of recurring characters in Ben's New Orleans world, but the major ones are these:
Benjamin January is of course the eponymous hero, a surgeon and musician. He was born a slave, freed as a child by his mother's white owner/patron, and lived in the relative freedom of Paris for a long time. The series begins shortly after his wife dies and he returns to his childhood home of New Orleans to put his life back together again. Ben is really hard to sum up in just a paragraph -- well, all of them are, but Ben more so than the rest because we spend so much time in his head (all of the books are told from his point of view). I guess the best way to describe Ben is that he has a romantic's soul combined with a cynic's clear-eyed awareness of the world's bitter realities.
Rose Vitrac ismade of awesome introduced in the second book and quickly becomes part of the buddy triad that also includes Ben and Hannibal. She's a quiet and bookish schoolteacher and general science/classics nerd who takes unexpected glee in breaking out of her quiet life in order to do things like steal horses or blow stuff up, which she's alarmingly good at. Rose has been free all her life (child of a black mother and unusually permissive, for the times, white plantation-owner father) and grew up isolated and rural on the Mississippi delta, learning about the world through books and otherwise running wild with her white half-brothers. Rose's dream is to run a boarding school for girls of color, to educate them (like herself) and give them better opportunities in life than to be a wife or some white guy's arm ornament. She makes me go "ROSE YOU ARE SO AWESOME" at least once per book. XD I love all the characters, but Rose ... I want to be Rose.
Hannibal Sefton is Ben's best friend, a mysteriously well-educated but down-on-his-luck Irish violinist. No one knows who he was or what he did before he showed up in New Orleans, and he never talks about his past, but he's clearly running from something. Hannibal is sweet and gentle and doesn't have a mean bone in his body (there's one scene later on, in which necessity forces him to deal bodily harm, which is simply heartrending), but he's also an alcoholic and opium addict and perpetually one step from disaster. He's kind of the series' designated Damsel In Distress.
Abishag Shaw is a white New Orleans police officer. At first glance he appears to be (as Ben assumes at first) the worst stereotype of white trash: filthy, uneducated and dangerous. In reality, though, he's wicked smart, something of a self-educated polymath (like the other characters), and is tenaciously dedicated to justice, even when it means having to ignore inconvenient bits of the law from time to time (like, say, turning a blind eye to an entire boatful of escaping slaves). Think Vimes in a cowboy hat with a Kentucky long rifle and a backwoods drawl. He and Ben have an interesting relationship of mutual respect shading slowly and reluctantly towards friendship. *fangirls Shaw madly*
Ben's sisters also deserve special mention: Dominique (a.k.a. Minou) is half white and his mother's pampered, sheltered favorite child and aargh I can't talk about her plotline without spoilers, and Olympe is Ben's full sister, a wife and mother and voodooienne, i.e. she's a holy woman in New Orleans' voodou subculture (which is treated respectfully in the books, as far as I can tell, along with Ben's Catholic faith).
I wrote a couple of stories for this series for Yuletide: Rescue is a Ben & Shaw & Dominique story with no specific spoilers (probably takes place in the general timeframe of the first couple of books), and A Mistress or a Friend is a Hannibal-centric ficlet that's spoilery for one plot thread in book 5.
Here's the series in order on Amazon.com (no spoilers aside from titles). There are 10 books so far, with another forthcoming next year.
This entry is also posted at http://friendshipper.dreamwidth.org/349346.html with
comments.
Basically right now there are only two series of books that I'm eagerly pre-ordering in hardcover and dropping everything I'm doing to read when they arrive: Dresden Files (which most of you know about) and the Benjamin January books by Barbara Hambly. I started reading them last fall because they sounded intriguing -- they're historical murder mysteries set in New Orleans during the 1830s -- and before I knew it I'd been completely sucked into her sprawling cast of characters and their world.
I'll talk more about the characters under the cut, because there are some scattered spoilers for the first couple of books (it's difficult to talk about who the characters are and why they're awesome without spoiling a few things) but aside from the characters and their AWESOMENESS, here are some of the other things I love about the books:
- They have a fabulous sense of place. They neither gloss over the ugliness and dirtiness of life in the 19th century, nor fail to celebrate the beauty and wonder. They're rich with historical details and vivid descriptions that leaves me feeling like I'm standing there on New Orleans' muddy, mosquito-infested streets. And I've never been there, never was actually that interested in going there (before reading the books; now I'd love to!), but these books make New Orleans itself as much of a character as the human characters.
- They do a wonderful job of balancing the swashbuckling-adventure side of the plot with the social commentary side of the plot. By narrative necessity, since the main protagonist Ben and his family are black, the books deal heavily with life in antebellum New Orleans among the free black community, including its deep social stratifications of both race and class, and the bitterness of being an exile in your own country, unable to vote or own a weapon or even to enjoy freedom that couldn't be taken from you in a single instant of bad luck or carelessness. And the books do a really good job of keeping this in the forefront of the readers' mind, as it always has to be for the characters. (Not to mention that the author is absolutely aces at giving her characters agency; Ben is never ever a victim who can do nothing but wait to be rescued by a white character -- he always, always saves himself or at least sets the events of his own rescue in motion.)
But the books are also full of adventure and derring-do -- there are pirates and thieves and bandits, last-minute rescues, hidden treasure, kidnappings, hurricanes, floods, long-lost family, daring plots and so forth. Lots of stuff gets blown up, metaphorically and literally. :D And, as they are technically murder mysteries, each book centers around a murder or three.
The characters, though, are what absolutely makes the books for me. There is a fairly large cast of recurring characters in Ben's New Orleans world, but the major ones are these:
Benjamin January is of course the eponymous hero, a surgeon and musician. He was born a slave, freed as a child by his mother's white owner/patron, and lived in the relative freedom of Paris for a long time. The series begins shortly after his wife dies and he returns to his childhood home of New Orleans to put his life back together again. Ben is really hard to sum up in just a paragraph -- well, all of them are, but Ben more so than the rest because we spend so much time in his head (all of the books are told from his point of view). I guess the best way to describe Ben is that he has a romantic's soul combined with a cynic's clear-eyed awareness of the world's bitter realities.
Rose Vitrac is
Hannibal Sefton is Ben's best friend, a mysteriously well-educated but down-on-his-luck Irish violinist. No one knows who he was or what he did before he showed up in New Orleans, and he never talks about his past, but he's clearly running from something. Hannibal is sweet and gentle and doesn't have a mean bone in his body (there's one scene later on, in which necessity forces him to deal bodily harm, which is simply heartrending), but he's also an alcoholic and opium addict and perpetually one step from disaster. He's kind of the series' designated Damsel In Distress.
Abishag Shaw is a white New Orleans police officer. At first glance he appears to be (as Ben assumes at first) the worst stereotype of white trash: filthy, uneducated and dangerous. In reality, though, he's wicked smart, something of a self-educated polymath (like the other characters), and is tenaciously dedicated to justice, even when it means having to ignore inconvenient bits of the law from time to time (like, say, turning a blind eye to an entire boatful of escaping slaves). Think Vimes in a cowboy hat with a Kentucky long rifle and a backwoods drawl. He and Ben have an interesting relationship of mutual respect shading slowly and reluctantly towards friendship. *fangirls Shaw madly*
Ben's sisters also deserve special mention: Dominique (a.k.a. Minou) is half white and his mother's pampered, sheltered favorite child and aargh I can't talk about her plotline without spoilers, and Olympe is Ben's full sister, a wife and mother and voodooienne, i.e. she's a holy woman in New Orleans' voodou subculture (which is treated respectfully in the books, as far as I can tell, along with Ben's Catholic faith).
I wrote a couple of stories for this series for Yuletide: Rescue is a Ben & Shaw & Dominique story with no specific spoilers (probably takes place in the general timeframe of the first couple of books), and A Mistress or a Friend is a Hannibal-centric ficlet that's spoilery for one plot thread in book 5.
Here's the series in order on Amazon.com (no spoilers aside from titles). There are 10 books so far, with another forthcoming next year.
This entry is also posted at http://friendshipper.dreamwidth.org/349346.html with
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I know she's written some Star Trek tie-in novels, including one I really liked, Ishmael. (She managed to make me like Kirk, which is really a trick!)
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But I was not kidding about how the tie-in authors treated Luke's love interests. Until they settled on Mara Jade, authors would routinely introduce love interests that were then killed/exiled/dismissed by other authors (usually Kevin J. Anderson) in subsequent books.
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