Brilliant idea but slightly flawed

Two of them, actually – two of the books I’ve just been reading are Melissa Marr’s bestselling YA fantasy Wicked Lovely, and Flow: The Cultural Story of Menstruation, by Elissa Stein, Susan Kim, and they’re rather surprisingly alike. Both are brilliant inversions of common ideas: in the former case, the idea that the hero and heroine must end up together, romantically, in a fairy tale; in the latter case, the idea that menstruation is too yucky to talk about and that all women hate it equally.

I’d recommend either to other readers, most especially teenaged girl readers, but I’d include a caution with either recommendation – the same caution, because the books are even more alike in their flaws. The biggest flaw I see in both is a tendency to over simplify history; if I believed either book entirely I’d believe that all women were meek and cowed until modern times (in the case of the fantasy, I’d limit that to human women) and no woman ever had good sex until very recent times. That’s even more odd since both books make the point clear that all modern women aren’t alike in their dreams, goals, desires or dislikes.

In Wicked Lovely, I have a hard time believing that culture has changed so much that simply being a modern woman saves Aislinn from the same games that faery courts have been playing for millennia. (I also have some trouble believing that her grandmother, so protective when it comes to magical menace, has no concerns about Aislinn staying out all night or sleeping over with a boy her grandmother hasn’t even met.)

In Flow, of course I do believe that former laws, cultures, and menstrual products were hugely restrictive for women; what I don’t believe is that all places and all times in the past were almost equally terrible for women nor that no woman ever had good sex (or had an orgasm that wasn’t medically prescribed and ickily clinical) until the sexual revolution of the 1960s. I don’t think the authors are quite intending to make those points, but their history is so simplified that’s the impression given. For a couple more examples, “adam” in Hebrew is related to both earth and blood, but it’s a bit simplified to call it “bloody clay”, and that barbers instead of doctors did bloodletting is not a statement of barbaric brutality in itself, but of the fact that barbers were the nearest thing to doctors that most people could afford to see. (Bloodletting itself might have been barbaric and probably killed more than it cured; I’m only arguing against the idea that the fact that barbers did it is especially telling.)

So in summary, both books: brilliant, well worth reading. Just keep your critical faculties engaged while you’re in them.