![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Review: Rebel Prince, by Justine Davis
Jul. 26th, 2020 09:29 pmWelp, I just had, hands down, one of the worst three day stretches of my entire life, so buckle up friends, we're gonna talk about this truly freaking bizarre-ass book.
It is important to understand that this book is basically the epilogue-esque sequel to two other books, Lord of the Storm, published in 1994, and The Skypirate, published in 1995, but was itself not published until 2015.
Yesterday, I went to an online event where Scarlett Peckham, who's a relative newcomer in romance, was discussing Judith McNaught's 'Whitney, My Love", with the women of the Woah!Mance podcast. It was an excellent discussion because it spent a lot of time picking apart how many women who are around my age cut their teeth on the 70s - 90s romance, and as adults we are intensely aware of how crazy problematic and fucked up these books are, but at the same time: there are still things we find deeply compelling about them. I argue, to some extent, that there is something innately empowering about how willing women like McNaught, Johanna Lindsey, and Jude Deveraux, etc., were to confront their own sexual desires despite women constantly being told that they shouldn't be interested in sex, that those desires made the dirty, dangerous. And at some level, I find it hard to judge a generation of writers who didn't have the internet to discuss the difference between rape fantasy and ravishment fantasy, how consent could work in these texts, etc. It's easy to look back and spit on pioneers for not having done enough. It means forgetting, though, that you wouldn't be where you are without them.
Which brings me to Justine Davis and the Coalition Rebellion series. Both of the first two books involve slavery. In the first, Shaylah Graymist, an Arellian pilot for the Coalition (aka, every randomly evil space organization you can think of from say, Star Wars, Firefly, etc.,) ends up with temporary ownership of a slave, whom she later ends up breaking out of custody and fleeing with to his home planet. Said planet is called Trios and is the most Utopic Utopia ever to Utope. And if you don't think about the fact that they're kind of super suspicious of outsiders and you can only live there if you are sponsored by a Triotian citizen, it's not creepy at all. In any case, said slave is actually Dare, the prince of Trios, which has been devastated by the Coalition because it is so fucking awesomesauce, and they KNOW, if anything of it is to survive, the Coalition's existence will always be challenged. Dare takes his rightful place on the throne, Shaylah becomes his queen, all's well.
In The Skypirate, we meet Dax Silverbrake, also of Trios, and currently a, you guessed it, skypirate. Dax has a lot of manpain because he feels he failed his people and his prince and and and. He accidentally comes into possession of a Coalition slave, who just happens to be a woman who used to be one of their high-ranking military officers who lost her right to, you know, humanity, when she wouldn't give them info on what might have happened to her oldest friend, Shaylah Graymist, and the slave she'd escaped with. Califa, our heroine, hadn't actually known, but clearly they weren't convinced of that. Anyway, there's lot of space shenanigans, eventually they have to go to Trios, where Califa is put on trial but found to have paid for her crimes as a Coalition officer and Dax is restored to his place as the king's right had military advisor, basically. (It's way more complicated, actually, he can wield this magic bow thing that only one Triotian a generation can and it's a whole THING, but, for our purposes, go with it.)
I can make fun of these books all I want, I can point out to you all of the super disturbing moments in them and more, and none of that matters: I unashamedly, unironically love these books. They are premium trauma and recovery romance, and I would be lying if I said that a good chunk of who I am as a story teller probably didn't grow out of these books to some extent.
All right, stage set: let's talk about Rebel Prince. RP happens, wouldn't you know, about twenty years after Skypirate. Dare and Dax have had a child each, and luckily, one was a boy and one was a girl. Lyon, Dare's son and the presumptive heir to the throne, is super into Shaina, Dax's daughter, who is oblivious. He's her bestie. Shaina has just learned that, despite this never happening before, she has inherited her father's power to be the magic weapon bearer. Her father has foregone mentioning this and now she's found out and is pissed at him, so she goes to hang out with Lyon in the few days before his ascension to the official Prince title. This is story line one.
Story line two regards Rina, an orphan Dax took responsibility for back in Skypirate, and her discovering that a man she fought one of the final battles against the Coalition with is still alive despite being believed dead for...I'm not entirely sure, ten years? The timeline of this book isn't super clear to me.
Anyhoodle. This book is fun, mostly because you get glimpses of our founding couples being awesome together and see Rina grown up, and the Coalition gets its ass kicked again, and I mean, for me, the pure nostalgia was going to carry me through.
Davis has a very particular writing...tick, I suppose. I wouldn't call it a style, so much, as that it's like she's so in love with these characters herself, she can't stop reminding you how proud "they are" of "each other." I'm pretty laid back about romance novels being overly sentimental, since I feel that's simply a feature that can be buggy, but there was a point in this book where I was like "I'm starting to feel as if your pride toward (insert character) is a bit paternal, rather than romantic, and that's not working for me."
The one serious failing of the book for me, however, is that Shaina, who is nineteen, ends up being surprise!preggers at the end from her one time of sleeping with Lyon and it's through her "child," e.g., barely formed zygote, that she inherits certain powers. It's at best an unsettling choice that forcefully places a very specific type of family dynamic on these two extremely young people, at worst, it suggests that Shaina's body is merely a conduit for her father and child's different powers. Either way, it's not enjoyable, and I had an extremely visceral "NOPE" reaction to it.
I will say, on the other side, there's a really sweet hint that Rina and her guy, Tark, will adopt a war orphan which was where I was like "and you're back, Davis."
I think the problem is that she's at her strongest when she's writing about people who are broken in some way, truly broken, not just upset or going through a rough moment. And while Shaina and Lyon have both had their struggles, neither of them even comes near to being broken, and it feels to me as if she falters when presented with that particular set of circumstances.
Even with all my caveats, it was really nice to get this book twenty-five-ish years after reading the first ones, to revisit this world that meant so much to me as a teen, and still, in a number of ways, underpins much of my narrative id. Basically: if you have a thing for hurt/comfort and can handle a bit of flowery/repetitive prose, read the first two. You can make up your own mind about the third. I wouldn't say I recommend it. I also wouldn't say "run, Forrest, run!"
It is important to understand that this book is basically the epilogue-esque sequel to two other books, Lord of the Storm, published in 1994, and The Skypirate, published in 1995, but was itself not published until 2015.
Yesterday, I went to an online event where Scarlett Peckham, who's a relative newcomer in romance, was discussing Judith McNaught's 'Whitney, My Love", with the women of the Woah!Mance podcast. It was an excellent discussion because it spent a lot of time picking apart how many women who are around my age cut their teeth on the 70s - 90s romance, and as adults we are intensely aware of how crazy problematic and fucked up these books are, but at the same time: there are still things we find deeply compelling about them. I argue, to some extent, that there is something innately empowering about how willing women like McNaught, Johanna Lindsey, and Jude Deveraux, etc., were to confront their own sexual desires despite women constantly being told that they shouldn't be interested in sex, that those desires made the dirty, dangerous. And at some level, I find it hard to judge a generation of writers who didn't have the internet to discuss the difference between rape fantasy and ravishment fantasy, how consent could work in these texts, etc. It's easy to look back and spit on pioneers for not having done enough. It means forgetting, though, that you wouldn't be where you are without them.
Which brings me to Justine Davis and the Coalition Rebellion series. Both of the first two books involve slavery. In the first, Shaylah Graymist, an Arellian pilot for the Coalition (aka, every randomly evil space organization you can think of from say, Star Wars, Firefly, etc.,) ends up with temporary ownership of a slave, whom she later ends up breaking out of custody and fleeing with to his home planet. Said planet is called Trios and is the most Utopic Utopia ever to Utope. And if you don't think about the fact that they're kind of super suspicious of outsiders and you can only live there if you are sponsored by a Triotian citizen, it's not creepy at all. In any case, said slave is actually Dare, the prince of Trios, which has been devastated by the Coalition because it is so fucking awesomesauce, and they KNOW, if anything of it is to survive, the Coalition's existence will always be challenged. Dare takes his rightful place on the throne, Shaylah becomes his queen, all's well.
In The Skypirate, we meet Dax Silverbrake, also of Trios, and currently a, you guessed it, skypirate. Dax has a lot of manpain because he feels he failed his people and his prince and and and. He accidentally comes into possession of a Coalition slave, who just happens to be a woman who used to be one of their high-ranking military officers who lost her right to, you know, humanity, when she wouldn't give them info on what might have happened to her oldest friend, Shaylah Graymist, and the slave she'd escaped with. Califa, our heroine, hadn't actually known, but clearly they weren't convinced of that. Anyway, there's lot of space shenanigans, eventually they have to go to Trios, where Califa is put on trial but found to have paid for her crimes as a Coalition officer and Dax is restored to his place as the king's right had military advisor, basically. (It's way more complicated, actually, he can wield this magic bow thing that only one Triotian a generation can and it's a whole THING, but, for our purposes, go with it.)
I can make fun of these books all I want, I can point out to you all of the super disturbing moments in them and more, and none of that matters: I unashamedly, unironically love these books. They are premium trauma and recovery romance, and I would be lying if I said that a good chunk of who I am as a story teller probably didn't grow out of these books to some extent.
All right, stage set: let's talk about Rebel Prince. RP happens, wouldn't you know, about twenty years after Skypirate. Dare and Dax have had a child each, and luckily, one was a boy and one was a girl. Lyon, Dare's son and the presumptive heir to the throne, is super into Shaina, Dax's daughter, who is oblivious. He's her bestie. Shaina has just learned that, despite this never happening before, she has inherited her father's power to be the magic weapon bearer. Her father has foregone mentioning this and now she's found out and is pissed at him, so she goes to hang out with Lyon in the few days before his ascension to the official Prince title. This is story line one.
Story line two regards Rina, an orphan Dax took responsibility for back in Skypirate, and her discovering that a man she fought one of the final battles against the Coalition with is still alive despite being believed dead for...I'm not entirely sure, ten years? The timeline of this book isn't super clear to me.
Anyhoodle. This book is fun, mostly because you get glimpses of our founding couples being awesome together and see Rina grown up, and the Coalition gets its ass kicked again, and I mean, for me, the pure nostalgia was going to carry me through.
Davis has a very particular writing...tick, I suppose. I wouldn't call it a style, so much, as that it's like she's so in love with these characters herself, she can't stop reminding you how proud "they are" of "each other." I'm pretty laid back about romance novels being overly sentimental, since I feel that's simply a feature that can be buggy, but there was a point in this book where I was like "I'm starting to feel as if your pride toward (insert character) is a bit paternal, rather than romantic, and that's not working for me."
The one serious failing of the book for me, however, is that Shaina, who is nineteen, ends up being surprise!preggers at the end from her one time of sleeping with Lyon and it's through her "child," e.g., barely formed zygote, that she inherits certain powers. It's at best an unsettling choice that forcefully places a very specific type of family dynamic on these two extremely young people, at worst, it suggests that Shaina's body is merely a conduit for her father and child's different powers. Either way, it's not enjoyable, and I had an extremely visceral "NOPE" reaction to it.
I will say, on the other side, there's a really sweet hint that Rina and her guy, Tark, will adopt a war orphan which was where I was like "and you're back, Davis."
I think the problem is that she's at her strongest when she's writing about people who are broken in some way, truly broken, not just upset or going through a rough moment. And while Shaina and Lyon have both had their struggles, neither of them even comes near to being broken, and it feels to me as if she falters when presented with that particular set of circumstances.
Even with all my caveats, it was really nice to get this book twenty-five-ish years after reading the first ones, to revisit this world that meant so much to me as a teen, and still, in a number of ways, underpins much of my narrative id. Basically: if you have a thing for hurt/comfort and can handle a bit of flowery/repetitive prose, read the first two. You can make up your own mind about the third. I wouldn't say I recommend it. I also wouldn't say "run, Forrest, run!"
