The Twelve Points of Caleb Canto, by Sam Starbuck

[sophia_sol]

It occurs to me, a couple days after I finished reading Sam Starbuck's fourth romance novel, that even though I read these novels on AO3, they should still count as books I read! He's publishing them all and everything!

So I have retroactively added three books to my count for last year (Fete for a King, Infinite Jes, and The Lady and the Tiger) and now I guess I'm writing a review for all four at once.

I've been following Starbuck's fanfic for years, under the name copperbadge, but last year he started on an original series of linked romance novels set in a tiny fictional European country, along the traditional Ruritanian lines, and I was like, sure, why not. The books feature plenty of queer characters (and only one of the four is about an m/f couple), a country where kingship is an elected position, and lots of feel-good content. Also two of the four have neurodivergent protagonists.

Of the four books, I liked Fete for a King (about a young king and a loud American chef) and The Twelve Points of Caleb Canto (about two Eurovision contestants) the best; the two middle ones (king emeritus and podcaster; two nobles doing politics) didn't land as well for me for a variety of reasons.

Overall the writing style in this series trends strongly in the direction of quippy dialogue for everyone, resulting in me feeling that there's very little sense of there being individual voices for the various characters. I also find constant quips to get kind of exhausting to read after a while, personally.

I also don't love that the focus is on a royal family. Yes, this is not a hereditary monarchy, and yes, the family is very open and welcoming to providing support to whoever appears in their ambit, but....idk. I think this may be one of those things where shining a light on the fact that the book knows hereditary country-leadership is bad means that I'm just more primed to notice ways in which the solution to the problem is imperfect.

The books are very readable, good-hearted, fun, and happy-ending-guaranteed. But I'm not sure I'm going to keep reading them.

Comments

[lannamichaels]

Yeah, the quippy stuff got really tiring in this one. I had no sense of anyone's individual voices; any lines could be said by anyone. I made a few notes in the gdoc about it, specifically certain lines that really shouldn't be coming from the people who said them. But the sentence fragments really started grating on me in this book. But since the ao3/gdoc version isn't the final version, I hope he'll fix it in the pdf/epub.

Then again, I have never gone back and reread the pdfs of the other ones after reading on gdoc/ao3, so I don't know how many changes he makes.

[sophia_sol]

Yeah exactly. I'm glad you made some comments! But I too haven't read any of the final ones so I don't know how much things change from first draft to final draft. There's only so much you can do about voice if it's pervasive through an entire novel-length work, unless you're committed to a really thorough rewrite, I feel.

[lannamichaels]

Yeah, there's also some worldbuilding stuff I really hate, but once it's dug-in, there's not much you can do about it aside from leave comments asking him to soften it. At least there was very little of the Somehow A Jewish Country In Europe stuff in this book.

[sophia_sol]

Yeahhhhh that too, for sure!!

[rymenhild]

I know, right? I mean, these books are cute and I've read and enjoyed them but my historian brain can just not get around "So some British people, who may or may not have been Welsh, established a kingdom at some point in the past, somewhere between southern France and southern Italy, where the state language is English and the state religion is ... Jewish... so don't think too hard about historical British antisemitism, or about how Judaism has been specifically practiced in Britain after the Jews were allowed back in in Cromwell's day and how that differs from Ashkenazi American practice, and definitely don't think for more than ten seconds about what would have happened to this kingdom between 1939 and 1945."

[lannamichaels]

The Welsh thing is at least a recent addition to the series. But yeah, from the beginning, my perspective was YOU NEED TO NOT DRAW ANY ATTENTION TO THE HISTORY, like, no, do not mention WW2, do not pass go, do not collect 200 dollars. But he has all these posts about how he feels WW2 went, and just.. no... stop... please. Like, I get what he is doing, I get this is part of Romance Novel Happy Stuff for him, like yay, m/m monarchy, everyone is fine with that, and also they're Jewish, but, like. No. No, everything completely falls apart if you say "there's a Jewish country in Europe".

Because meanwhile I'm over here going "yeah so we were expelled from every single country in Europe, like, three times" even before we get to the elephant in the room.

So I have to ignore this part of the worldbuilding as much as possible because it's the price of admission to this series, but wow, is this price of admission very very high.

(Who also? Somehow? Managed to maintain the whole "no last names, we use patronymics instead"?????? And they're elected???? And they have great relationships with their neighbors, and they kept English as a national language to annoy France? I... I....)

[rymenhild]

It works as long as I'm singing "la la la" and pretending I can suspend my disbelief. But. Yeah. It doesn't work.

[sophia_sol]

YEAH I love your and lannamichaels' discussion! I so agree that it makes no sense and I found it uncomfortable to read and I had to do a bunch of pretending that stuff just wasn't a thing, to be able to enjoy the rest, sigh

[lannamichaels]

Have you read the latest one? I just spent a half hour ranting to a friend in whatsapp about it. It's... Yeah.

[sophia_sol]

oh no. OH NO. what does the latest one do? I kind of gave up on reading these books tbh but I'm morbidly curious!

[lannamichaels]

So it's... he's doubled down on the Judaism and done it so badly. At the basic level, he gets wrong how long it is between rosh hashana and yom kippur, he decides son of/daughter of use "e" between the names when you're naming both parents instead of "v", and use the last name instead of the first name, so some really basic problems. And then the more complicated worldbuilding problems rear their heads because he's brought the Judaism back to the forefront and done it in such a way that it's ... so you know where "it's not insensitive it's just unthinking", well, it's reached the point where it's a problem to be this casual. Somehow he made a country between Italy and France that is American Reform and the problems with that just get more and more the more you look at it, and in this book, he looks at it. And does not fix the problems. He doesn't care to put the work in, because these are half-assed hallmark romances that he's asking for unpaid beta readers to fix for him to sell, and I lost patience with that books ago, and now I've lost enough patience that I don't even know if I should leave comments to tell him how wrong he is, because he's not going to fix it, and if he actually cared, he'd not have made these mistakes, because he'd have listened to everyone who told him to slow down or stop or think about it for a moment.

...guess I'm still mad.

[lannamichaels]

Anyway, what he needs is a Jewish consultant he will actually listen to, and also one he should pay, because he's selling these books.

[sophia_sol]

ohhhh that is all NOT GOOD, yikes. feeling better and better about having unfollowed him a while back. your anger is so understandable, as is whatever you decide to do about commenting or not!

[rymenhild]

I didn't know there was a latest one! I deduce that I should not bother?

[lannamichaels]

I would not recommend it, but in the same way that I'm curious to know if other people dislike it for the same reasons I do kind of way. But it's 140K with several extranous plotlines, so it's a slog to get through if you're not enjoying it. (it took me about two weeks-ish? I stopped reading for days at a time and nearly didn't finish.)

[rymenhild]

My TBR list is too long and my spare time is too short for that, then. Maybe eventually I'll be bored enough to get to it.

[seekingferret]

You should read Di Bovo Bukh, it is amazing for Somehow Most of Europe is Jewish without any explanation.

[lannamichaels]

My library's never heard of it. Is there an English translation floating around the internet?

[seekingferret]

I dunno? I read this translation by Jerry Smith, which Amazon seems not to have anymore. And my copy was loaned to a friend a number of years ago and may never return.

[chestnut_pod]

Interesting! I did not know that copperbadge of old was testing these particular waters. Due to my own fandoms past, I associate him quite strongly with Torchwood and Doctor Who, whence perhaps the quippiness.

shining a light on the fact that the book knows hereditary country-leadership is bad means that I'm just more primed to notice ways in which the solution to the problem is imperfect. -- Yes! If you're going to do royalty, do it! It is much easier to suspend one's disbelief when no one is in the corner pointing out how thin that wire looks…

[sophia_sol]

Yeah I associate him with those fandoms too! Also MCU, after that. He was in harry potter first though, and from what I've read of his older fics, he was pretty quippy in those days too; I think it might just be his style as an author. It works better in some contexts than others, I think.

I get so frustrated with SO MANY books about royalty these days! There were different things to be mad about in older books, but it seems like the current approach is just like, "I want the escapist fiction but I know royalty is bad," and then the author tries to split the difference, and I don't know that I've ever seen that done truly well.

[chestnut_pod]

I've seen it done where it's like "I want the escapist fiction but I know royalty is bad; let's lean into it and make it sexy bad," which I can get behind! But it's still not my preference.

[sophia_sol]

hahaha yeah I think I have more respect for that approach! though like you it still wouldn't be my preference

[luzula]

Now I'm curious--sexy bad in what way?

[chestnut_pod]

Oh, in the slightly D/s way of "I am very happy this person has absolute control over my person and also dungeons," or sexy ruthlessness, or people who enjoy leaning into droit du seigneur or hieros gamos or arranged marriages and the whole array of consent ~stuff that becomes available in such a situation.

[luzula]

Ah, okay! Yeah, if you do that it becomes pretty obvious that it's about sexual fantasy and not politics.

[sholio]

I don't know these books (though I've read some of Copperbadge's fanfic in the very distant past) but I'm finding the discussion really fascinating, in part because it's making me think about my own preferences as well! Just on a personal level, I'm really not a fan of the current trend of wanting to have the iddy, fancy glamor while hanging a lampshade on the problematic aspects. Like!! It's okay to want that stuff, it's okay to lean into the guilty-pleasure glitter of it all if that's what floats your barge! We're all adults here, I think we all understand that not everyone who enjoys the glitz of balls and fancy gowns is a raging monarchist. And similarly, there is absolutely a place for deconstructions and takedowns. But mixing them together just feels subtly off for me, it's like someone writing iddy hurt/comfort while reminding you every few pages that you're not actually supposed to be getting off on other people's distress (which I HAVE actually run into and it's the opposite of fun).

[sophia_sol]

it's like someone writing iddy hurt/comfort while reminding you every few pages that you're not actually supposed to be getting off on other people's distress (which I HAVE actually run into and it's the opposite of fun).

oof yeah that's ZERO fun, and is a very good parallel for this kind of thing!

[lirazel]

The conversation about this is SO interesting!

[sophia_sol]

Agreed!!!! I love all the thoughtful people who show up in my comments