I found out that my library has a fantasy book club. That sounded like fun. I found out about it a few days before the meeting but I was able to get a copy of the ebook they were discussing from the library. It wasn’t anything I would normally read but I decided to read it and see how the book club went.

The book was A Forbidden Alchemy and it wasn’t my cup of tea. It was **shudder** romantasy (I hate that term). It had all the worst aspects of that genre.

  • instant love
  • a love triangle
  • no really good reason why anyone should like this girl anyway

I find that in these books I tend to be interested for the first half of the book and then after that I just don’t care what happens. I finished it though, in order to go to the meeting.

It wasn’t at the library. It was in a local pub that is very geeky. It has lots of games and fantasy-themed menu items. That was fun. I hadn’t been there before.

Here are the things that I would have brought up in a discussion of the literary merits of the book.

  1. There was a lot of strange casual misogyny. It was enough that I checked twice to make sure that I was correct in thinking that this was written by a woman. Female characters were referred to as whores by male characters who didn’t know them. It was just a casual phrase to demean them. I wouldn’t expect that in writing by female authors. The female characters never spoke up about this. Those male characters did sometimes apologize if they noticed that the female character had a male person who appeared to have an interest in her. To be clear, they apologized to the male person – not to the female person who they called a whore. Again, this was never acknowledged as a problem.
  2. I’d have discussed the love triangle. One pair met during a traumatic day at age 12. The boy remembered her ever since. Ok, I get that. It was burned into his memory. But they haven’t seen each other in over a decade. The other pair was high school boyfriend-girlfriend. That was mostly proximity and then they broke up. But the guy, who did the breaking up, has been pining for her for seven years? Why? This girl pretty much had no personality. Now they are suddenly fighting over her?

The book club meeting wasn’t that fun. It was pretty chaotic. People were talking over each other and having side conversations so you couldn’t hear everything going on. The leader didn’t keep good control of the discussion and keep it on track. The questions were pretty basic – Did you like it? (Resounding no from the group), were there plot holes, etc. Nothing deep or thought provoking.

I don’t know if I’d go back unless it is a very interesting book. Next month’s book doesn’t interesting me. It is some kind of YA-ish fae story. Not my thing.