A review by sefkhet
Troubled Blood by Robert Galbraith
slow-paced
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
2.0
Right, I own this because I'd paid for it on pre-order before JKR showed her transphobic ass to the degree she has done lately. I've offset this as much as I can by donating double the cost of the book to Mermaids.
I have read the whole thing, and I can say with confidence that it did not need to be 927 pages long. Indeed, I have tagged what otherwise would be a fairly fast-paced book as slow-paced because it did not need to be 927 pages long.
I will also say up front that the best character in the whole book is Wolfgang, the dog.
I've given it two stars because I like Strike and Robin, and because I think this has the fundamental building blocks of a story that would have been great in the hands of a different writer. I've liked Strike and Robin since The Cuckoo's Calling, which I read before anyone knew who Robert Galbraith was. I was pleased when Robin got shot of Matthew midway through Lethal White (not least because three and a half books is quite long enough for any woman to haul a plot device around as if it's a small grenade), and although Robin's character development in this book is fairly predictable, it isn't entirely bad.
On the other hand, the regression of a number of the other long-standing women characters in the book in support of Robin's character development is teeth-grindingly awful. So far as Strike is concerned, Robin's chief asset has always been that she is Not Like Other Women, and that is a casually misogynist viewpoint that I'll forgive Strike on the grounds that the main person he tends to be comparing her to is his ex-fiancee. In the previous books, I've had no difficulty reading it as Strike's viewpoint, mainly because the previous books have featured women in the supporting cast who have not been written as stereotypes or as foils for Robin. Ilsa, Vanessa, and Linda have sacrificed their personalities in this book and I don't even know why.
The narrative is filled with casual bigotry -- against women, against fat people, against women of colour, against people with regional accents. The narrative is in third-person omniscient, so take from that what you will. When the narrative in the later Harry Potter books was full of holes, we forgave it because it was written from the point of view of a canonically oblivious teenage boy. She doesn't have that excuse here.
The transphobic dogwhistle of an A-plot that was the subject of so much of the advance publicity is pointless, given that it's entirely about the dangers of cisgender men rather than trans women. (I suspect the author sees neither the irony nor the nuance.) It didn't need to be included, and the story itself would have lost nothing at all and would have needed to be changed not at all if it had never been mentioned.
And that's without getting into the factual errors, the continuity errors, and the pages upon pages of fully transcribed interviews full of ellipses and difficult-to-read phonetically-spelled regional accents that just aren't needed.
The really disappointing thing is that the resolution to the murder is actually well set up and satisfying and creepy, but by the time we got to it I'm not sure I cared anymore. Also,
I have read the whole thing, and I can say with confidence that it did not need to be 927 pages long. Indeed, I have tagged what otherwise would be a fairly fast-paced book as slow-paced because it did not need to be 927 pages long.
I will also say up front that the best character in the whole book is Wolfgang, the dog.
I've given it two stars because I like Strike and Robin, and because I think this has the fundamental building blocks of a story that would have been great in the hands of a different writer. I've liked Strike and Robin since The Cuckoo's Calling, which I read before anyone knew who Robert Galbraith was. I was pleased when Robin got shot of Matthew midway through Lethal White (not least because three and a half books is quite long enough for any woman to haul a plot device around as if it's a small grenade), and although Robin's character development in this book is fairly predictable, it isn't entirely bad.
On the other hand, the regression of a number of the other long-standing women characters in the book in support of Robin's character development is teeth-grindingly awful. So far as Strike is concerned, Robin's chief asset has always been that she is Not Like Other Women, and that is a casually misogynist viewpoint that I'll forgive Strike on the grounds that the main person he tends to be comparing her to is his ex-fiancee. In the previous books, I've had no difficulty reading it as Strike's viewpoint, mainly because the previous books have featured women in the supporting cast who have not been written as stereotypes or as foils for Robin. Ilsa, Vanessa, and Linda have sacrificed their personalities in this book and I don't even know why.
The narrative is filled with casual bigotry -- against women, against fat people, against women of colour, against people with regional accents. The narrative is in third-person omniscient, so take from that what you will. When the narrative in the later Harry Potter books was full of holes, we forgave it because it was written from the point of view of a canonically oblivious teenage boy. She doesn't have that excuse here.
The transphobic dogwhistle of an A-plot that was the subject of so much of the advance publicity is pointless, given that it's entirely about the dangers of cisgender men rather than trans women. (I suspect the author sees neither the irony nor the nuance.) It didn't need to be included, and the story itself would have lost nothing at all and would have needed to be changed not at all if it had never been mentioned.
Spoiler
And in the end, after spending half of the book and what feels like half my life on it, it isn't even the A-plot.And that's without getting into the factual errors, the continuity errors, and the pages upon pages of fully transcribed interviews full of ellipses and difficult-to-read phonetically-spelled regional accents that just aren't needed.
The really disappointing thing is that the resolution to the murder is actually well set up and satisfying and creepy, but by the time we got to it I'm not sure I cared anymore. Also,
Spoiler
for a series that is so quick to armchair diagnose psychosis, we definitely skip over the fact that even the most disinterested of armchair diagnosticians would have recognised that at least part of -- by no means all of, but still -- the murderer's motive is that she has Munchausen's by proxy.I find myself wondering what the BBC might do with this, when they get there. There's a lot of scope for them to tell it better.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Rape and Violence
Moderate: Transphobia, Sexism, Misogyny, and Fatphobia