Thoughts on Fallen / Torment

[glitter_n_gore]

Another long post about one of the bigger-name paranormal YA titles out right now: Lauren Kate's Fallen. I actually like this series a lot, but I want to talk about some disturbing buzz I saw in the Amazon reviews, particularly for the second book. I don't put but so much stock in those things, because they are incredibly biased to start with, but I do like checking out the two and three star reviews every once in a while because I think they're the most useful. The five and four stars are mostly gushy and brimming with fangirl squee; and the one stars are hateful and non-specific. Mostly. Not all the time, but mostly. Thus, I like to see what the middle-of-the-road folks tend to think.

Before I get into what happened with the comments, let me give you a brief rundown of both books and my take on them, because you'll need the context to understand why I was so disturbed:


In the first book, Fallen, our heroine is a girl named Luce Price who has been sent to a boarding school for a troubled teens after walking away from a mysterious fire that killed her then-boyfriend. She's marked as a troublemaker and has a history of perceived mental illness, thanks to whispering shadows that no one else can see, so the assumption is she needs medication, discipline and constant supervision. The twist is that Sword & Cross, the institution where she's sent, isn't just a school, but a gathering place for fallen angels.

The bulk of the narrative is about Luce trying figure out the identity and motives of one Daniel Gregori, a phenomenally hunky but rude and standoffish fellow "student," who seems inexplicably familiar to her. What we and Luce eventually find out is that Daniel and Luce have met before--many, many times, in previous lives. Well, previous lives for Luce--Daniel, as an immortal, just keeps running into her at her various incarnations. That's his punishment for daring to love a mortal--to watch her die over and over, usually shortly after their first kiss in whatever life she's on, whereupon she promptly bursts into flames. Only for some reason, Luce survives this time.

Apart from a perfunctory love triangle in which I was actually rooting for the other guy (I'm often rooting for the other guy in these things--I can't stand broody, silent types when it comes to romance), that's pretty much all that happens in the first book. Luce and Daniel get together, fall in love, and she realizes he's an angel. That's about the size of it. And may I take a moment to point out that you can figure that out just by looking at the cover. May I also point out that as far as paranormal romantic YA is concerned, this series is the one that annoys me the least--and after reading the second book, it doesn't annoy me at all. I actually really like it.

In the second book, Torment, Luce and Daniel have spent some happy, fluffy time together between the end of her time at Sword & Cross and the beginning of Luce's new enrollment at a small college on the West coast called Shoreline. It's a proper college on paper, and for half of the students enrolled there, but for the other half it's a safe haven for the Nephilim--offspring of angels and humans with a mixed bag of unpredictable super powers--and there are angels and demons on the faculty, teaching everyone together on shaky neutral ground while the students decide which side they're on. Luce is there because the Nephilim provide some kind of "protection," and under Daniel's orders, she's not supposed to leave campus. Ever.

This is where the romance begins to wane. The buzz of Luce initially finding Daniel and consequently being swept off her feet starts to go stale, and she doesn't rationalize away everything he does. She still loves him, but she's starting to wonder how well she really knows him. If he loves her, why does he keep abandoning her without telling her where he's going and why? Why won't the teachers or anyone else tell her what's so special, exactly, about her relationship with Daniel, to the point where all the students there immediately know who she is? What about the families of the previous Luce's, such as a sister and parents that she discovers after some research--is it right for Daniel to put them through the pain of losing a family member? And just who does Daniel think he is anyway, setting up curfews and boundaries for her, then scolding her when she breaks them like a "child" or a "badly behaved pet"?

See, I love this because, unlike virtually every other paranormal "romance" I've read under the YA heading, the heroine starts to think for herself and take action to get answers on her own, as opposed to being spoonfed expository monologues or watching the plot happen around her. Which, ironically, is pretty much what happened in the first book. It's also remarkably self-aware, and includes some ironic lampshade-hanging when the other characters start to speculate over Which Guy Luce Will Choose! Yes, there's another perfunctory love triangle in the second book, but it happens more naturally than some other hot guy fawning over Luce for no apparent reason--she actually makes friends with this person and they do fun stuff together, and with Daniel being away so much and acting so cold and superior, Luce starts to wonder if she might be better off with someone else, destiny-be-damned.

There's more, but that's about all you need to know for me to segue into those Amazon reviews I mentioned earlier.

Here's the thing: The sequel of any given book, especially one that's popular with the YA crowd, is going to have some issues. Many will like it more than the first book. Many will like it less. Many will like them both equally. What disturbs me in this case is that a great number of reviewers who did not like Torment as well as Fallen had this to say: "Why doesn't Luce just shut up and do as she's told? She has a totally gorgeous fallen angel who's in love with her--what more does she want?" I'm not quoting anyone directly there, but this sentiment popped up so many times, in various rearrangements of syntax and tone, that it shocked me.

One of the things detractors of paranormal romance complain about is the spineless, passive, weak-willed heroine letting her love interest get away with virtually anything, using the fact that they're "in love" as a hand-wave that excuses any and all faults. Hush, Hush is a particularly horrific example of this. I don't think of myself as a detractor, exactly, because I go back and forth on the books themselves and whether I like them or not, for various reasons, but that character type drives me crazy. What I enjoyed about Luce in the second book is her realization that she's been blind to a lot of Daniel's faults before this--she's still starry-eyed, but her being aware of that makes her more cautious and determined to find a reason to stay with Daniel beyond this fate-and-destiny thing. I get that and I appreciate it a lot.

I think the problem with these Amazon reviews is something the great cleolinda touched on in her post about "The Female Gaze" re: the Twilight movies: "And I feel like I'm a little different from a lot of people in that I can compartmentalize a lot of things. A lot of people--in this case, Twilight fans--will start out liking, say, Edward, for whatever reason, and because they like him, proceed to defend and rationalize everything he does from then on." (Full article here.) Because Bella in the Twilight books takes this same attitude towards Edward--"Oh, he just disabled my truck to keep me from visiting the dangerous werewolves and protect me from myself, because he looooves me,"--even though folks like me and Cleo cringe at that, there's no disconnect between the heroine and the fans. They see Edward as infallible, and everything he does is okay. In the case of Torment, because Luce stops to think, "Hey, wait a minute, that's not cool," I can only theorize that the fans have put Daniel on a similar pedestal and are now angry at Luce for--I feel, wisely and realistically--knocking him down a peg. She starts to see him as a flawed person whom she needs to work with to make this relationship stable and healthy.

While I love what author Lauren Kate has done here in drawing up questions in Luce's mind as to whether staying with Daniel is really the right thing for her, I almost understand this. For one thing, the two books are so different in style and tone it's almost as if they were written for separate audiences. The reactions to the sequel are so divided that it's clear the existing audience has already separated into two vocal factions--those that worship Daniel and want to have Luce as an empty reader-proxy character to insert themselves into, and those who see Luce as her own character and love seeing her grow a backbone regardless of what Daniel does. The problem is that the first book is what attracted that first group, and the second is fairly small because not that many of us stuck around to see if it got any better. The focus of the second book is completely different from the first, in that the romance takes a back seat to Luce searching out answers to her own past lives and the consequences that arose from her actions in them. The series on the whole is pitched as a paranormal romance, but in the sequel it's not as important to Luce as other things. I hate to admit this, but the Twilight series, as many problems as I have with it, does a much better job of playing to its existing audience and fulfilling its expectations.

The other part of this is very simple: it's a fantasy. The reason this narrative type is so popular--well, one of many reasons, I'm sure--is that the reader can picture herself in the place of the narrator, an ordinary girl who finds herself the object of desire of a supernaturally hunky guy. Or two. Or even more. The hard work, trust, and communication it takes to actually make a relationship work is not a part of that fantasy. Breaking the illusion is not part of the deal the author usually makes with the readership. The love story is supposed to be easy, and if anything threatens to break the couple apart, it's supposed to be some devious outside source--like, in the case of Twilight, an identifiable antagonist who forces the hero to protect and shelter the heroine in the name of love. There's a bit of that in Torment as well, but it all happens off-page, so Luce is both ignorant of that and frustrated by being kept in the dark without any explanation. And the difference between Luce and Bella is that Luce ignores Daniel's warnings and takes matters into her own hands.

What I find disturbing is a combination of things, but mostly I wonder why the young readers who create the viable market for these types of books don't want a strong female heroine. If they want a heroine they can identify with, that's one thing. But why do they expect that person to let the hero walk all over them and make all her decisions for her? Why, when Luce makes the choice to come out of her shell and do her own investigating, does the readership turn on her and no longer want her as the protagonist?

These are questions worth looking into. I don't think that young people really like their love interests to walk all over them and make all their decisions--at least I don't want to believe that they do. There's something to be said for having a hero who protects you and takes care of you, and while it's not as popular a type as it once was, I still understand that mindset. What doesn't translate is the line between being "protected" and not having a will of one's own. That's the issue, and that's what I don't understand about this generation of readers.

I'm not going anywhere in particular with this observation. I just wanted to call attention to it and see if anyone else has noticed it as a trend.