mothwing | Are You A Kissing Book? Part II

It seems that the best chance of finding books about women without love plots is when searching among YA novels and historical novels involving royal, crossdressing characters hell-bent on learning how to fight, as long as they can keep their hands off servants and mentors, that is. Not entirely surprising, but sad.

The books below, judging by summaries and reviews, have good chances of not containing love plots.

Dorothy Canfield Fisher's Understood Betsy - orphan Elizabeth Ann leaves her sheltered city life for a life on her aunt's farm and its various chores, which she rapidly grows to love too much to leave again.

Allan Frewin Jones' Warrior Princess series: Branwen, aided by faithful former slave Rhodri, becomes a warrior princess and defends her home and hearth against the Saxons. I'm foreseeing Branwen/Rhodri, but who knows.

Astrid Lindgren's Ronja the Robber's Daughter - in spite of her family history, Ronja does not want to become a robber, neither does Birk, the son of her clan's closest enemy. They flee and their families have to work together to find their children.

Donna Jo Napoli: Hush. Irish Princess Melkorka and her sister Brigid are sent away for safekeeping when a plot on her family is threatening her life and are captured by Russian slavers instead. They try to keep their royal birth secret by not speaking. Upside: no love plot, downside: gangrape.

Rebecca Tingle's version of teen Æthelflæd, The Edge of the Sword. King Alfred's teenaged daughter Æthelflæd is not happy with the prospect of having to marry an older ally of her father, even unhappier with her bodyguard, but learns how to fight and protect those close to her gladly, which soon becomes necessary.

Theresa Tomlinson's Wolf Girl. Wulfrun's mother is accused of stealing a neclace and Wulfrun sets out to prove her innocene.

Other loveplot-less books:

Michael Ende's Momo- Orphan Momo live s in a ruined amphitheatre. When everyone she loves start falling prey to the Men in Grey and their timesaving bank, she steals their life time back. German classic really eveybody should read.

Annika Thor's Sanning eller Konsekvens (Ich hätte nein sagen können) -Nora doesn't like the way her class, especially rich Fanny, are mobbing big-chested Karen, but finds out to what lengths even she herself will go to get her best friend Sabina back, who is best friends with Fanny these days.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I found all the books of Napoli's I read really problematic in one way or another, and just about all of them seem to be miserable. :/

Nahoko Uehashi's Moribito books look like if there's a romance subplot, it's very minimal; I can't tell from the plot summaries and I haven't read the ones that have been translated so far. They appear to focus primarily on the main character and the child she has to protect.

I'm going to have to keep an eye out more carefully; I'm not bothered by well-done romance subplots and don't always remember them when I think about a book, but I am am frustrated about how many romance subplots are badly-done and/or derailing to the story and wish romance weren't shoehorned into every story.

They didn't look very upbeat, either, what with gangrape and slavers and that. Makes me wonder why they're YA books, somehow.

I'm normally not too bothered by romance plots, either, but after reading one too many of the not-well-done sort I started paying attention to them and also started getting pissed off by the fact that they are EVERYWHERE. Therefore I started looking for stories that specifically don't contain them - it's not as though I'll never read anything that contains a love plot ever again, it's just that right now I'm curious whether any books without them exist at all, and so far, they've been devilishly difficult to find.

YA doesn't have to be happy, and often deals with heavy topics, but there's something about the way Napoli does it that just rubs me the wrong way--in either YA or adult fiction. I don't know. And I have been...unimpressed with how she handles disability (in fairytales, disability and deformity are often external markers of internal evil; in modern retellings, I am Very Disappointed if the author doesn't question that).

Understood--and it is ridiculous how hard they are to find.

I think there is a difference between gang rape and not happy - of course I don't know how detailed that's going to be, but this in specific bothers me about many historic YA novels - of course sexual violence happens and happened, but the frequency with which this brand of violence is included in books aimed at young girls upsets me and strikes me as unnecessarily gratuitous. Of course this is not surprising, considering how often it's used to add grit and background detail to adult historic novels, so this as the kiddie version was most likely inevitable.

Disability handling - o.O WTF, that's creepy.

Yeah, I...really don't like sexual violence in YA fiction (hence why I was lukewarm about Silver Phoenix overall--it didn't have any actual rape, but there was a near-constant threat of it. For reasons which made sense with the plot and the world of the story, but I still didn't like it). There is probably a need for some YA fiction addressing sexual violence topics, but I don't like it being used because a) it adds instant tension and/or angst (this is why I am no longer a Mercedes Lackey fan, partially) or b) because "women got raped a lot in history" or something like that, which seems to be the assumption of a lot of adult historical writers, and apparently that's bleeding over into YA.

Napoli's Rapunzel book was...wow. It was a dealbreaker for her writing for me. I was hoping until the end that she'd pull out something subversive, but no--Rumpelstiltskin is punished with disability and ugliness for his sin of pride and for being a jerk, and hey! It turns out he really is evil, and there will be no redemption for him at all. (Plus his daughter basically married her rapist, so everyone was miserable. The text slightly critiques the spinner marrying a man who was ready to execute her if she didn't do the impossible, but it doesn't manage to pull out any sort of agency or happy ending for her--she just...marries the prince. And is miserable. And judgemental, but that's okay because Rumpelstiltskin really is as evil as he is ugly and disabled. >:()

...I really hated Spinners, can you tell? And irritatingly, it was beautifully written and had a lot of really cool aspects. But I just found it horrifying. I really feel that if authors want to retell super-problematic stories, they have a responsibility to subvert the problematic aspects.

Are You A Kissing Book? Part II

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