It’s our second-ever group podcast, and we are punchy, and also we’re using a brand new microphone and we, meaning I, meaning Gin Jenny, did not calibrate it altogether correctly perhaps. Slash, there was a loud train in the background. So. We are talking at length about A Hope Divided, which is Robert Repino’s first romance novel and Whiskey Jenny’s first Alyssa Cole novel, and we had a grand old time. We hope you will forgive the imperfections in the sound quality. You can listen to the podcast in the embedded player below, or download it directly to take with you on the go!
Here are the time signatures if you want to skip around (but it’s like 90% A Hope Divided talk).
2:02 – What we’re reading
5:06 – What we’re sleeping on
8:26 – A Hope Divided, Alyssa Cole
Follow Ashley here and Robert here!
Get at me on Twitter, email the podcast, and friend me (Gin Jenny) and Whiskey Jenny on Goodreads. If you like what we do, support us on Patreon. Or if you wish, you can find us on iTunes (and if you enjoy the podcast, give us a good rating! We appreciate it very very much).
Credits
Producer: Captain Hammer
Photo credit: The Illustrious Annalee
Theme song by: Jessie Barbour
Transcripts by: Sharon of Library Hungry
Transcript!
WHISKEY JENNY: Hello, and welcome to a special bonus episode of the Reading the End Bookcast, with the Demographically Similar Jennys. [gasp] I’m Whiskey Jenny—
GIN JENNY: And I’m Gin Jenny
WHISKEY JENNY: And!
GIN JENNY: WE’RE IN THE SAME ROOM!
WHISKEY JENNY: We’re together in the same room, we are both in the zip code of Chicago, and we are also joined today by two very special repeat guests, Ashley and Robert.
ASHLEY: Hello!
ROBERT: Hello!
WHISKEY JENNY: Welcome back, guys!
GIN JENNY: We haven’t had you on the podcast for a minute! You were last here to discuss genderswapped Twilight, which we all had some opinions about.
ASHLEY: Some opinions. One opinion, I think.
ROBERT: One opinion. [laughter] A unanimous—there was a scholarly consensus.
GIN JENNY: One very noisy opinion.
ROBERT: Can I say, just in case anyone’s doubting that we’re actually in Chicago, you will occasionally hear the train, the elevated train going by the window.
ASHLEY: Unless it gets edited out.
GIN JENNY: Yeah, hopefully I’ll be able to edit it out, but we’ll see.
WHISKEY JENNY: If not, that’s the L! [laughter] I suppose you’re wondering why we’ve gathered you here today, and it’s to discuss A Hope Divided, by Alyssa Cole.
GIN JENNY: I actually thought you were going to say books and literary happenings, and just be really like—Guess what? Books and literary happenings! [laughter]
WHISKEY JENNY: Well, that. But in particular, one book that we all read, and Robert, this is your first romance novel.
ROBERT: I’m pretty sure it’s my first; I don’t recall reading another one.
WHISKEY JENNY: Okay, and everyone else has already read romance before.
GIN JENNY: Yeah, I think everyone else at this table is more or less fans of the romance genre.
ASHLEY: Yes.
WHISKEY JENNY: What did everyone think overall?
GIN JENNY: No, no, no.
WHISKEY JENNY: No!
GIN JENNY: Before we get into all that…
WHISKEY JENNY: Yeah! Oh God, sorry. So, sorry! Before we get into all that, what is everyone reading right now?
ASHLEY: So, I just started reading the second book of the To all the Boys I’ve Loved Before. This one’s called PS I Still Love You, I just started it last night, it’s still very cute. I listened to the audiobook of the first one, and it was just top-notch. I loved the narrator so much; it was like watching a movie. And so now I am hearing, as I’m reading the second one, I’m hearing it in her voice, and it’s just great. I’m really into it so far.
GIN JENNY: Aren’t they making a sequel to the Netflix movie of To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before?
ASHLEY: Sure hope so.
GIN JENNY: God me too. What a great movie.
ASHLEY: Really enjoyed that as well. I just love everything to do with To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before and Jenny Han.
WHISKEY JENNY: Did I hear a rumor that the movie is based on the first three books?
GIN JENNY: I thought the movie was based on the first book but kind of encroached a little bit into the second. Is that correct?
ASHLEY: Ummm, that’s possible. I know the ending is very different and more definitive, which is fine, than the ending of the first book. The ending of the first book is very ambiguous.
GIN JENNY: Cool. So I actually just finished reading a book that I super liked, called The Psychology of Time Travel, by Kate Mascarenhas. And it is so good, it’s about—the premise is in 1967, four British women invent time travel, and one of them kind of goes crazy when they go to the press. They’re gonna go to the press to talk about it, and one of them has a breakdown on camera, and so she’s kind of shunted out of the time travel world, and then there’s a jump forward to the present day, and she’s an old lady and she and her granddaughter are very close, and she’s talking about that she wants to get back into time travel before she dies. It was just so great? It was a lot of mixing of timelines and perspectives, and I just thought it was a really, really, really, really, really terrific book, and I’m just really sad it hasn’t gotten more attention yet.
ROBERT: Now that I’m done with A Hope Divided, I’m going back to the seven or eight hundred page book—
GIN JENNY: Game of Thrones.
ROBERT: No, no, no. Well, sort of. It’s Black Leopard, Red Wolf—am I getting that right?—by Marlon James, which has been compared to Game of Thrones. I think I’m maybe a third of the way through.
GIN JENNY: How’s it treating you?
ROBERT: It’s a great book. I’m still not getting everything about it, cause it’s very dense, and it’s challenging in a way that a great book should be, so I’m gonna continue on with it.
WHISKEY JENNY: I put that on one of our preview episodes, but I have not started it yet. I’m excited to hear, all the way through, what you think.
GIN JENNY: I’m definitely not gonna read it. It sounds too violent for me. I don’t have to do this to myself.
WHISKEY JENNY: I am also to the wire finishing A Hope Divided, but after that I’m gonna start Retablos, by Octavio Solis, which I think is sort of a book of short story memoirs, memoir short stories. Those are essays. [laughter] But I brought it because—well, I wanted to read it, but it’s very small, and I was like, great, we’re all together in this city of Chicago, traveling around. I can just pop it in my new backpack and then if for some horrible reason we get separated for ten minutes and I have nothing to do for ten minutes, I won’t be bookless. I’m constitutionally incapable of—What if I’m bookless for ten minutes?
[laughter] Y’all, that would be horrible! That would be awful!GIN JENNY: I know you’re joking kind of—
WHISKEY JENNY: But I’m not because I always bring it! So I was like, well, this’ll be lightweight, and I can just carry it around whenever.
GIN JENNY: Smart.
WHISKEY JENNY: So our Patreon supporters voted for us to discuss what we are sleeping on: what sort of media that we would like to consume, have heard good things about, but have not yet consumed. Let’s go around the same order and all say what we’re sleeping on. I feel like—we’re all sitting on the floor, and I feel very—except for Robert is sitting in a real chair and lording over us—but it feels very like, now everyone go around the circle, and you can hold the talking stick, and tell us what you’re sleeping on.
[Note: Robert was in a chair when Whiskey Jenny said this, but after about ten more minutes he felt too guilty having his head higher than ours, I guess because he took The King and I very to heart as a youth, and he switched to the floor at the cost of his back.]ASHLEY: It feels like we should do drawings on the floor, and like crayons and stuff.
GIN JENNY: Okay, Ashley, here’s the talking stick.
ASHLEY: If you know anything about me, you know that I don’t really watch that much TV, so there are many, many things that I would probably like that I haven’t seen, and that are theoretically on my list to get to eventually. The main one that everyone is surprised that I haven’t seen and that I’m sure I’ll like is Friday Night Lights, that was a very easy one for me, and the one that if I’m being really honest that I will probably watch before that is The Haunting of Hill House.
WHISKEY JENNY: BUT RIGGINS.
[laughter]ASHLEY: It’s so much shorter!
WHISKEY JENNY: And I also haven’t finished Friday Night Lights. So I understand. It’s a lot.
ASHLEY: Well, I also haven’t started it.
GIN JENNY: As a finisher, I’m currently in the midst of finishing Friday Night Lights, so I’m in late season three, heading into season four, and it’s so good. God, it’s just so good. You should definitely—
ASHLEY: I’m sure I’ll like it! I probably should say, because you guys know this but not everybody does, the reason that people are surprised that I haven’t seen, is that I’m from Texas, and I love football, and that’s about it basically.
GIN JENNY: Yeah! So, if you know anything about me, you know that I never watch movies, so all of mine would really be movies. But everyone else at this table recently watched Wayne’s World, which is a movie that I still have not seen. Although it was—the plot of it was just explained to me not two hours ago, it still escapes my mind. It’s supposed to be very sort of sweet and gentle and low-stakes, which sounds great, and I think it’s probably going to be one of these things like Empire Records where I just resisted seeing it for the longest time, and then I do see it, and I’m like, oh, this is incredible. And Empire Records is in fact my favorite movie.
WHISKEY JENNY: Are you actively resisting, or do you just keep forgetting about it?
GIN JENNY: I keep forgetting about it, and it doesn’t—I rarely hear anything about it that makes me think I need to bump it to the top of my list.
ASHLEY: That’s understandable!
GIN JENNY: I think it doesn’t have like a sexy hook.
ROBERT: I was reminded for the millionth time that I still have not seen My Cousin Vinny. So I think I need to just end that drought and take care of it as soon as possible.
GIN JENNY: Can I tell you something?
ROBERT: Please.
GIN JENNY: I’ve never seen The Godfather.
[long silence]ROBERT: I’m staring at you right now. I wish the camera, or the microphone, could pick that up.
WHISKEY JENNY: Well, I haven’t either, but you knew that already.
GIN JENNY: Now Robert is staring at Whiskey Jenny.
ROBERT: Why am I here?
[laughter]ROBERT: I’m disappointed, but let’s move on.
WHISKEY JENNY: Well I guess I’m sleeping on The Godfather, but also, Atomic Blonde, which I just—it looks so stylish, it looks precisely up my alley, and I still haven’t seen it! I don’t know why!
ASHLEY: It’s so good!
WHISKEY JENNY: Can’t wait to see it. I love McAvoy, I love Theron. Love accents. I love great coats, I love action. I love the seventies.
ROBERT: It’s the eighties.
WHISKEY JENNY: I love the eighties.
[laughter]WHISKEY JENNY: Is it? Like, early?
ROBERT: Late. Very late.
WHISKEY JENNY: Late? Late. I love the eighties. And it’s by a director I really like, the person who did the John Wick franchise. I don’t know what my problem is, but there it is.
ASHLEY: You’re gonna love it.
GIN JENNY: Well, for today’s podcast, we all decided to read—
WHISKEY JENNY: Independently.
[laughter]GIN JENNY: We elected to read A Hope Divided, by Alyssa Cole. I thought maybe we could do like a whip-round, where everyone gives their general impressions of the book. Do you want to do it in the same order as before?
ASHLEY: I liked it overall. I definitely had some notes. All of us except Robert were previously familiar with Alyssa Cole.
WHISKEY JENNY: False. I mean, I’d heard of her, but I had never read her before.
ASHLEY: Okay. I think the thing that she does that I really like, and obviously we can get more into specifics about what we liked and disliked, but in general the thing I really like about her books is that she’s good at creating a high-stakes romance that’s also intertwined with the plot in a way that does not feel forced. I enjoy that a lot. Yeah, I had some notes about some of the ways the characters were developed, and it was a little slow in the beginning. But I mean, overall, yeah, it was like a fun quick read for me.
GIN JENNY: So I have been—not to be an Alyssa Cole hipster, but I have been a really huge fan of Alyssa Cole’s since her first series, which was a post-apocalyptic—
ASHLEY: I read those!
GIN JENNY: Yeah, they’re fun! So I’m very excited that she is now really really big and has books all over. I would say I liked this a lot; it was not my favorite of her books, and I think that overall I have a harder time with the Civil War series, just because the Civil War was such a terrible time. So even though the romance was good and the book was good, it didn’t give me that same sort of feeling of like joyous escapism that I feel about reading some of her other books. I was saying as we were on the way back here to record this podcast, I just read one of her contemporary romances, which is just a more escapist romance novel, that felt less horrifyingly relevant to our current political situation? The Civil War was a horrible time, and we are now living in horrible times, so.
ROBERT: I liked it and would recommend it. Of course I say that, and then for the rest of the podcast I’ll be nit-picking all the things that I didn’t—that didn’t work for me. I think this is a story that I appreciated a lot, because the main character was pushing the plot with high-stakes decisions, and then acting on those decisions. I feel like sometimes in a story like this, I think sometimes the characters can end up being a little passive, especially with so much stuff happening around them. That part of it really worked for me and made it that I was able to read this in a few sittings, which, from me, is the best compliment I can give anything. [laughter] If I can read a book in a few sittings—like, I’m a slow reader. It was like—moved along very quickly, had a character who was driving the action. I overall would recommend it.
WHISKEY JENNY: Can I ask in like what situation you would recommend it?
GIN JENNY: Oh, great question.
WHISKEY JENNY: Just generally, or if someone was like, I want to read a romance, or I want to read a dramatic romance?
ROBERT: I guess if they said they wanted to read a dramatic romance, or wanted to—
WHISKEY JENNY: Like high stakes.
ROBERT: My amateur understanding of the Civil War, which comes from my day job, which deals with some history publishing, and also, my degree, which is in history, we did some—I have some basic knowledge of the Civil War, and I thought the research in this was pretty good, and I thought that this is the kind of book that maybe could lead people to do some more research on their own about what life was actually like then and how nuanced some of the resistance to the Confederacy was at the time.
WHISKEY JENNY: I think I liked it the least, which is to say that I did not like it. I’m really happy it exists. I just don’t think it is for me.
GIN JENNY: Did you not enjoy the writing, like do you think you would not read another—
WHISKEY JENNY: Nope! It was not the writing. I thought it was very well-written. I did not enjoy the romance. I didn’t think they were Chaos vs Order Muppety enough.
ASHLEY: Definitely not. They were both very Order Muppet.
WHISKEY JENNY: Yeah, I needed a bit more differentiation. I prefer when there’s more of a different dynamic between the characters. I feel like they have very similar interests and personality and temperament, which also works great for them. Again, not to knock that kind of—whatever. But, when I’m reading, I much prefer a Chaos vs Order Muppet. B of all, exactly what you said. It was not escapism, and it was like pretty difficult at times to read. There were way more justifications for torture than I was expecting? I don’t think the book is pro-torture, but our hero dude had tortured people, and so our heroine sort of ends up twisting herself into knots to be like, that’s cool, I guess, it was for a good cause, and you got information that was ultimately right. I do not read romance to ask myself those sort of moral questions about why we have the Geneva Convention, and are there any cases when you should torture people?
GIN JENNY: No. There are none.
WHISKEY JENNY: No! To have a hero who has tortured is a tough situation to find yourself in. So all of that. And it’s just not my very particular brand of romance, as well. It’s a very high drama, there are no jokes—like, rightfully so! Cause they’re all in a terrible situation. I did not expect there to be jokes! But I just prefer it when it’s a more low-key situation, and there are jokes, and the characters—as we say often—like each other’s jokes. That is the kind of rapport that I really like reading about, and they have not that kind of rapport really, that we get to see. Because it’s not really a time for jokes! Everything is awful! But again, super happy it exists. I think you said something really interesting as we were walking over here about correcting a historical wrong in the romance genre. And I definitely agree with that, I’m really excited this exists to show a black woman and a white man having a relationship in the Civil War and it’s not a nonconsensual master/slave relationship, portrayed as—
GIN JENNY: Romantic?
WHISKEY JENNY: Cool? So, there are a lot of things I like about it, I like that it exists in the world.
GIN JENNY: You admire it more than you like it.
WHISKEY JENNY: Exactly. I do want to read a bit more—this is my first Alyssa Cole, and I would love to read more by her and see—maybe is this series not for me? Or does she have some other stuff that I could get into? Cause I have heard a lot about her before starting this, so I know it’s a big gap in my romance education not to have read Alyssa Cole before.
GIN JENNY: Yeah, I think you would like her contemporary series, the Reluctant Royals series, the first of which is A Princess in Theory, which I thought was quite good, and does have banter. There’s some drama but it’s much lower stakes in general. So I thought I would just briefly say what the premise of the book is?
ASHLEY: Yeah!
WHISKEY JENNY: Oh yeah!
GIN JENNY: So it is about a biracial woman named Marlie whose mother practices traditional medicine and when Marlie was thirteen, her white family member, her half-sister, came to get her from her mother and was like, oh, I want her to live with us, and have a good life, and I’ll take care of her, and her mother sent her away with this half-sister.
ASHLEY: And that is because the white father of both of these women has just died, and wanted her to be part of the family. Is that correct?
GIN JENNY: Correct. So that’s her background, and now it’s the Civil War, and she’s a spy for what’s called the Loyal League, which is people in the South spying on behalf of the Union. She has been bringing books to this prison camp run by the Confederacy, and that’s where she meets Ewan, who is our other protagonist, and he has had a past in military intelligence and essentially torturing people to get information. But he’s been in the prison camp for a while, and they meet there, and they have a similar taste in ancient Greeks. A lot of catastrophes occur, and they’re on the road a lot of the time.
WHISKEY JENNY: I enjoy that they did not have the same take on the ancient Greeks, actually. Like, I appreciated that they’re both into reading ancient Greek philosophy and whatnot, but I thought this was really cute: When she brought books to the prison, Marlie would write in the margins her thoughts, and Ewan would be like, Well I disagree vehemently with the logic here, but I love this woman, so, you can write whatever you want in any book.
GIN JENNY: Yeah, I loved that too. As I started to make my notes for this podcast, I was thinking, like, God, so much happens in this book, like there’s so many different parts. So what I like at the beginning, there’s this sort of little epistolary element where they’re tucking letters into the books that they’re reading and sending them back and forth, and she calls him Socrates.
WHISKEY JENNY: I liked that. I liked that the epistolary element sort of comes back later on, because he is trapped in her attic— That’s not a euphemism. [laughter] He’s like hiding out—
GIN JENNY: In her secret—again, not a euphemism, in her secret room.
WHISKEY JENNY: I’m sorry.
[laughter]WHISKEY JENNY: So sorry. So here’s my other problem with the romance is it started out—Like, I know intellectually that he’s into her brain, but a lot of his talk at the beginning, he’s just talking about how beautiful she is. And also I’m excited that a black woman is getting that sort of protagonist treatment, so that’s cool, but he is talking a lot about how he has to work really hard to control himself in front of her, and like, remember his principles, and just a lot of rhetoric around that sort of thing that I didn’t really like.
ASHLEY: I just didn’t really understand where that was coming from, because it seemed like sort of conservative Christian rhetoric about sex and desire, and I know that the Greeks, he obviously quotes the Greeks like a lot, and I know that was part of their philosophy, so maybe that’s—Maybe it’s just supposed to be that. But I didn’t really—I don’t feel like that’s so integral to the personality of someone growing up in Civil War times, that it would be like a religion. Maybe that’s just him being a weirdo.
WHISKEY JENNY: I know it’s different for a person in that day and age talking about it versus someone today, but like, today that sort of language is often very harmful to justify rape, basically, to be like, well, you were super hot, and I wanted you. And I know it’s a tough comparison to make. It was just so reminiscent of that, that it put me on edge.
GIN JENNY: Yeah, and I would say that I find that a lot in the romance genre, even among quite feminist writers such as Alyssa Cole. There’s a lot of this sort of, you’re so hot that I absolutely can’t resist you kind of stuff, and I have never liked that, and I wish that authors would do it less. I also thought as the romance was building, there was a lot of like, Oh, I want to bang you! Oh, but we mustn’t.
ASHLEY: And yeah, that’s kind of what I was saying. The like, you’re so hot that I can’t resist you didn’t bother me as much as the like, impulse to deny that. I just didn’t understand where that was coming from, and it seemed like the internal pushback against that desire on both of their parts— On hers it’s a little more understandable. Still, they both seem to have that oh but I can’t.
WHISKEY JENNY: And also I was like, well, somebody’s gotta make the first move here, or you’re never gonna bang! Who’s gonna—when’s the banging gonna start? As Robert asked on the plane!
GIN JENNY: Yeah, you had an issue with this, right?
ROBERT: It was more just me being obnoxious, which I know may come as a shock to you.
ASHLEY: Hard to believe.
GIN JENNY: More banging! Robert Repino!
ROBERT: Last night when I was wrapping the book up, I was occasionally shouting out, “Are they gonna fuck yet or what?”
WHISKEY JENNY: I will cosign that letter that you write. I wish there had been more banging. When they finally bang, it’s both of their first times, and I’m not really a first-time person, I guess.
GIN JENNY: Also they say my least favorite phrase, which is making love.
[heavy groaning]ROBERT: That’s the filthiest thing anyone can say.
GIN JENNY: I can’t cope with it. She’s like, oh I want you to make love with me. [laughter] And he’s like, oh, I’ve never made love before, and I just, I really hate that phrase so intensely.
WHISKEY JENNY: Yeah.
GIN JENNY: Genuinely, if I were about to bang someone and they said “let’s make love” I’d be like “Get out.”
ROBERT: Can I just say, this is where I’m curious about the research that was done for this book. There’s just such a huge gap in our understanding of how people viewed sexuality a hundred and fifty years ago. Even though his attitude toward her seems regressive and he says stupid things at times, I don’t know, I was sitting there wondering, like, yeah, but wasn’t that very common? The other question about it is like, it was so repressive, the idea of who could have sex with whom, when you could do it, whether it’s out of wedlock, if you’re two different races, obviously same gender couldn’t do—That sort of thing. But how often were people actually having sex then? They must have been doing it far more than they admitted. We have no idea! It’s such a huge gap in our understanding.
GIN JENNY: I would say that with historical romance novels, there’s a sort of strange but not in a bad way disconnect between things that the writers do that are meant to be historically accurate, and the things that the writers do to be like, this is how sex should be. So I guess I don’t worry too much about how much sex people, or like what kind of sex people were having during the Civil War, because to me that’s not super relevant to the thing romance authors are doing, because what they’re trying to do with the sex scenes, I think—and this sounds so douchey and didactic, but I think they’re trying to portray sex in a utopian way, like this is how sex between people can be.
ASHLEY: I think we’ve talked about—I didn’t coin this but there are historical romance novels that I refer to as anachronistically woke, and I feel like this kinda falls into that. I mean, obviously we get a lot of stuff that is not, and like you, Whiskey Jenny, I prefer the ones that are anachronistically woke in the sense that they’re escapist, and we just don’t have to— Even though they’re historical, we don’t actually have to deal with a lot of the stuff that was more unpleasant in real life.
WHISKEY JENNY: It’s very ostrich.
ASHLEY: It’s okay! I like those better too! And I know that a lot of it isn’t realistic, but I wouldn’t really want to read one that—
GIN JENNY: Yes!
ASHLEY: —probably was, even though I don’t really know what was— And I mean, who knows? Maybe people really were having— Probably not. [laughter] Jenny’s shaking her head. [laughter] Yeah, I agree.
GIN JENNY: I think people were probably having terrible, depressing, not-consensual sex.
WHISKEY JENNY: You think? Oh, well, I think there was a lot of nonconsensual sex, for sure.
GIN JENNY: Yeah. I don’t mean no one had fun sex.
WHISKEY JENNY: Yeah! Okay!
GIN JENNY: Obviously they did, but yeah, I just think—
ASHLEY: I mean, you’re probably right.
GIN JENNY: And I appreciate that about romance novels, because I don’t want to read—
ASHLEY: Exactly. I like these ones that are like a historical setting that is almost like fantasy. To me, all the duke and duchess ones, I think those are great, and the more fantastical the better. I don’t actually want to read about what it would have been like to live back then, almost in any sense except for maybe the clothes. I definitely don’t want to hear what anyone smelled like, for sure.
GIN JENNY: Or what they did with their poop.
ASHLEY: Yeah, exactly. Speaking of that, one of the things I loved about this, legitimately loved, was that she had a privy in her own house.
WHISKEY JENNY: Aw!
ASHLEY: I loved that? I love that he didn’t have to go outside to poop. I love that that was just like—none of that was a problem. They specifically were like, she has a privy in her room, it’s her own private privy, he can use it when he’s in her secret attic. Not a euphemism.
[laughter]GIN JENNY: It just sounds so dirty.
ASHLEY: I would never have thought of that if you guys hadn’t said that.
[laughter]WHISKEY JENNY: Sorry, sorry, sorry.
GIN JENNY: I also think with romance novels, there’s kind of a weaponization of historical accuracy against stories like this, to say, oh, historically accurate, you know, there couldn’t be an interracial relationship. So I do appreciate that although the story deals with that, it’s not treated as if a black woman cannot have a happy ending or cannot have a romance.
ASHLEY: Yeah!
WHISKEY JENNY: Yeah.
GIN JENNY: And whether that’s historically accurate or not, I don’t care? That’s the kind of story that I would enjoy reading.
ASHLEY: Same.
GIN JENNY: What did people think—because I think Alyssa Cole’s drawing a really explicit parallel between the Civil War and now? Which is another reason that it really did not feel as escapist as some romance novels do. What’d you guys think about that?
ROBERT: I kind of assumed that the Sarah character represents the—
GIN JENNY: The 53%?
ROBERT: Or the nominally sensitive person who can’t really make a decision when it actually counts.
GIN JENNY: Yeah. Sarah is Marlie’s white half-sister, and there’s a scene midway through the book where Sarah’s brother’s wife is saying, like, she shouldn’t be here, she’s black, she shouldn’t have these rights or whatever, and Sarah says, well, her soul is white. It was so awful, and I—gosh. I really liked that the book really got into Marlie’s complicated feelings about Sarah, because Sarah has really provided for her and in the context of a white southern woman in this period has been really comparatively great. But what counts as good for Sarah is so, still, massively inadequate for what Marlie needs, and also what like, the country needs. I just thought that whole conflict for Marlie, because she has really strong feelings for Sarah, who she’s lived with and who has provided for her since she was a teenager. I like that the book didn’t elide either side of that. It didn’t say like, her love doesn’t count, and it also doesn’t say that her feelings of exclusion don’t count. Those are both two things that were important in Marlie’s life.
ASHLEY: I feel like it handled that really nicely, and it was a complicated relationship that was not perfect and at times very very hurtful to Marlie in a way that she was right to be hurt by.
GIN JENNY: I know we were just saying that there’s not that many jokes in this book, rightly, but there was one moment where Marlie was talking to Ewan about her relationship with Sarah, and Ewan says, “Well, you know, if you haven’t tried to secede from her in all of these years, you’re doing better than our country.” [laughter]
ASHLEY: That made me laugh.
WHISKEY JENNY: Speaking of parallels, I just did not know what to make of the Stephen character. I don’t know what he was doing for the book, a of all, and I don’t know—was I supposed to draw a modern-day parallel to him, like what group he would represent. He does absolutely nothing in this like, well, my wife is terrible, I can’t do anything about that, and it’s like: Yeah! Yeah you can!
GIN JENNY: I believe he’s supposed to represent white men.
WHISKEY JENNY: Is he?
GIN JENNY: Sorry, Robert.
ROBERT: Yeah, well.
WHISKEY JENNY: Is he?
GIN JENNY: Yes.
WHISKEY JENNY: Well then who’s Cahill?
GIN JENNY: Nazis. Cahill is Nazis.
WHISKEY JENNY: Oh, Cahill’s Nazis. Ohhhhhhh. I thought Cahill was white men.
[laughter]ASHLEY: That was dark!
ROBERT: I need to leave!
WHISKEY JENNY: Sorry! I’m sorry, I’m sorry! [laughter]
GIN JENNY: Cahill’s a character who works for the Confederacy? What’s his job?
WHISKEY JENNY: Yeah, he works for the governor of North Carolina to track down deserters.
ASHLEY: The Home Guard.
WHISKEY JENNY: Sorry, sorry, the Home Guard, to track down deserters and the resistance.
ASHLEY: I think his group of bad guys is the Home Guard.
WHISKEY JENNY: And also our hero-guy is just like, really obsessed with him. To the point that I was like, I’m worried that all the fic writers are gonna write fic about that. Like, he was really obsessed with him! I guess he is a terrible Nazi.
ROBERT: About the Cahill character, though, one thing that may or may not be parallel is the fact that we find out later that—or actually we find out pretty early that Cahill’s background is that he was tortured by Ewan in a prison camp. And the book never says that maybe this is the reason why Cahill’s such an asshole.
GIN JENNY: I don’t think it is! I think he was an asshole separately.
ASHLEY: You get the feeling that he already was.
ROBERT: He already was, you’re right, and I wanna emphasize that for listeners. You know, it is interesting that Ewan’s past comes back to haunt him in this form.
GIN JENNY: Like I said, I thought that Marlie’s emotional conflict was pretty well depicted, like not just—her past with her mother, her past with her half-sister, how she feels about her place in the world. I thought that was all really good. I felt like Ewan’s emotional conflict worked a little less well for me. There’s this moment in the story where he says, you know, suddenly all the things that had always been wrong with me were the best things about me, talking about becoming a torturer. I didn’t really know what we were supposed to think those elements were. What were we supposed to think he was like?
WHISKEY JENNY: I think it was like his lack of outward emotion.
GIN JENNY: Okay.
ROBERT: I think they specified lack of empathy.
WHISKEY JENNY: Of empathy. Okay.
ROBERT: Yeah.
GIN JENNY: I think you’re right, but I didn’t really see, when he would talk about his childhood, I didn’t really see anything from his childhood that made me think, oh yeah, lack of empathy is a really notable trait.
ASHLEY: But I agree with you that that is one specific thing that I don’t see in any part of his past, is lack of empathy. In fact it seems like what he’s learned to do is be maybe even more sensitive to other people and to his environment in particular, because his dad was an alcoholic and then his mom was not an enabler, but just learned to cope with it. Because he was an angry alcoholic, and so she would just shut everything down, and then he would also get angry because Ewan’s younger sister was the product of an assault, and—Horrible childhood, but again, Ewan seems to have coped with it by learning to be extra-sensitive.
GIN JENNY: But also, going back to his past as a torturer, that’s kind of a central conflict in the book, where he’s like, oh, am I a bad person for being a torturer, whatever. And he talks to Marlie about it and she’s like, maybe you’re not a bad person! He’s like, yeah, maybe I’m not a bad person. I’ll have to think about it. And that’s kind of the end of that whole conflict? Number one, maybe you shouldn’t torture people. That’s not okay. But b of all, it’s not really dealt with. Marlie’s just like, maybe it’s okay for you to do that.
WHISKEY JENNY: Yes!
GIN JENNY: And he’s like, yeah, maybe so. And then that’s kind of it for that conflict which has up until then been really central to his character.
WHISKEY JENNY: Yeah. I was gonna say, maybe if they had dealt with it, I would’ve not felt quite so upset about—
ASHLEY: So a big reveal that comes—
WHISKEY JENNY: —the torture.
ASHLEY: —quite late in the book, too, the reveal of his past to Marlie. We know about it, but that’s a big reveal to her quite late in the book. This doesn’t leave very much time for them to deal with it at all. He stews about it for a long time. She’s upset. Then they—it kind of just—it’s defused very quickly.
ROBERT: If I remember correctly from that conversation, he says in that conversation that he didn’t feel anything, and I was left with the impression that he’s saying that he as a person hasn’t really changed that much from this whole experience, except maybe now that he loves her? Did I not remember that correctly? Is that how you interpreted it?
GIN JENNY: No, I mean I thought that the situation was that he was troubled by not having accessed the emotions that he thought would naturally arise from doing this violence against other humans.
ASHLEY: It does seem like the distinction that the book tries to make between him and Cahill, because that’s what he was trying to do, is say, what if I’m like him? And it seems like the thing that he and Marlie come up with is that Cahill enjoys inflicting pain, and Ewan does not, so therefore they’re not the same. Therefore Ewan is okay and it’s fine for them to get together.
WHISKEY JENNY: Right.
GIN JENNY: Well, and I do also think the book was trying to make the distinction that doing the same action in the cause of justice versus the cause of injustice are morally different. And I agree that that’s true! Unless the action is torture, in which case, not really!
WHISKEY JENNY: I know!
ASHLEY: Still bad!
WHISKEY JENNY: It’s still torture! And I think the other thing is, I feel like in romance novels often when there’s this sort of like, internal struggle, often in the male character, I feel like, to be like, oh well I’m not worthy of this angel who’s come before me. Like, we as the reader are supposed to be like, oh honey, yes you are, you’re fine, we all love you!
ASHLEY: And it’s so romantic that he feels this way!
WHISKEY JENNY: Look at this beautiful, troubled—I’m sorry—tortured soul.
[laughter]WHISKEY JENNY: But I feel like that is a construct that I’ve read often before, and to have it applied here to someone who is a literal torturer was where I feel like I was supposed to, as a reader, be like, you’re overreacting! You’re fine! You’re still a good person, just you tortured a couple of people, that’s not a sentence I was saying in my brain.
ASHLEY: The other sort of romance construct that I—and this is one that I just don’t like in general, and especially didn’t like here, is the idea that—I think at one point, Marlie’s describing the things that Cahill has said to her, and he has this like, violent response. He’s just like, well, if he ever touches you, I’ll kill him. And she of course knows—even though she doesn’t know that he’s done anything like that and his violent past—she knows that like, oh, he could actually do that, he actually means that, and he knows the exact way. She’s supposed to be into that. Throughout the book it’s like, well, he’s a violent person, but he would never hurt her. And it’s like, having violent thoughts and having trouble controlling his violent impulses towards everyone else but her. At one point he even says, if he ever hurts you, I’ll kill him. And then she kind of looks at him in alarm, and he realizes offering to do violence for someone is not a way to reassure a woman that she’s safe with you. So at least Alyssa Cole’s acknowledging that that’s maybe not a great impulse, but I also don’t feel like the book really did anything to tone that down at all. There’s a section later in the book where Cahill is, in fact, assaulting her, in a very upsetting way, and Ewan is the one that breaks it up. I just could do without that.
WHISKEY JENNY: It’s problematic to like— It’s interesting you framed it that way, though, because often when characters are written that way, I often really like them. For example, Logan in Veronica Mars, I feel like is a prime example of this. And I’m like, aw, look at him doing violence on behalf of Veronica! And I know it’s problematic, I get it. I know it’s bad. That just did not come across for me with this character. I don’t know what the difference is.
GIN JENNY: I think that one element would have to be that in certain circumstances, you’re asked to expend some element of moral disbelief?
WHISKEY JENNY: Mm-hm.
GIN JENNY: And I think it’s a challenge for romance novels because to some extent they want to make it real life morals.
WHISKEY JENNY: And I feel like this book in particular—especially because, as we’ve talked about, it’s drawing distinct parallels between this stuff—
ASHLEY: And thinking about things that are happening today, in the context of this book, yeah.
GIN JENNY: Yeah, no, exactly. But I think that a challenge arises when the tropes of romance novels crash into that effort to make it related to real life beliefs, and I think that the more the author makes it connected to our own reality, the harder it can be to suspend some of that—like you said, to suspend that same moral disbelief and say, yeah, he wants to kill people for her, and that’s romantic.
WHISKEY JENNY: And when Logan does it, it is, right? We all agree?
ASHLEY: In other romance novels, it is, to some extent. It’s still a trope that I don’t love, but I am not gonna claim that I have—that every time I have ever read it, I have been like, Ugh! I don’t like this! This is not romantic at all!
GIN JENNY: I think that there’s some media where murder itself is less morally fraught. Cause I was thinking of Damon from The Vampire Diaries.
ASHLEY: Aw.
WHISKEY JENNY: Another of my favorites! Like, I know that I have a problematic type. [laughter]
GIN JENNY: So 75% of the people at this table love Damon from The Vampire Diaries.
ASHLEY: 25% just haven’t met him yet.
ROBERT: Right.
GIN JENNY: But I think that it involves suspending your own morality, and participating in the fictional morality, and I think that because A Hope Divided asks you to not suspend your own morality, and kind of really focuses on making you not suspend your own morality, it’s harder to buy into some of these tropes.
ASHLEY: That’s a really good point.
WHISKEY JENNY: I agree. That’s a really great point.
ASHLEY: That was my biggest problem with the book, was the torture aspect, and how quickly they dispense with it, and how we’re supposed to find it romantic. When he’s like barely met her, he’s like, but I’m gonna do a murder, and she’s like, yeah, maybe we don’t—don’t do that. And even that is, I think, more of a product of the way her character has been developed, and not the author saying it’s bad for this guy to do a murder on her behalf. Again, he ends up doing one! So.
GIN JENNY: Romance as a genre often will ask you to say, like, participate in these tropes of the genre in some ways, but in other ways, retain your own morals, and we’re gonna talk about them in interesting ways.
ASHLEY: We’ve touched on these things already, but I just want to reiterate how much I love the tropes of him being hidden in her attic. I love that so much.
GIN JENNY, giggling: I’m sorry.
WHISKEY JENNY: HEY-OOOOOOOOOO!
[laughter]GIN JENNY: I’m so sorry that I keep giggling.
ASHLEY: You guys! [laughter]
ROBERT: I didn’t laugh. This is serious business.
ASHLEY: I legitimately—I actually really love that idea though. I love the idea of having to hide someone—
GIN JENNY: Totally.
ASHLEY: And like, having it be slightly improper. I love that so much.
GIN JENNY: I also liked it that in a book about the Civil War, she’s not the one who has to hide in the secret room.
WHISKEY JENNY: Right?? What a great choice!
GIN JENNY: I really did appreciate that, because it reminded me, and I think on purpose, probably, of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, by Harriet Jacobs. But I liked it that she was the one who’s supporting him, and he was the one who was hiding.
ASHLEY: I also like that there’s no point at which his book-learning, his scholarly pursuits in any way are superior to hers.
GIN JENNY: Yes!
ASHLEY: I think there was like a page break on my Kindle at the part where they’re looking at all of her apparatus—her stills, her prized possessions—and he’s like looking at the way it’s all laid out, and I don’t think he has a lot, or maybe any, scientific knowledge. But he’s like looking at the way her still is set up and coming up with notes about the way her process could be improved, and I was like, oh hell no. Then I turned the page and it was like, but then he realized after talking to her that everything he suggested, she’d already thought of.
WHISKEY JENNY: I also—speaking of innuendo, there’s one moment—I really liked all the flirting over the science, I thought that was really cute.
ASHLEY: That was top-notch.
WHISKEY JENNY: There was one moment where he says, Your alembic is quite dot dot dot smooth—
[laughter]ASHLEY: That was really funny.
WHISKEY JENNY: —and sturdy.
[laughter]WHISKEY JENNY: I really enjoyed that. I liked all of her scientific leanings, I thought that was really fun, and not often do you get to read about a character’s— I really, really thought that the relationship with her between science and her mother’s teachings was a really, really interesting one, and I really wanted that to be explored a little bit more.
GIN JENNY: Yeah, there’s a scene where he’s very attracted to her but he’s like, no I mustn’t, so to push her away, he says something snotty about her mother’s medicinal techniques, and later on, she’s like, you know, there’s no difference really between your conception of science and what my mother does. It’s just about who has authority. And I appreciated them making that point! That sort of Western quote unquote empirical science knowledge isn’t the only kind of way to know things and accomplish things.
WHISKEY JENNY: I totally agree. I think the character has a lot more inner conflict about that, though, than that statement she made to Ewan would suggest. We see a little bit of evidence of it, and I just wanted to explore it more, because I think that was a— It’s like a fascinating character conflict.
ASHLEY: I like the idea that that can coexist with Western medicine, and that she can sort of make—and it seems like she has made them work together, in a really interesting way.
GIN JENNY: Yeah! Which I really liked!
ASHLEY: It was really great.
ROBERT: I was actually curious—I thought there was going to be a scene where something that he would regard as superstition would actually be tested, and would work. So it wasn’t just something that someone had asserted, this just works, and we know it does. But that being said, the scenes, like you said, where they’re flirting over the science, I thought were very well done because they were grounded. I think there’s a lot of—in any book that tries to develop quickly a romance between people, I think the temptation on the part of the writer is to just summarize things and focus exclusively on how much the characters feel about what’s happening. Like, oh, they were so happy doing this. Whereas this was grounded in what they were actually doing, and letting that speak for itself as opposed to just being like, and they were happy, they were happy, they started to like each other, that sort of thing. It was very well done.
GIN JENNY: I thought it was too, and I think even from the first time that we see them together, when they’re talking about books. I thought it did a pretty good job of establishing them as being interested in each other before the high stakes of Civil War took over and kind of forced them into proximity. I also—I’ve noticed this as a trend in romance novels I’ve been reading recently where— So oftentimes, I mean, I have a separate problem with treating penetrative intercourse as the be-all and end-all of sex.
WHISKEY JENNY: Like the one true intercourse?
GIN JENNY: Yeah. But often in romance novels, they’ll be sort of, you know, like, finger and mouth stuff—
[laughter]GIN JENNY: And then they’ll have intercourse and they’ll be like, wow, we’re really united now. Which is, yeah, again, a broader problem that I have with the way the romance genre portrays sex.
WHISKEY JENNY: And the world, really.
GIN JENNY: God. And the world. So much. Yeah. But a trend that I’ve noticed recently is in the kind of earlier phases, it’ll be more sex scenes where only the lady gets to come.
ASHLEY: Woooo!
WHISKEY JENNY: Yeeeeeeeeah!
[laughter]ROBERT: Whaaaaaat?
[laughter]GIN JENNY: And part of me is like, you know what, like, during sex, not always does every single party come—
ASHLEY: Every single party, ahahaha.
WHISKEY JENNY: You don’t know how many people are there!
ASHLEY: Go on! [laughter] I’m listening.
GIN JENNY: In one way I’m in favor of portraying that, but it does feel a little weird to have a lot of sex scenes, and I have noticed this more often, where reciprocity doesn’t seem to be a concern of the characters. Not from a realism perspective, because romance novels can do whatever in terms of realism. But it’s just a—I don’t know! It’s just something I’ve noticed recently.
WHISKEY JENNY: I think for me that’s part of the escapism of the genre. For me it’s nice to see it not being an issue.
GIN JENNY: Me too. I think just because I’ve seen it now several times, I’m like, I’m like—
WHISKEY JENNY: It’s a trend.
GIN JENNY: Are we doing this now, romance genre? Apparently we are.
WHISKEY JENNY: The other real romance novelly thing this book did—
[laughter]WHISKEY JENNY: Our protagonist has a real protagonist problem, you guys. She has two different-colored eyes.
GIN JENNY: Oh my God.
ASHLEY: I wondered if we were gonna talk about that!
WHISKEY JENNY: Oh, we’re gonna talk about it.
ASHLEY: That cracked me up.
WHISKEY JENNY: She has two different-colored eyes! You know, a real imperfection, I think we can all agree, and it makes her hideous.
ASHLEY: And what makes the male protagonist special is that he—
WHISKEY JENNY: Only he!
ASHLEY: –thinks it’s beautiful.
WHISKEY JENNY: Sees the beauty of that!
ASHLEY: No one else does!
GIN JENNY: I will say that I think that to my relief, the book doesn’t spend a lot of time on Marlie thinking, God, I’m disgusting for having two different colored eyes. So other people are like, oh, you’re a witch? But she herself doesn’t seem to have a lot of internalized—
ASHLEY: That’s a good point.
WHISKEY JENNY: I feel like the book didn’t spend time on it, but we get a couple of moments where she does actually. And I also thought if it is symbolism for her biracial heritage, I was like, this is a little—
GIN JENNY: That’s not great.
ASHLEY: I actually was fine with it, and I totally agree with you, I thought that was hilarious. We have talked independently about that trope of romance, of like, the female protagonist having a quote-unquote perfection that of course is like super hot, but in the book, only the male protagonist is—
WHISKEY JENNY: Able to appreciate it.
ASHLEY: Able to appreciate it, exactly. I liked in the context of this book that the people seeing that and thinking that she was a witch also seemed to have to do with her being biracial.
GIN JENNY: Sure.
ASHLEY: That, I was fine with, because it was like, the total package. I don’t know. I bought that as a reaction.
WHISKEY JENNY: Sure. I actually—so at the very end, there’s a moment where they’re camping out with the skulkers—
ASHLEY: Deserters.
WHISKEY JENNY: Yes, who have coalesced into this guerrilla force. She wakes up from a dream in French that is a warning, and the guy next to her starts getting his gun and waking everyone else up, and she’s like, What are you doing? And he says, when someone who has those eyes starts awake as if a ghost has just whispered in your ear, like, look out, like, I’mma pay attention. And he was correct, it was a warning, danger was afoot. I don’t know, I really liked that, and really liked that hint that the supernatural, like you said, was there, and I guess I do like that piece of the eyes. Fine.
[laughter]ASHLEY: I liked that scene a lot too.
GIN JENNY: So we’ve talked a bunch about how this worked as a romance novel. How do people feel liked it worked as a historical fiction novel? Because Alyssa Cole says in her author note she wanted to talk about people who resisted the horrible slave-owning regime in the South, which I really appreciated, because I do feel that even though I am a liberal living in the South, that’s kind of an area that I don’t really get very often about the Civil War.
ASHLEY: Along the lines of what you’re saying, I liked the degrees of sympathy or lack thereof within these different communities that are supposed to be so polarized, or that are sometimes portrayed as like—
GIN JENNY: A monolith.
ASHLEY: Yeah, exactly, as monolithic, and there were many degrees within those. So I enjoyed that a lot, that Stephen has that house in Philadelphia that he could go to, but his wife doesn’t want to because that’s where—
GIN JENNY: She’s a dick. She’s the worst.
ASHLEY: She’s a dick, and that’s where liberal people live, or whatever it is that she calls them. So she doesn’t want to go up there, but then like, Sarah, as we’ve talked about, sees herself as more sympathetic to the Union cause, but has to be under cover about that, but even with that, still saying horrible things.
GIN JENNY: Yeah! Still super racist!
ASHLEY: Yeah, she’s very racist and says some very hurtful things, totally unconsciously, to Marlie. She’s not trying to be hurtful. She’s trying to be inclusive and doesn’t even understand that she’s being hurtful in the first place, so I liked the degrees of that. I feel like that’s something that doesn’t get addressed in Civil War—at least in the Civil War stuff that I’ve read.
WHISKEY JENNY: To your point, I feel like there was an attempt to include Native people in the narrative as well, a bit, and I think that just goes to all the history we hear is such a monolith, as you say, and it is a lot more nuanced. I also appreciated the Hattie character, who’s a poor white woman, and says like, well, I don’t fit into Cahill’s ideal of a rich white Southern belle.
ROBERT: I think this is tapping into a resource that we need to be exploring more. I’m really stunned that there just haven’t been more mainstream stories along these lines. I mean, maybe I shouldn’t be, because Hollywood is in a lot of ways racist, and isn’t really seeking out these sort of things, so—and the publishing industry isn’t seeking them out enough.
GIN JENNY: Very racist also, the publishing industry that we’re in.
ROBERT: Yeah, that I work in. But to me, this genre of Civil War–era drama and even action, to me, is far more interesting than the Western, which has been the traditional American story for a hundred years or so. This idea of, you know, we are taking over this land, there are people who are resisting, they are automatically the bad guys. And yeah, there’s some, some of the guys taking over the West are bank robbers, and then the sheriffs have to take care of them, but overall, there’s this inevitability of us seizing everything.
GIN JENNY: Yeah!
ROBERT: This genre, I think, allows for so much more nuance, like you were saying. I know we keep saying the word nuance, but allows for so many different perspectives on things that just haven’t been explored. I remember reading Beloved for the first time. There’s an escape sequence, and I’m just like, how are there not more—not just very highbrow novels about it, but why isn’t there a dumb action movie? I want a John Wick that takes place—I thought that when Django Unchained came out, that would bring out some more of these sorts of things. And I know that movie’s got a lot of issues, I get it, but I just thought that there could be more of those types of stories. Also, another thing just to bring up, just talking about the history of this, the fact that there were so many different examples of people who were fed up with the Confederacy while living in the South, and—It’s an interesting thing about the Civil War that during the Civil War, the southern government was basically all about winning the war, obviously. There’s an argument that they drafted too many people, when they should’ve actually had people on the home front. Country still needs to work while you’re waging war! Meanwhile, the Union was—I think during this time, they passed the Homestead Act, I think they purchased Alaska. Basically they were planning for what America was going to look like after the war. So they were actually a functioning government that was, for all the issues they had, and obviously I’m not saying they were perfect, but they were actually planning to make the country work after this. I think the stuff that we see in this book is exploring just the dysfunction of the Confederacy, how it just couldn’t—on top of, you know, running this horrible institution that never should have happened, it just wasn’t working in other ways, too. It was interesting to see that come to life in this story.
WHISKEY JENNY: I also thought it was interesting, there’s a line—There’s the deserters, who’ve sort of coalesced into a guerrilla group, and then there’s a line that that group has been doing a lot of like raiding and pillaging and not-great things throughout the town. And I just thought that was—like things are not always clear-cut, and the people who are deserting the army for whatever reason and fighting for the Union against the Confederacy were also—
GIN JENNY: Yeah, also capable of doing war crimes. Oh, just like—
WHISKEY JENNY: The hero! That we have to get on board with, and I—I just never did.
ROBERT: Also, just, Melody and Cahill eventually get some explanation for why they’re such assholes. Not that—well, Cahill was tortured, and Melody is mad that her husband cheated on her?
WHISKEY JENNY: No. No!
ROBERT: No, wait, did I mess that up?
WHISKEY JENNY: No! That was pre-her. She’s mad that her husband, spoiler, actually fathered Marlie. Now they are trying to have children, and he cannot, so she’s pissed.
ROBERT: And let me emphasize, neither of those things are excuses for their asshole behavior. But yeah, okay, maybe I misinterpreted the timeline there.
WHISKEY JENNY: I didn’t love that that was portrayed as a relationship, between Stephen and Marlie’s mother.
GIN JENNY: Yeah. Fair.
ASHLEY: Yeah, that was actually one of my other big concerns.
GIN JENNY: Well, I—gosh. I want to say this carefully. Most of the time, sexual relationships between slaves and the people who quote-unquote owned them were incredibly non-consensual, and I was interested in the way the book portrayed the relationship between Marlie’s mother and Stephen as being sort of something that—I was interested in the parallels between Marlie’s relationship with Ewan, a white guy who in this society has more power than she does. And I was interested in the parallels between that relationship and her mother’s relationship with Stephen, and how her mother thought that there could be some kind of equality within the relationship, as kind of human to human, and how she turned out to be wrong. And I thought that was an interesting parallel to the Marlie/Ewan relationship, because, yeah, because again, they’re just in such different societal positions of power, and the power that Ewan has over Marlie pretty much at every moment as a white guy—Yeah. I mean, I was interested in the book complicating that a little bit, while making it clear that Stephen is a trash person who took advantage.
WHISKEY JENNY: Yes. No, it does.
GIN JENNY: But I also think that it makes it clear that Marlie’s mother had some agency in the situation, and was making choices believing that she—you know what I mean? But that ultimately, Stephen had the power over what happened in that relationship.
WHISKEY JENNY: Yeah, sure.
ASHLEY: And I agree with everything you just said. I think the thing about it that was troubling to me, just in the context of the book, was how easily Marlie’s conflict with comparing her own relationship with Ewan to her mother’s relationship to Stephen, and trying to figure out how she could know that this was gonna be different in some way. I was like, yeah, I don’t know how you would know! It kind of seems like there isn’t a way to know that.
GIN JENNY: Yes!
ASHLEY: And, I mean, I guess you don’t have to know that to go into a relationship, but that seemed very troubling to her, rightly so, and I didn’t—it didn’t feel like we ever got any resolution on if or how she overcame that feeling of like, never being able to trust that what they had was real enough to build a relationship on.
WHISKEY JENNY: I think if it is trying to complicate that relationship between Stephen and Marlie’s mother in the way that you’re saying, that’s a tough thing to do in this space, also, in like, the page count that this book was allotted, as well. It’s a very difficult endeavor, and I’m not sure it quite cleared the hurdle, simply because there was no room for it to in this book. I would be interested to delve more deeply in that. One other thing that I did not super love is the way that Ewan—the way he talks about his father’s suicide was pretty difficult.
GIN JENNY: Yep!
WHISKEY JENNY: He has a line where he essentially says “if I drove him to it, great.”
GIN JENNY: Yeah, not good.
WHISKEY JENNY: It was not good, and also it sort of—There’s only a couple lines here and there addressing it, and again, there’s just really not the space, I think, to talk about these incredibly complex issues that you have brought up, of: Of course you would feel grateful that your abusive person in your life is no longer abusing you. By what means, though? That’s a tough question that I feel like we didn’t really get to talk about, but the specter of it is raised by those couple of lines, and I’m like, wait, I’m sorry, what?
GIN JENNY: Yeah.
WHISKEY JENNY: What?
GIN JENNY: No, I thought the same. We were talking earlier about things that are our particular bugbears of problematic elements in books, and yes, I overall do wish that books were more measured and thoughtful about the ways that they talk about and depict suicide. Okay, I have a question now, for the Alyssa Cole slash romance newbies amongst us.
WHISKEY JENNY: Oh. That’s for you and me, Robert.
ROBERT: I guess so.
WHISKEY JENNY: I didn’t realize.
GIN JENNY: Would you read another Alyssa Cole novel, or a romance novel?
ROBERT: I would do both. Before I came on this, I remember coming across some conversation talking about how depressing so much fiction is, and how romance is the one genre that actually talks about hope. And how important that is! Even those novels that may not be—well, for all the things we could nitpick, or whatever, I think that is something that is not just escapist. It’s something that serves real value in literature, and I think other genres are actually trying to play catch-up. So I’ve been interested in reading some more. I need to educate myself.
GIN JENNY: I got you, boo! I have so many recommendations.
WHISKEY JENNY: Are there any kinds that you’re particularly interested in?
ROBERT: I think mostly it would be like this, like a historical one.
WHISKEY JENNY: Historical.
GIN JENNY: What are your views on sci-fi romance, as a sci-fi writer yourself?
ROBERT: I’m open to it! Hey, sky’s the limit. I’m open to a lot of things.
WHISKEY JENNY: Navy SEALs?
ROBERT: I could do Navy SEALs.
ASHLEY: Werewolf SWAT?
ROBERT: Look, as long as they’re sexy, as long as the word apex appears in it—
WHISKEY JENNY: Did the word apex appear in this book?
ROBERT: Several times.
ASHLEY: So many times.
WHISKEY JENNY: Oh, I missed that!
ROBERT: I’ve never heard that in a sex scene.
WHISKEY JENNY: I probably skipped over that because what I hate is when it’s like metaphorically sexual and it’s like, the wave crashing, and you’re like: Come on.
GIN JENNY: I also have a real problem with using the word her sex, his sex.
ASHLEY: Eeeeeeeuuuuuuuuueeeeuuurgh.
WHISKEY JENNY: And you mean, to mean, like, parts of the anatomy.
ASHLEY: Sex organs.
GIN JENNY: Yeah, to mean sex organs. It really really really bothers me.
ASHLEY: It’s icky.
GIN JENNY: This book does that, and I just, God, I hate it so much, and I can’t really pinpoint why.
ASHLEY: She also feels the pleasure and/or orgasm in her womb, which I was like—
ROBERT: I’d call 911.
ASHLEY: Exactly! I don’t think that’s a thing! One of the times it’s like, arousal is happening in her womb.
GIN JENNY: Yes. I’m really—this is why I really wish that romance novels had AO3-style tags, so if there was like a virginity kink tag, I could just skip it.
ASHLEY: Totally, totally.
WHISKEY JENNY: I’m not into it!
GIN JENNY: I’m not into it.
ROBERT: Wait, did Jenny answer the question?
WHISKEY JENNY: I absolutely would read some more Alyssa Cole.
GIN JENNY: I actually really loved A Prince on Paper, I’m not just saying that because it involves fictional Lesotho, a country that I already really like. It’s a really fun book. I think the postapocalyptic ones are quite good, for the reasons that Robert mentioned, which is that they have a focus on hope and—
ASHLEY: They’re good stories! There were a lot of story elements that I was not expecting, and I remember really thinking— Those were very revelatory to me as a romance noob, because—I actually was thinking a lot about this recently, about how I wrote this very strange romance novella about the zombie apocalypse.
GIN JENNY: Nice.
ASHLEY: And it really came from an almost like fanfic kind of impulse, of just, this is a world that I fantasize about, and I want to write it so I can live in it all the time.
GIN JENNY: Sure!
ASHLEY: It was very weird! And I was just like, what is wrong with me, why am I obsessed with writing this zombie apocalypse romance?
GIN JENNY: Nothing is wrong with you.
ASHLEY: Thank you. I appreciate that. And it also turned into a horror story, which I was not expecting, but then I was like, This is so fun, oh my God. Then I found out that Alyssa Cole had already written an entire trilogy of postapocalyptic romances, where the apocalypse is an element in bringing people together, which is the whole reason I wrote this zombie apocalypse romance slash horror story. It really blew my mind that people were writing stuff that was so imaginative, so they’re very special to me.
GIN JENNY: Awwww.
WHISKEY JENNY: Great. Robert, can I ask you another question?
ROBERT: That’s fine.
WHISKEY JENNY: Was there anything, reading this book, that raised any flags, that you were like, well that’s weird, but you later found out it was a convention of the genre?
ROBERT: There wasn’t anything where I said, oh, this is weird, why isn’t it working, and then later I was like, oh, that must be a romance trope. Although one thing that made me think a lot was the situation of having one character either convalescing or in some other vulnerable position and that’s when the other character gets to know them.
[laughter]WHISKEY JENNY: Yes.
ROBERT: The novel that came to mind for me isn’t—
WHISKEY JENNY: Misery?
ROBERT: —technically a romance novel, but—
WHISKEY JENNY: Misery?
[laughter]ROBERT: The novel that came to mind for me is A Farewell to Arms, you know, cause that has a character who is recovering from injuries in World War I, and in the end, he falls in love with his nurse.
ASHLEY: Dick injuries.
[laughter]GIN JENNY: No, you’re thinking of, um—
ASHLEY: Sun Also Rises.
GIN JENNY: Sun Also Rises.
ASHLEY: Does he not have dick injuries in A Farewell to Arms too?
ROBERT: I do not recall any—it probably refers to his sex, for all I know.
GIN JENNY: Disgusting.
WHISKEY JENNY: Sex injuries.
[laughter]GIN JENNY: GET OUT.
ROBERT: I don’t know. Is that something that you come across—is that—Okay, because you’re all giggling the whole time I’m trying to—
WHISKEY JENNY: Yes. That is absolutely a thing that happens all the time.
ROBERT: All the time, okay.
WHISKEY JENNY: Not all the time, not always.
ROBERT: But there’s very often a character in a very very vulnerable situation where they’re almost at the whim of the other character?
WHISKEY JENNY: I would say—
ROBERT: Does it seem that way?
WHISKEY JENNY: Often there are two characters who circumstances force to be in close contact or close discussion. Whether it’s like, someone’s vulnerable to another one is, I would say doesn’t happen as much. But that, for reasons, they have to keep interacting, is very nearly always the case.
GIN JENNY: The reason that I was giggling is that there’s sort of a whole genre of fanfic called Hurt/Comfort—
ASHLEY, rapturously: Yes.
GIN JENNY: Yeah, there’s kind of a whole genre of: Someone is injured, someone else is tending to them.
ROBERT: Right.
WHISKEY JENNY: Is—I’m so sorry. Is that what that tag means?
GIN JENNY: Yep!
WHISKEY JENNY: Well this is new information. I thought it meant that the person was hurting them and then comforting them—
ASHLEY: Oh no no no no no.
WHISKEY JENNY: And I was like, well, I don’t want to read that! No!
[laughter]WHISKEY JENNY: I thought it was the same person doing both, I guess.
ROBERT: Wow. That—man, this got dark.
WHISKEY JENNY: So this is helpful that it’s not correct.
ASHLEY: Can I tell you guys where some of my first hurt/comfort fanfic that I read came from?
GIN JENNY: GOD, yes.
ASHLEY: And I wanna preface this by saying, this arose, because I don’t think this is a particularly common or populous fandom, but there’s a lot of Die Hard fic specifically about—you’re making a face, correctly so—
GIN JENNY: I am, too.
ASHLEY: —about Bruce Willis’s character and the Justin Long character in Live Free or Die Hard.
GIN JENNY: Newp!
ASHLEY: —in which the Justin Long character in the actual movie is dating his daughter.
GIN JENNY: So gross! So weird! I don’t care for it!
ASHLEY: So it is, it’s super weird, and Kay even was like, I don’t actually understand why there’s so much fic about these two guys, this is super strange, but here it is. And a lot of it is one of them being injured and the other one having to take care of them. Just a lot of hurt/comfort fic about them, and like, convalescing, and actually, I liked it! Because one of them is about recovering from a knee injury, and I was like, oh, this is a thing I recently did, I relate very much. In one of them, they’re even going to physical therapy together, and it was like, a lot of things that I recently experienced, so I enjoyed that a lot.
WHISKEY JENNY: Even if it’s not hurt/comfort, if it’s not convalescence, I think—
GIN JENNY: Yes, forced proximity.
ROBERT: Being forced—
WHISKEY JENNY: Yeah, forced proximity is an extreme trope.
ROBERT: I was actually just about to say something about that, which is one thing I did appreciate about this book was that she wasn’t just being forced into the situation. She does choose to be there; she chooses to escape with him. A lot of the stuff does come from her making decisions, as opposed to her just being lumped in with him.
WHISKEY JENNY: And she chooses to shelter him.
ROBERT: Right.
GIN JENNY: Which I appreciate, because I think, when I’ve read sort of older romance novels, there’s been a lot more—and I think this is just a function of where society is in terms of accepting female sexuality—but like older romance novels use a lot more of like, well, I have to have sex with him. Whereas in—Whiskey Jenny’s making quite a face. Whereas in more contemporary romance novels, there’s, yeah, like you said, there’s much more of acknowledging choice and deciding your own fate.
WHISKEY JENNY: The sex is not the part that’s like, well, we have to do this. The proximity is enforced, and then sparks fly. Like fake dating! I can’t believe nobody else has brought up fake dating.
GIN JENNY: Yayyyyyyyy. God, I love fake dating.
WHISKEY JENNY: But fake dating is so much fun, and it’s an example of, for reasons, two characters have to hang out, and pretend to date.
ROBERT: And then they make love?
GIN JENNY: Stop it. Get out.
WHISKEY JENNY: No they don’t! No they don’t!
ASHLEY: No one in this house makes love.
GIN JENNY: Get outta Chicago!
[laughter]ROBERT: Should we go into more detail about the logistics of writing a sex scene?
WHISKEY JENNY: Yes.
ROBERT: Cause I definitely was reading this with great interest, as you can imagine. It was curious, the decisions when to use a euphemism and the decision when to use a clinical term, like every once in a while, it’d be like, Whoa, there’s a penis!
GIN JENNY: Yeah!
ASHLEY: I mean, yeah. Story of my life.
[laughter]ASHLEY: Just kidding. Just kidding. I thought that would be a funny thing to say, I’m sorry.
ROBERT: Cause it really is a skill, and the fact that it’s something that people obsess over, so much that there’s a International—
GIN JENNY: Bad Sex Awards?
ROBERT: Bad Sex Awards, yeah. I think all the sex scenes I’ve written involved animals, so—
[laughter]WHISKEY JENNY: That counts, I think!
ROBERT: I wrote one legitimate sex scene but it’s like, a paragraph.
GIN JENNY: Sentient animals, we should say.
WHISKEY JENNY: With each other.
ROBERT: Sentient animals, yeah. It wasn’t just a dog humping. It was consensual, it was loving—
ASHLEY: There were no humans involved.
ROBERT: Both parties were satisfied at the end.
GIN JENNY: It does seem really hard, and I think that often in more quote-unquote literature, there’s a suspicion of embodiment of the characters. So often sex scenes are treated as more kind of grotesque.
ASHLEY: Yeah, I don’t like that.
GIN JENNY: I don’t like that at all, and I think it happens a lot. I think the tone is set by what I call dick lit writers like Philip Roth and Norman Mailer, where it’s like, sex is disgusting, bodies are disgusting, and I think romance novels sometimes go a little bit too far in the opposite direction, where everyone’s body is perfect and nobody is elbowing each other during sex. Which is fine! I mean, that’s fine! Going back to what we were saying about escapism. But I do think romance novels are quite good at talking about bodies and physical intimacy in a way that’s not suspicious of the whole endeavor, which I think a lot of other genres are, which is I think why the entrants in the Bad Sex Awards are so bad, because they treat bodies and sex a something disgusting and suspicious.
WHISKEY JENNY: I did like that during their final sex scene, there is mention of like, they bump heads a couple times, or like, things weren’t that rosy-perfect.
ROBERT: I think overall they were well done.
WHISKEY JENNY: Do we think that?
ROBERT: There were things there that I like, goofed on, of course, you know. Like I said, the occasional slippage into clinical terms, or the use of terms that I’ve never heard before, like apex. I’m fixated on the apex. What is that?
WHISKEY JENNY: I don’t think they were bad! But they didn’t fully work for me, I guess.
GIN JENNY: I would not say that they were the apex of sex scenes.
[laughter]WHISKEY JENNY: I would not either.
ASHLEY: I also wonder how much of the weird verbiage comes from trying to talk about it in a historical-y way?
GIN JENNY: Whiskey Jenny chokes on her wine. Now that we’re talking about sex scenes, it all sounds weirdly dirty.
WHISKEY JENNY: No, it just reminded me that a lot of regency novels, there’s a particular word that they love to use for female anatomy, that just every time, it—
ASHLEY: Can I ask what it is?
WHISKEY JENNY: Quim! They use quim!
[laughter]WHISKEY JENNY: All the time! And I’ve never heard that before, and you don’t hear it now, and that’s just how we symbolize that we’re having sex in olden days, and I don’t know, it’s a funny word to me. Sorry.
ASHLEY: I had the same reaction you did, apparently!
WHISKEY JENNY: Yeah, but it’s really funny.
GIN JENNY: For a while, I don’t remember why, I was reading a bunch of Victorian porn. I was like, What was porn like in Victorian times?
WHISKEY JENNY: Bunch of quims?
GIN JENNY: No. A bunch of twins, since you inquire.
ASHLEY: Wait wait wait wait wait.
GIN JENNY: And also a strangely high amount of female ejaculation.
WHISKEY JENNY: Yeah.
GIN JENNY: But additionally, I learned the term gamahuche, which is a historical—
WHISKEY JENNY: What’s a gamahuche?
GIN JENNY: I love how all of you just sprang to attention, which again, now that we’re talking about sex scenes, sounds so dirty. Yeah, it means, like, performing oral sex.
ASHLEY: How do you spell that?
GIN JENNY: G A M A H U C H E.
WHISKEY JENNY: It’s a verb?
GIN JENNY: Uh-huh!
WHISKEY JENNY: So one gamahuches someone else?
GIN JENNY: One gamahuches someone else.
ASHLEY: I’ve never heard that.
ROBERT: That word is in Bohemian Rhapsody.
GIN JENNY: Really!
ROBERT: No, I made that up.
[laughter]WHISKEY JENNY: You could have sold me!
ASHLEY: There’s no female anatomy in that song.
GIN JENNY: Well, it doesn’t matter, it’s for both! I was going to say, way to go, Freddie Mercury. I’m sorry.
ASHLEY: I feel like if you can use words like that, this particular book I think is using words that people didn’t use back then. So I think this comes from a place of wanting to convey somewhat—not prim—but like, non-clinical, but also less explicit words for the anatomy? I think that’s how we came to apex and womb. Which I don’t think—again, I read her trilogy of the postapocalyptic ones, and there were some women having sex in those, and I don’t think we ever hear about anybody’s womb in those.
GIN JENNY: I think it’s so tricky!
ASHLEY: It’s very hard.
GIN JENNY: I get that it’s very hard to talk about sex in a way that’s not clinical and is not sort of disgusted with bodies—
WHISKEY JENNY: Not clinical, not disgusted with bodies, but also not overly cloaked.
ASHLEY: Not super kinky either.
GIN JENNY: Well, and not—what I’m trying to say is not kind of precious—
WHISKEY JENNY: Precious! All kinds of ways you could go wrong!
GIN JENNY: But I do think that romance novels really have it over all the other genres in being able to talk about sex, and also build up sexual tension.
ASHLEY: God, right? Absolutely.
WHISKEY JENNY: That’s interesting, though, that this is a different kind of sex scene from her other books. That speaks to it being a character choice between them, and because they’re both so—trying to deny their own desires, so in that context I guess it makes sense. You know the other thing I really enjoyed, was Marlie’s point that wanting so hard to suppress your desires—because she’s talking about Greek philosophy—is just another form of desire.
GIN JENNY: Oooh.
WHISKEY JENNY: I really appreciated that!
ASHLEY: She really turned the tables on us!
WHISKEY JENNY: Oh! This is a fun argument! I’m into it! Yeah.
ROBERT: I’m glad you recruited me, once again.
WHISKEY JENNY: Thank you so much for coming on!
GIN JENNY: Yeah, thank you guys for coming!
WHISKEY JENNY: As always.
GIN JENNY: Thanks for coming to Chicago with us!
ASHLEY: My pleasure.
GIN JENNY: Where can people find you online, Ashley and Robert?
ASHLEY: The easiest place to find me is Twitter, I’m ashleybwells.
ROBERT: I’m on Twitter as well, repino1.
GIN JENNY: This has been the Reading the End Bookcast with the Demographically Similar Jennys. You can visit the blog at reading the end dot com; you can follow us on Twitter at reading the end; we’re both on Goodreads as Whiskey Jenny and Gin Jenny; and you can email us — and we hope you will! — at reading the end at gmail dot com. If you like what we do, become a podcast patron at Patreon dot com slash reading the end. And if you’re listening to us on iTunes, please leave us a review. And until next time, thanks to our patrons for making this bonus episode possible!
[noisy cheers, because Gin Jenny did that outro from memory]