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sophia_sol) wrote2021-04-17 04:43 pm
sophia_sol) wrote2021-04-17 04:43 pm
The Devil Comes Courting, by Courtney Milan
This is a very ambitious book which is handling some honestly challenging themes, within the structure of a historical romance novel. Is it perfect? No. Do I love it very, very much regardless? YES INDEED.
The story: Grayson Hunter, a Black man who runs an international telegraph company, wants to get China connected to a transpacific telegraph line. Amelia Smith, a Chinese-born woman who has been raised in a white missionary family to be as English as possible, is very excited at the possibility of figuring out a sensible way of encoding Chinese writing into a system transmissible by telegraph. Together, they support each other in facing difficult family history and in building up each other's confidence in their own worthiness!
My biggest complaint is that this book is trying to handle a lot of emotional arcs at once, and thus doesn't have the space to give all of them as much attention as I would want. I understand the problem: people are complicated and have a lot going on, and a novel does have a certain expectation of length limits, so it's hard to squish everything in and some concessions must be made. Plus it's a romance novel and if there's too much focus on all the various non-romance-related things, it......doesn't exactly fit the genre anymore.
Major Emotions Things it's doing:
- Grayson's relationship with his living family
- Grayson's war-related trauma due to three of his brothers dying
- Grayson's inability to let himself be happy
- Grayson's experiences as a Black man in racist social contexts
- Grayson and Amelia's relationship
- Amelia's relationship with the white woman who raised her, and her white adoptive brother
- Amelia's relationship with her Chinese family
- Amelia developing confidence in herself and her abilities
- Amelia developing friendships with other Chinese women, and what that means for her
- Amelia learning that accepting accommodations for the way her brain works differently than other people's isn't a bad thing or something to be embarrassed about
- Benedict growing up and discovering who he's becoming
And uh honestly that's probably not all. It's a lot!!! And all of it goes into making these characters wonderfully complete people, and it's great and I don't want ANY of these things cut, but some of these just fly by, or happen mostly off-screen, because there's always more to get to. And there's like....plot and things happening as well, it's not all people having feelings! I don't have an answer to how to solve this, but I do wish there had been a little more room to explore all the things the book wove in.
Anyway. I adore that this is a book where both people involved in the romance arc grow and are made stronger in their absences from each other. This is a story involving a lot of travel, and a lot of work, and when Amelia and Grayson are on different sides of the world they maintain what connection they can, and the knowledge of the other person's support allows them to blossom into their best selves, even when they aren't physically together. Partnerships can look like lots of different things depending on the needs of the people involved, and sometimes that means long interstices of time apart, with the expectation of more in the future, and it doesn't mean they love each other any less or that their relationship doesn't work. It always makes me happy to see portrayals of non-traditional ways of living out a relationship.
One of the other things I want to say is that this book directly addresses some of the darker parts of anti-Asian racism that occurred during this era of history. Courtney Milan talks in her end notes about how she turned down the knob on racism in general while writing this novel, as compared to what history was really like, but even with the knob turned down this is.....hoo boy. Guess what I'm trying to say here is that although this is a romance novel with its guaranteed happy ever after, it goes to some dark places, and the things that happened will continue to have a huge effect on these characters for the rest of their lives. It is not exactly escapist literature, as romance novels are sometimes assumed to be. Of course, all those historical romances out there about the rich white heterosexual english upper crust only get to be escapist for a certain subset of people, and I really love how Milan is more and more dedicated in her oeuvre to smashing through that wall of silence like kool-aid man, all like, "HELLO GUESS WHO ELSE HAS ALWAYS EXISTED IN HISTORY AND DESERVES TO FIND LOVE AND HAPPINESS."
(Disclosure: I received this book as an ARC in exchange for an honest review. The book goes on sale April 20, and is available for preorder now.)
The story: Grayson Hunter, a Black man who runs an international telegraph company, wants to get China connected to a transpacific telegraph line. Amelia Smith, a Chinese-born woman who has been raised in a white missionary family to be as English as possible, is very excited at the possibility of figuring out a sensible way of encoding Chinese writing into a system transmissible by telegraph. Together, they support each other in facing difficult family history and in building up each other's confidence in their own worthiness!
My biggest complaint is that this book is trying to handle a lot of emotional arcs at once, and thus doesn't have the space to give all of them as much attention as I would want. I understand the problem: people are complicated and have a lot going on, and a novel does have a certain expectation of length limits, so it's hard to squish everything in and some concessions must be made. Plus it's a romance novel and if there's too much focus on all the various non-romance-related things, it......doesn't exactly fit the genre anymore.
Major Emotions Things it's doing:
- Grayson's relationship with his living family
- Grayson's war-related trauma due to three of his brothers dying
- Grayson's inability to let himself be happy
- Grayson's experiences as a Black man in racist social contexts
- Grayson and Amelia's relationship
- Amelia's relationship with the white woman who raised her, and her white adoptive brother
- Amelia's relationship with her Chinese family
- Amelia developing confidence in herself and her abilities
- Amelia developing friendships with other Chinese women, and what that means for her
- Amelia learning that accepting accommodations for the way her brain works differently than other people's isn't a bad thing or something to be embarrassed about
- Benedict growing up and discovering who he's becoming
And uh honestly that's probably not all. It's a lot!!! And all of it goes into making these characters wonderfully complete people, and it's great and I don't want ANY of these things cut, but some of these just fly by, or happen mostly off-screen, because there's always more to get to. And there's like....plot and things happening as well, it's not all people having feelings! I don't have an answer to how to solve this, but I do wish there had been a little more room to explore all the things the book wove in.
Anyway. I adore that this is a book where both people involved in the romance arc grow and are made stronger in their absences from each other. This is a story involving a lot of travel, and a lot of work, and when Amelia and Grayson are on different sides of the world they maintain what connection they can, and the knowledge of the other person's support allows them to blossom into their best selves, even when they aren't physically together. Partnerships can look like lots of different things depending on the needs of the people involved, and sometimes that means long interstices of time apart, with the expectation of more in the future, and it doesn't mean they love each other any less or that their relationship doesn't work. It always makes me happy to see portrayals of non-traditional ways of living out a relationship.
One of the other things I want to say is that this book directly addresses some of the darker parts of anti-Asian racism that occurred during this era of history. Courtney Milan talks in her end notes about how she turned down the knob on racism in general while writing this novel, as compared to what history was really like, but even with the knob turned down this is.....hoo boy. Guess what I'm trying to say here is that although this is a romance novel with its guaranteed happy ever after, it goes to some dark places, and the things that happened will continue to have a huge effect on these characters for the rest of their lives. It is not exactly escapist literature, as romance novels are sometimes assumed to be. Of course, all those historical romances out there about the rich white heterosexual english upper crust only get to be escapist for a certain subset of people, and I really love how Milan is more and more dedicated in her oeuvre to smashing through that wall of silence like kool-aid man, all like, "HELLO GUESS WHO ELSE HAS ALWAYS EXISTED IN HISTORY AND DESERVES TO FIND LOVE AND HAPPINESS."
(Disclosure: I received this book as an ARC in exchange for an honest review. The book goes on sale April 20, and is available for preorder now.)
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I would read this even if you had told me all the MCs were obstreperous flying goats, so I am triply delighted to hear that it is in fact very lovable, if a bit squeezed.
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I just finished it--I had a lot of the same thoughts as you. Even for a 300-page novel, there were a surprising number of emotionally meaningful scenes that were off-screen. Particularly her meeting with her Chinese family, where I expected to spend a lot more time on that, and instead we jump forward in time back to Shanghai, and I was like--what? What about meeting her father? What about the siblings? What about getting to know more about the mother she barely remembered?
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