…About some dude running around with the power to pull fictional objects from books into reality and thereby preventing book magicians [libriomancers] from duking it out with vampires and thus exposing magic to the world. Entertaining and intellectually easy, this passably written trilogy opener contained some cool ideas [magic via books!] that were under-served by the pedestrian prose.

I was interested and somewhat pleased to note that the protagonist’s partner and love interest, Lena, an extremely tough dryad, was explicitly written as fat, bi/queer and polyamorous [with varying degrees of success depending on the trait], but apparently this blew a few fuses in other readers’ heads. On Amazon, for example, “RG” describes Lena as “a rubenesque nubian dryad, in other words a chubby black woman who sleeps in a tree.” I think “RG” thinks that this is a bad thing, as “RG” then proceeds to go off on a tangent of racist, anti-fat misogyny. There are indeed problematic aspects in Lena’s characterization [which I may get into when it is not half past midnight]; however, the mere presence of a fat woman of color who sleeps in a tree is not axiomatically grounds for derisive excoriation.

Fortunately, in the next comment, J. Platte takes “RG” to task for the misogynist, anti-poly assumptions in the post, but fails to rebuke the egregious racism.

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