Faythe’s pride is being embroiled more and more into
vicious werecat politics as her father’s rival will resort to any means to try
and take control of the council. Up to and including dragging them into a war.
There’s something else going on with the Strays as well,
not part of any Pride, they’re often ignored. But when Marc, Faythe’s love
interest, goes missing she is torn between staying with the Pride and looking
for Marc
The plot of this book slightly frustrates me. There are
two interesting plot lines I’d really like to focus on – the political
shenanigans of the werecat council as an alpha does his very best to overrule
Greg and replace him as head of the council by any means necessary. The second
is the plot line of Pride cats apparently doing odd things to Stray cats and
tracking them. I have no idea why, given that any Stray can pretty much be
murdered and no-one actually cares. Those are interesting plot lines
Instead we focus far more on Faythe trying to find Marc
who has gone missing. I don’t care. I don’t like Marc. I’ve never liked Marc. I
think Marc’s relationship with Faythe has just been so very terrible for so
very long. If he dropped out of the series entirely I’d be much much happier.
So a storyline all about finding him? Not really something I’m going to focus
on.
I’m going to have to repeat a lot of what I said in the
last book in this series. It’s not exactly bad or even problematic – if we
ignore everything that has come before it.
I can almost feel the author desperately trying to
rewrite those previous books. I’m almost certain that if there was a way to go
back in time and change them the author would. We can see the narrative they
want to tell:
Faythe lives in a misogynist society but is lucky to be
born in the very progressive Pride who is trying to walk back a lot of the
worst abuses of their society – both against women and against Strays. Greg,
her father, understands the science and realities and has every faith in his daughter
being a capable ruler and taking over after him. Faythe was very young in the
first book, naïve, unaware of how good she had it and full of childish
rebellion. But she learned from her mistakes and is continuing to grow and
learn and mature (even if, even in the last book, Faythe proved herself to be
completely incapable of controlling her tongue for five damn seconds). And now
she has grown and is still frustrated but she and her dad are fighting the good
fight. Not only are they fighting the good fight, but Faythe has learned and
grown and is even a moderating influence on her father when he starts to make
rash and emotional decisions
Yes, Faythe has grown enough that she is stepping up as leader and being responsible for her Pride and bravely standing up to her father. She’s also being a kind, wise and gentle guidance to Kaci, the werecat “Tabby” they’ve taken in as well as supporting Manx, the abused Tabby who is now on trial for the murders she committed while on the run and afraid.
Manx’s own story is a painful one with every part of what
it means to face the judgement of these Pack Leaders and what they did to her.
It’s actually really insightful in looking at what the implications of
helplessness mean for a woman like Manx who has been abused on top of her now
being so dependent on the patriarchal society of the werecats for her
protection. Especially when we have the big bad of this book effectively trying
to take over werecat society by controlling the rare females; the big bad is
defined by making the decisions of the women for them
Honestly, it’s an amazing improvement over the previous
books – here’s where the misogyny of the society is being actively challenged. Here
is where we see a female protagonist actually stepping up and being capable, a
moderately good leader (not an awesome one – her decisions are overly
self-focused and not perfect – but they’re still more than reasonable) and
actively challenging the problems of that society. The prejudice is called out
and challenged
Yes, it’s pretty amazing to think these are the same
books
Yet they are the same books so we have problems here.
Faythe continually comparing her behaviour to Kaci’s and how she was such a
foolish child is a terrible recap of the previous books. You can’t re-write
the bullshit of the first books like this. Faythe was locked up, Faythe was
kidnapped, Faythe was caged for not obeying. Faythe was groomed – by her own
father – and all but forced into a relationship while being constantly guilted
every step along the way. This happened, it was terrible, it was awful and it’s
only made worse by pretending this was all just Faythe’s immature acting out.
It’s terrible that we’re still treating Marc as her true love forever more
without any acknowledgement of the problems from before – or even treating
Faythe as the one at fault.
It doesn’t change the inherent problem of the world
building. There’s no reason why the werecats would only produce a few female
children. It makes no biological sense – in fact, with Faythe insisting that sisters
are pretty much impossible, I can’t see why the werecats aren’t going extinct.
This whole world building – on top of the plot – turns
most of the women in this series into objects to be possessed. That’s literally
all Kaci exists to be – an object lesson and something to possess. The same
applies to Manx, she isn’t a character she’s an object to be fought over. A
being that exists to show how terribad the other werecat alphas are. The only
other woman we see is Faythe’s mother who does very little except be super sad
and cook. The other female alphas are almost non-existent. The other female
members of the prides are almost non-existent. There are no female characters
in this book beyond Faythe. We have Faythe. We have the two Learning Objects to
be Possessed and we have background female-shaped spaces.
There’s another element that this book tries to address
but kind of fails – Faythe insists that her pride and her father, Greg, treat the
Strays (werecats who are created not born) far better than the other prides.
She even talks about respecting the civil rights of Strays. But… except for
Marc (her designated love interest), we see zero sign of this. She is outraged
that someone is tracking the Strays – but she herself is quite willing to beat
a Stray half to death when questioning him and we saw the same thing in the
last book as well. There’s no respect for civil rights here, it’s ridiculous to
even claim it. I think this is the underlying issue of this book, maybe this
series: just because you SAY it’s so, doesn’t mean it IS so.
And it only makes it worse that every Stray they show any
kind of compassion for turns out to be evil in some way. This is a problem,
again, which this series loves – the narrative is designed to reinforce the
prejudice of the characters within it.
This book also kind of makes an improvement over the
previous books’ treatment of race: the only POC is Marc who is latino and it’s almost
never relevant in the book. How is this an improvement? Uh – remember the spicy
accent? Sadly some books are so terrible that erasure is an improvement.
Similarly I continue to be kind of grateful this series has not inflicted
itself on LGBTQ characters so far.
In the end I am torn. On the one hand I think this book
would be vastly better if the previous books didn’t exist. If the previous
books hadn’t established such an awful back story that this book is now saddled
with then this would be a much better and much less problematic story. On it’s
own this book isn’t so bad at all, it’s certainly not even remotely as problematic
– but it has the millstone of Stray
and Rogue
dragging it down and a whole lot of bullshit it is trying to justify. At the
same time, I have to question if I would have been as positive about this book
if I didn’t go into it with a cringe on my face waiting for the awful to
happen. It still has problems – erasure, lack of meaningful female characters,
completely unnecessary sexist world building – but feels like a vast
improvement because it’s not Stray or
Rogue.
