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Stoats & Weasels
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December 10, 2022Source of book: Bought by me
Relevant disclaimers: None
Please note: This review may not be reproduced or quoted, in whole or in part, without explicit consent from the author.
And remember: I am not here to judge your drag, I mean your book. Books are art and art is subjective. These are just my personal thoughts. They are not meant to be taken as broader commentary on the general quality of the work. Believe me, I have not enjoyed many an excellent book, and my individual lack of enjoyment has not made any of those books less excellent or (more relevantly) less successful.
Further disclaimer: Readers, please stop accusing me of trying to take down “my competition” because I wrote a review you didn’t like. This is complete nonsense. Firstly, writing isn’t a competitive sport. Secondly, I only publish reviews of books in the subgenre where I’m best known (queer romcom) if they’re glowing. And finally: taking time out of my life to read an entire book, then write a detailed review about it that some people on GR will look at would be a profoundly inefficient and ineffective way to damage the careers of other authors. If you can’t credit me with simply being a person who loves books and likes talking about them, at least credit me with enough common sense to be a better villain.
*******************************************
File under: what did I just read and why? (Spoilers ahead and trigger warnings for sexual assault, suicide, among other things).
Okay, the why is that I had vague memories of this book from having snuck-read it in the adult section of library when I was a lost teen or pre-teen. I think maybe my mother had taken it out and been disgusted by its focus on, y’know, sex and emotions—and, desperate for insight into this forbidden world, I sought the book out later. It’s disorientating because I remember Stoats & Weasels at once vividly while also being unable to recall anything about it. I do know I was very confused, and that the male characters were very needy, and that I found that hot. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
And I’ve only just realised that I read and reviewed another one of this author’s books (A Fine Restoration) and found it mind-bogglingly incomprehensible and frighteningly straight … so now I feel like I’m following some stranger around being weird about their work. This needs to be the last Kitty Ray I randomly read because otherwise it’ll look like I have some kind of very specific vendetta (which I don’t): on the other hand, this worked a lot better for me. Although, let’s be clear, because A Fine Restoration had no redeeming features “worked better for me” is—in this context—kind of the equivalent of saying I preferred it when you vomited over my shoes instead of punching me in the face.
I’m also really worried at the thought of the child that was once me delving into this book in the search of insight into anything. Like, it's not fucking no wonder I grew up strange.
The deal here is that our heroine Emma is attending art college in the mid-60s. She gets a scholarship, despite being only sixteen, and—seeking freedom from her over-protective mother—plunges immediately into the world of young adulthood along with her hot, glamorous (slightly older) friends. There’s Alison the sensationally beautiful, biracial, promiscuous, manipulative charisma bomb. Bill, the gay one. George who is there. And the aloof, arrogant Jay who falls immediately in love with Emma, despite the fact she is sixteen and he is twenty-six, a deep creepiness the book never acknowledges and yet is impossible to ignore. And, yes, they don’t become involved in any way until Emma is, at least, eighteen but that is still some Jacob Black / Ralph de Bricassart style bullshit. Anyway, in the midst of all this, Emma meets Alison’s younger brother, Ricky—a young man whose learning disabilities and stutter made him fall short of his father’s standards, and whose emotional abuse has rendered almost incapable of speech—and falls immediately in love with him. It all falls apart, Ricky leaves, Jay, who was too awesome for art school and has dropped out to earn money in nebulously arty ways, continues to pursue Emma. Alison is having an affair with one of the tutors at college which, needless to say, ends in tragedy.
It’s weird because it feels like both a lot and nothing at all happens in the book. To be honest, it’s mostly just Emma wondering who to fuck. And the big mystery—since it takes the form of a meander through Emma’s memories as she tidies of the attic of a house she and her current partner have moved into—is which of Ricky or Jay she ultimately ends up with, given that both men are overwhelmingly obsessed with her for, as far as I can tell, no apparent reason. Other than she’s one of those heroines with lots of red hair and prominent hip bones who have no sense of their own beauty and make you want to strangle them.
I don’t even know where to start with this book. I mean, it’s written in the 90s and set in the 60s, so I guess the fact that it’s jarringly awful is … to be expected? But the problem was, I couldn’t tell what was intentionally awful (it was the 60s, it was the 90s, we didn’t think about things the same way then as we do now) and what was, err, just unexamined awfulness? Or, even worse, awfulness that was supposed to be … not awful at all. And somehow sexy or exciting or proof of love. Like the fact that Jay (26, remember, to Emma’s 16) spends the entire book essentially trying to entrap her into loving him: doggedly waiting for her (while secretly feeling furious he isn’t the one who gets to de-virginate her – dude, what the hell), encroaching on her when she’s vulnerable under the guise of helping her, manipulating her with sex, disregarding her agency, both physically and emotionally, guilt-tripping her with his personal trauma. It’s kind of one of the grossest things I’ve ever read, except it’s written with such “you’d look askance at this if you stumbled across it in a dark romance” dramatastic flair that I was kind of devouring it? Ready to embrace it as a deeply problematic fave before it went irredeemably off the rails.
I mean it contains lines like “He paused on the landing below, and stood looking up at her white, hunched figure, his face distorted with loneliness and covetous longing” which is the sort of tripe I completely adore. I am in my thirties, I have no excuse, and yet there is still part of me that wants to be looked up at with loneliness and covetous longing. Like, yes, aloof man, bring me your damage and your neediness, bring it right here and serve it on toast. And well, “His skin was still sheened with the sweat of energetic lovemaking and drops of tea” … that’s just all my kinks in a single sentence. Energic Lovemaking and Drops of Tea is both my sextape and my autobiography. Plus, I am absolute trash for this kind of nonsense:
Nothing gives me the glee like a character going from one emosh to a very different emosh with barely a pause. Like begging and bellowing are practically polar opposites, and yet Jay manages to swing from one to the other in the space it takes a woman to flinch. Imagine you were actually interacting with someone, and they acted like this.
They’d be all
And then flip straight into
You’d be terrified. You'd be abso-fucking-lutely terrified.
And speaking of terrified, this is a snapshot of Jay’s bookshelf, y’know … the guy who is supposed to be one of the romantic leads: “Steinbeck, Hemingway, John Hersey, P.G. Wodehouse, Proust, Bernard Malamud, Evelyn Waugh.”
RUN, GIRL. RUN NOW. It is all dead white men. That is the literary collection of an entitled manchild with no sense of perspective.
Unfortunately, there came a point that the entertaining (and I do give the book full credit for being occasionally entertaining unlike A Fine Restoration, which was dire from beginning to end) was just drowned in the ick. Listen, I’m a romance reader, I can take a certain of alpha bullshit. The whole, “I’ll ignore what you want, because I know what you need” deal that is a tropified version of man-caring that would be an actual felony in the real world. It’s just …there seems to be actual felonies taking place on page in Stoats and Weasels as well? For example,
Um. Maybe there’s something I’m wholly failing to account for in terms of the dynamic here, but I’m pretty sure the term for having sex with someone when they’re resisting you isn’t “making love.” And I’m also pretty sure that was the case in both the 90s and the 60s.
In any case, whatever is going on with Emma and her two terrible men is a mere drop in the awfulness bucket compared to what happens to Alison. Which is to say, she has an affair with one of her tutors, gets pregnant, he refuses to leave his wife, so Alison, in a fit of despair, takes some pills and drowns in her own vomit. And, of course, this is presented as a tragedy (although it’s a tragedy that mostly facilitates Emma advancing her relationship with Jay by boning him) and includes a lot of “ah, men, see how they exploit women, are they not the predators and are women not their prey, the way stoats and weasels are with rabbits” type commentary. Which ... well. Fair enough. That is, indeed, how the patriarchy works, be in the 60s or the 90s or the 2020s. It’s just I can’t help but notice that the victim of the stoats and weasels in question is the sexually liberated, beautiful, confident biracial woman (who had secretly wanted Jay all along, but he only had eyes for SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLD Emma, of course he did). While all in the men in Emma’s life (irrespective of the text’s own faltering relationship with the concept of consent), even the ones she treats incredibly badly and has no interest in, have literally nothing better to do than anchor their whole existence around the possibility of getting to be with her. So, basically, men are all stoats and weasels unless you happen to be the book's white heroine? None of which read to me like it was intended to be commentary on privilege or society or the way the world treats women who dare to transgress its strictures. Nope. Alison is punished by authorial fiat. And it did read like punishing, for daring to be not be Emma.
I could also discuss the treatment of Alison’s brother, Ricky, which is equally unfair. And then there’s the pair of cartoonishly stereotypical homosexuals (one of them even minces across a room—seriously who fucking minces? Who has ever, in the history of the world, actually minced) who end up together despite having nothing in common except they’re the only two gay characters in the book.
Except who cares?
I need therapy now.
Relevant disclaimers: None
Please note: This review may not be reproduced or quoted, in whole or in part, without explicit consent from the author.
And remember: I am not here to judge your drag, I mean your book. Books are art and art is subjective. These are just my personal thoughts. They are not meant to be taken as broader commentary on the general quality of the work. Believe me, I have not enjoyed many an excellent book, and my individual lack of enjoyment has not made any of those books less excellent or (more relevantly) less successful.
Further disclaimer: Readers, please stop accusing me of trying to take down “my competition” because I wrote a review you didn’t like. This is complete nonsense. Firstly, writing isn’t a competitive sport. Secondly, I only publish reviews of books in the subgenre where I’m best known (queer romcom) if they’re glowing. And finally: taking time out of my life to read an entire book, then write a detailed review about it that some people on GR will look at would be a profoundly inefficient and ineffective way to damage the careers of other authors. If you can’t credit me with simply being a person who loves books and likes talking about them, at least credit me with enough common sense to be a better villain.
*******************************************
File under: what did I just read and why? (Spoilers ahead and trigger warnings for sexual assault, suicide, among other things).
Okay, the why is that I had vague memories of this book from having snuck-read it in the adult section of library when I was a lost teen or pre-teen. I think maybe my mother had taken it out and been disgusted by its focus on, y’know, sex and emotions—and, desperate for insight into this forbidden world, I sought the book out later. It’s disorientating because I remember Stoats & Weasels at once vividly while also being unable to recall anything about it. I do know I was very confused, and that the male characters were very needy, and that I found that hot. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
And I’ve only just realised that I read and reviewed another one of this author’s books (A Fine Restoration) and found it mind-bogglingly incomprehensible and frighteningly straight … so now I feel like I’m following some stranger around being weird about their work. This needs to be the last Kitty Ray I randomly read because otherwise it’ll look like I have some kind of very specific vendetta (which I don’t): on the other hand, this worked a lot better for me. Although, let’s be clear, because A Fine Restoration had no redeeming features “worked better for me” is—in this context—kind of the equivalent of saying I preferred it when you vomited over my shoes instead of punching me in the face.
I’m also really worried at the thought of the child that was once me delving into this book in the search of insight into anything. Like, it's not fucking no wonder I grew up strange.
The deal here is that our heroine Emma is attending art college in the mid-60s. She gets a scholarship, despite being only sixteen, and—seeking freedom from her over-protective mother—plunges immediately into the world of young adulthood along with her hot, glamorous (slightly older) friends. There’s Alison the sensationally beautiful, biracial, promiscuous, manipulative charisma bomb. Bill, the gay one. George who is there. And the aloof, arrogant Jay who falls immediately in love with Emma, despite the fact she is sixteen and he is twenty-six, a deep creepiness the book never acknowledges and yet is impossible to ignore. And, yes, they don’t become involved in any way until Emma is, at least, eighteen but that is still some Jacob Black / Ralph de Bricassart style bullshit. Anyway, in the midst of all this, Emma meets Alison’s younger brother, Ricky—a young man whose learning disabilities and stutter made him fall short of his father’s standards, and whose emotional abuse has rendered almost incapable of speech—and falls immediately in love with him. It all falls apart, Ricky leaves, Jay, who was too awesome for art school and has dropped out to earn money in nebulously arty ways, continues to pursue Emma. Alison is having an affair with one of the tutors at college which, needless to say, ends in tragedy.
It’s weird because it feels like both a lot and nothing at all happens in the book. To be honest, it’s mostly just Emma wondering who to fuck. And the big mystery—since it takes the form of a meander through Emma’s memories as she tidies of the attic of a house she and her current partner have moved into—is which of Ricky or Jay she ultimately ends up with, given that both men are overwhelmingly obsessed with her for, as far as I can tell, no apparent reason. Other than she’s one of those heroines with lots of red hair and prominent hip bones who have no sense of their own beauty and make you want to strangle them.
I don’t even know where to start with this book. I mean, it’s written in the 90s and set in the 60s, so I guess the fact that it’s jarringly awful is … to be expected? But the problem was, I couldn’t tell what was intentionally awful (it was the 60s, it was the 90s, we didn’t think about things the same way then as we do now) and what was, err, just unexamined awfulness? Or, even worse, awfulness that was supposed to be … not awful at all. And somehow sexy or exciting or proof of love. Like the fact that Jay (26, remember, to Emma’s 16) spends the entire book essentially trying to entrap her into loving him: doggedly waiting for her (while secretly feeling furious he isn’t the one who gets to de-virginate her – dude, what the hell), encroaching on her when she’s vulnerable under the guise of helping her, manipulating her with sex, disregarding her agency, both physically and emotionally, guilt-tripping her with his personal trauma. It’s kind of one of the grossest things I’ve ever read, except it’s written with such “you’d look askance at this if you stumbled across it in a dark romance” dramatastic flair that I was kind of devouring it? Ready to embrace it as a deeply problematic fave before it went irredeemably off the rails.
I mean it contains lines like “He paused on the landing below, and stood looking up at her white, hunched figure, his face distorted with loneliness and covetous longing” which is the sort of tripe I completely adore. I am in my thirties, I have no excuse, and yet there is still part of me that wants to be looked up at with loneliness and covetous longing. Like, yes, aloof man, bring me your damage and your neediness, bring it right here and serve it on toast. And well, “His skin was still sheened with the sweat of energetic lovemaking and drops of tea” … that’s just all my kinks in a single sentence. Energic Lovemaking and Drops of Tea is both my sextape and my autobiography. Plus, I am absolute trash for this kind of nonsense:
‘Please,’ he begged and she flinched, took an involuntary step backwards. ‘No!’ he bellowed.
Nothing gives me the glee like a character going from one emosh to a very different emosh with barely a pause. Like begging and bellowing are practically polar opposites, and yet Jay manages to swing from one to the other in the space it takes a woman to flinch. Imagine you were actually interacting with someone, and they acted like this.
They’d be all
And then flip straight into
You’d be terrified. You'd be abso-fucking-lutely terrified.
And speaking of terrified, this is a snapshot of Jay’s bookshelf, y’know … the guy who is supposed to be one of the romantic leads: “Steinbeck, Hemingway, John Hersey, P.G. Wodehouse, Proust, Bernard Malamud, Evelyn Waugh.”
RUN, GIRL. RUN NOW. It is all dead white men. That is the literary collection of an entitled manchild with no sense of perspective.
Unfortunately, there came a point that the entertaining (and I do give the book full credit for being occasionally entertaining unlike A Fine Restoration, which was dire from beginning to end) was just drowned in the ick. Listen, I’m a romance reader, I can take a certain of alpha bullshit. The whole, “I’ll ignore what you want, because I know what you need” deal that is a tropified version of man-caring that would be an actual felony in the real world. It’s just …there seems to be actual felonies taking place on page in Stoats and Weasels as well? For example,
He made love to her, for the last time. Emma resisted him; it seemed wrong somehow in a way it hadn’t before, but he made her anyway.
Um. Maybe there’s something I’m wholly failing to account for in terms of the dynamic here, but I’m pretty sure the term for having sex with someone when they’re resisting you isn’t “making love.” And I’m also pretty sure that was the case in both the 90s and the 60s.
In any case, whatever is going on with Emma and her two terrible men is a mere drop in the awfulness bucket compared to what happens to Alison. Which is to say, she has an affair with one of her tutors, gets pregnant, he refuses to leave his wife, so Alison, in a fit of despair, takes some pills and drowns in her own vomit. And, of course, this is presented as a tragedy (although it’s a tragedy that mostly facilitates Emma advancing her relationship with Jay by boning him) and includes a lot of “ah, men, see how they exploit women, are they not the predators and are women not their prey, the way stoats and weasels are with rabbits” type commentary. Which ... well. Fair enough. That is, indeed, how the patriarchy works, be in the 60s or the 90s or the 2020s. It’s just I can’t help but notice that the victim of the stoats and weasels in question is the sexually liberated, beautiful, confident biracial woman (who had secretly wanted Jay all along, but he only had eyes for SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLD Emma, of course he did). While all in the men in Emma’s life (irrespective of the text’s own faltering relationship with the concept of consent), even the ones she treats incredibly badly and has no interest in, have literally nothing better to do than anchor their whole existence around the possibility of getting to be with her. So, basically, men are all stoats and weasels unless you happen to be the book's white heroine? None of which read to me like it was intended to be commentary on privilege or society or the way the world treats women who dare to transgress its strictures. Nope. Alison is punished by authorial fiat. And it did read like punishing, for daring to be not be Emma.
I could also discuss the treatment of Alison’s brother, Ricky, which is equally unfair. And then there’s the pair of cartoonishly stereotypical homosexuals (one of them even minces across a room—seriously who fucking minces? Who has ever, in the history of the world, actually minced) who end up together despite having nothing in common except they’re the only two gay characters in the book.
Except who cares?
I need therapy now.
August 2, 2013
Die schüchterne Emma beginnt mit 16 Jahren ein Kunststudium in London und fühlt sich in eine andere Welt versetzt. Bisher wohlbehütet zu Hause aufgewachsen, lernt sie jetzt eine andere Seite des Lebens kennen: mit ihrer neuen Clique steht nicht das Lernen an erster Stelle, sondern Feiern, Musik, Alkohol und freie Liebe. Zunächst bleibt Emma zurückhaltend, dann aber lernt sie Ricky kennen und lieben, doch auch Jay hat Gefallen an ihr gefunden und ihr in schweren Zeiten beigestanden. Zu beiden hat Emma eine ganz besondere Beziehung, doch sie muss sich für einen entscheiden.
Ein fantastisches Buch, das mich sehr gefesselt und mich nach London in die 60er Jahre versetzt hat. Die Geschichte um Emma und ihre Zerrissenheit zwischen zwei Männern war spannend und ergreifend, ich habe mit ihr gefühlt und gelitten. Dies ist mein zweites Buch von Kitty Ray und ich mag ihren Schreibstil, der gut und flüssig zu lesen ist, und es schafft, Atmosphäre einzufangen und Gefühle und Emotionen zu vermitteln.
Emma ist mir sehr sympathisch, auch wenn ich ihre Handlungen nicht immer verstehen konnte. Ihre Zerrissenheit zwischen Ricky und Jay ist manchmal wirklich schmerzlich und zu keinem Punkt der Geschichte konnte ich wirklich einschätzen, für wen der beiden sie sich letztlich entscheidet. In manchen Punkten sind die beiden Konkurrenten sich sehr ähnlich, in anderen könnten sie unterschiedlicher nicht sein. Jeder hat seine Ecken und Kanten, aber auch seine liebenswerten Seiten und Eigenschaften.
Die Charaktere sind allesamt gut gezeichnet, sie sind lebensnah und echt, nicht nur schwarz und weiß, sondern mit vielen Grautönen. Dadurch fühlte ich mich inmitten der Studierenden und begleite nicht nur Emma, sondern auch ihre Studienfreunde. Alice, George, Bill und Tante Mabel – um nur einige zu nennen - jeder hat eine eigene Geschichte und sein eigenes Päckchen zu tragen. So ist dieser Roman nicht eine reine Liebesgeschichte, sondern eher eine Darstellung menschlicher Beziehungen mit allen Höhen und Tiefen.
Mich hat auch dieser Roman von Kitty Ray wieder überzeugen können! Ich bin völlig eingetaucht in die Geschichte um Emma und ihre Freunde und habe mitgefühlt mit den toll gezeichneten Charakteren. Eine Geschichte wie das wahre Leben, mit Höhen und Tiefen, mit Freud und Leid, keineswegs ein kitschiger Liebesroman sondern eine interessante Charakterstudie zur Zeit der 60er Jahre in London.
Ein fantastisches Buch, das mich sehr gefesselt und mich nach London in die 60er Jahre versetzt hat. Die Geschichte um Emma und ihre Zerrissenheit zwischen zwei Männern war spannend und ergreifend, ich habe mit ihr gefühlt und gelitten. Dies ist mein zweites Buch von Kitty Ray und ich mag ihren Schreibstil, der gut und flüssig zu lesen ist, und es schafft, Atmosphäre einzufangen und Gefühle und Emotionen zu vermitteln.
Emma ist mir sehr sympathisch, auch wenn ich ihre Handlungen nicht immer verstehen konnte. Ihre Zerrissenheit zwischen Ricky und Jay ist manchmal wirklich schmerzlich und zu keinem Punkt der Geschichte konnte ich wirklich einschätzen, für wen der beiden sie sich letztlich entscheidet. In manchen Punkten sind die beiden Konkurrenten sich sehr ähnlich, in anderen könnten sie unterschiedlicher nicht sein. Jeder hat seine Ecken und Kanten, aber auch seine liebenswerten Seiten und Eigenschaften.
Die Charaktere sind allesamt gut gezeichnet, sie sind lebensnah und echt, nicht nur schwarz und weiß, sondern mit vielen Grautönen. Dadurch fühlte ich mich inmitten der Studierenden und begleite nicht nur Emma, sondern auch ihre Studienfreunde. Alice, George, Bill und Tante Mabel – um nur einige zu nennen - jeder hat eine eigene Geschichte und sein eigenes Päckchen zu tragen. So ist dieser Roman nicht eine reine Liebesgeschichte, sondern eher eine Darstellung menschlicher Beziehungen mit allen Höhen und Tiefen.
Mich hat auch dieser Roman von Kitty Ray wieder überzeugen können! Ich bin völlig eingetaucht in die Geschichte um Emma und ihre Freunde und habe mitgefühlt mit den toll gezeichneten Charakteren. Eine Geschichte wie das wahre Leben, mit Höhen und Tiefen, mit Freud und Leid, keineswegs ein kitschiger Liebesroman sondern eine interessante Charakterstudie zur Zeit der 60er Jahre in London.
August 25, 2011
Der deutsche Titel ist abschreckend: man erwartet einen billigen Kitschroman, aber so ist es nicht. Emma, die sich als junge Studentin entscheiden muss zwischen 2 Männern und damit auch dem Verlauf ihres eigenen Lebens....in Rückblicken erzählt- bis zum Schluss ahnt man nicht, wer der auserwählte ist. Fesselnd.
January 3, 2013
Five art students in the 60s: red-haired Emma, manipulative Alison, conceited George, shy Bill, and sarcastic Jay live intertwining lives in London. Twenty-five years later, living in Norfolk, the past returns to disrupt Emma's world.
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