Reverse Psychology and Racist Romance

I think the main reason I feel like posting is that lj is down so I can't post there :)

Anyway: once it became clear that I wasn't getting anything productive done today (eg when I fell suddenly alseep after Cam went to work and didn't wake until 11) I was planning on spending the rest of today reading the book I bought yesterday. It's "The Hidden Heart" by Laura Kinsale, author of "Midsummer Moon" (a regency romance I read and enjoyed lately) But on the FIRST PAGE is "She..generously informed the Indians that the jungle monsters with holes for faces were no longer in pursuit..They had escorted the white woman out of Barrio do Rio in order to save themselves from the supernatural beasts that she had said would surely descend upon them if they hadn't."

GUH

It was written in 1986 so there's quite possibly a magical anti-racist learning experience later in the book but I'm not sure I can bothered waiting to see (especially since even if there is I'm still going to have trouble liking her as a protagonist), and googling about to check is more effort than I really feel like. Dammit. I was just thinking yesterday about the difficulty of writing historical/fantasy etc settings without buying into all the classism /racism/sexism etc. But there's dodgy subtext and then there's "LOL RACISM".

EDIT: And googling "racism Kinsale "The Hidden Heart"" got me lots of reviews of the book which happened to have unrelated references to racism elsewhere on the page, including one by oyceter, one of the creators of "International Blog Against Racism Week", though it is from several years ago and I remember her saying she used to be much less aware of this sort of thing. HMM.

My escapist fiction is making me tense

So perhaps watching Dollhouse to distract me from the offensiveness of this novel wasn't the best idea (not that's it's particularly bad so far, for Dollhouse. The season premiere of Lie To Me squicked me more(*). But it's still...Dollhouse-y) And the episode of Xfiles I started watching was about a bunch of carnival freaks and I just didn't have the energy to give it the benefit of the doubt.
( Ranting about this damn book some more )

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