Astrid Hawk

I had low expectations, but this was even worse than I expected. I'm not a huge romance reader, but I think every once in awhile it's fun to read one as sort of a guilty pleasure (not that there's anything wrong with being a romance reader, but there's rarely anything with greater meaning in these stories, so I know that picking one up is just for a diversion). Lately, my choices have mostly just shown me what romance readers do and don't like, rather than giving me that fun diversion. This one was a particularly low point, and I'm struggling to understand why genre readers like it enough for it to have higher than a 4 star average on GR.

For a "romantic comedy", there really wasn't much romantic or comedic. The romance was mostly lustful obsession, occasionally punctuated by the characters thinking about how "special" the other person was just to provide some token sense that they weren't just driven by lust (which they absolutely were). The comedy consisted of absurd and wildly uncomfortable scenes that were too awkward and contrived and full of grotesque imagery to be funny. I don't mind spice, but I found myself dreading and wanting to skim past the sex scenes in this book (and there were quite a lot) - they just felt like hindrances for getting on with the story, and they were often cringey. The final conflict in the last 50 pages should have been meaningful, but it was overdone, and because the author wanted a happy ending, the FMC ends up reverting to her vapid, lustful self from the beginning of the book and allows herself to be physically subdued into accepting a resolution to the conflict.

Sadly, would not recommend, even for a known quantity diversion. It's just cringey. Look elsewhere.

I know my 2 star rating is an unpopular opinion, but as this book went on, I found it more and more unsettlingly problematic.

The first issue is that Perez seems to mistake effect for cause - she argues that bias against women is due to a gender data gap. The unstated assumption is that, if this data gap didn't exist, people would actually use the data and solve all problems. In fact, as her endless stream of examples points out, the world's problems that stem from a bias against women (or more accurately, a failure to consider women) are mostly NOT due to a lack of data, but due to the same thing that causes the lack of data - a mostly universal socialized tendency to assume that humanity == male.

Putting the annoyingly contradicting logic aside (because the examples still stand, even if Perez incorrectly identifies the root cause), the problematic aspect of this book is that it reads like a TERF echo-chamber. If you are a cis-woman, trans-exclusionary, and want to feel indignantly and righteously outraged about treatment of those who we label as women, this is definitely the book for you. However, this offers no solutions, no outlet for your anger, so you'll just... I don't know... be thumping your fist on the table going "yeah! someone else said it!" with zero meaningful change. I admit that it's very compelling and easy to get sucked in, but every time I put the book down for a bit between sessions, and reflected on what I'd read, I realized that it's mostly just appealing to its target audience emotionally, telling them what they want to hear, rather than providing truly revelatory information that is useful and actionable.

This book entirely ignores intersectionality, the fact that there are data gaps for non-"white" races even for men, the fact that non-"white" women face even greater blindness bias than most of the situations Perez discusses. (Yes, in some cases she mentions other races specifically - e.g. when discussing stoves available to African households - but in mixed-race or generic examples she makes the same mistake she's railing against - she assumes that all "women" are homogenous, and she's envisioning a white (usually British) woman in that image).

There was an opportunity here, which Perez misses, to discuss the tricky challenge of de-categorizing something that has previously been categorized. It's similar to the topic of racism's relationship to "colorblindness". To be "colorblind" is to keep all your learned prejudices while dismissing the very real differences in history and experience among different racial groups - which in today's culture, usually means just expecting everyone to be "white". Even though the concept of race is artificial, something we invented as a society to divide power and possessions among groups, it's still important to keep tracking it separately so that we can understand the impact of policies, design, technology, etc on ALL those groups, particularly those that have been overlooked and underserved or abused. It's the same with the gender data gap. Even though gender is something we invented as a society, we can't ignore the differences between the genders due to the roles and patterns we've created for them. Perez does argue for gender-disaggregated data, but she doesn't acknowledge the impact here on the broader topic of gender.

There is a brief statement in the beginning of the book that acknowledges that sex and gender are two different things and that gender is a social concept... but then for the rest of the book she constantly conflates the two. She speaks about bias against the female "gender" when she's talking about issues that are directly related to sex (reproductive health, for example), and she occasionally talks about the female sex when she's mentioning issues of gender (which would apply to anyone perceived as female or feminine - such as being "shushed" in a professional setting). She makes zero acknowledgement that it is the concept of gender roles, and particularly binary gender roles, that is the entire problem here.

For all my complaints, I do think the book was well-structured - and it's a good look at how hidden bias makes its way into policy, politics, and technology. But on the whole, I feel it promotes a very very limited view, which, if adopted, would perpetuate the very problem it highlights across other marginalized groups.

This really isn't the fairy tale retelling that many summaries and blurbs say it is. It's really an atmospheric story with some paranormal elements based on folklore. It draws from and combines several northern cultures' stories about Bigfoot, werebears, and other forest man/monster blends. It tries to ask and answer questions about being true to yourself, finding your own way in life, and whether love and our relationships with others can override our own natures. The forest imagery in here was delightful - the smells of the tundra, the tastes of the berries, the feel of cold water and stone. But I found the characters hard to relate to, and the ending was unsatisfying. The last paragraph in particular felt bolted-on.