Articles

On Apologies, Forgiveness and West Ravenel

I listened to Devil’s Daughter by Lisa Kleypas recently and I loved it so much I decided to read the book as well. If anyone has been following my Twitter feed at all, it won’t be a surprise that I have fallen hard for West Ravenel, the hero of Devil’s Daughter. I’m not alone. Janine from Dear Author is similarly obsessed – I believe she’s re-read the book three times now. Her review of the book is here and my review of the audiobook is at AudioGals here. Janine and I also had an epic email thread going where we gushed and squeed and reveled in the West Ravenel goodness so it’s clearly a book which has captured our imaginations.

Gold toned cover with a picture of a beautiful red-haired woman in a creamy-gold ball gown evening dress trimmed with peach coloured flowers

As much as I enjoyed the audiobook, reading the print/digital version is a different experience again. Things I’d forgotten or somehow glossed over come into sharper focus in print for me. Whereas on audio I feel better able to understand certain subtext (I believe this is because the narrator does some of that interpretation for me and thank god for it I say – it’s not something I’m really good at. Or, maybe hearing the words produces a more instinctive emotional response than seeing the words? Or if not more instinctive, different? Who knows?). In any event, the other night when I was reading, a particular line stood out to me and it was kind of a revelation.

The thing which got up my nose in a big way about the latest Outlander book

MOBY printThe following might be considered spoilerish, so be ye warned.  Personally, I don’t think it is all that spoilerish because even though it comes late in the book, it’s not really connected to the main storyline – something that makes me even more annoyed because it just didn’t really need to be there at all and it could have been changed in one very small (but significant) way and it would have been okay.

On with the rant.

First off, I’m an Outlander fan. I love the series.  It’s not perfect, but overall, I find the Outlander vortex sucks me in every time.  I gave the last book, Written in My Own Heart’s Blood, a B+.  I liked it very very much.

But.

There was one thing which bothered me when I was consuming the book.  Claire operates on a very young slave girl (she’s around 13) with a gynaecological injury.  The girl, Sophronia, was non-violently repeatedly raped (she’s so young and also a slave, it cannot be called seduction as consent here was so far absent it may have been on the moon) by her owner.  She became pregnant. There was a problem during a long labour and the baby died.  Sophronia was left with two fistulae – so both urine and fecal matter was escaping her body via her vagina  (this is still an issue today, especially in poor communities where very young girls give birth without appropriate medical care, but that’s another story).

Verified by MonsterInsights