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Back when I introduced the profession of armin in Daughter of Mystery, it was to some extent a means of creating a social context in which Barbara would make sense. It also became an aspect of developing Alpennian society as its own thing. Other societies had a dueling culture. Other societies had systems for guarding the virtue of young unmarried women. Other societies had personal bodyguards. But somehow in Alpennian culture those elements had come together in a recognized profession that acted as proxies for their employers in the public performance of "honor culture."

In Daughter of Mystery, we're introduced to the types of things an armin might be called on to do in a very immediate fashion through Barbara's actions and responses, as well as a passing reference to the consequences of a duel she fought on the baron's behalf. But in Floodtide, Roz hasn't had any interactions with armins on a personal level. She knows stories--probably the same sorts of stories that Iulien elaborated on in her fiction. But where Iulien (and the prior viewpoint characters) engage with armins from a superior social position as potential employers (or at least as the friends of potential employers), Roz comes from a different angle.

In the servants' hierarchy, armins are both very high and functionally outside the usual structures. Roz's first concern is to know how she's supposed to act toward them, her second, to avoid having to do so as much as possible. Because armins are perilous. They don't follow ordinary rules. They're allowed to kill people. And some of them seem like they might enjoy doing so.

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I didn’t know much about armins when I came to Tiporsel House—not about what they really did, just the old stories. The Fillerts hadn’t had an armin. Mostly folks didn’t. Just the titled folks, or maybe unmarried ladies if they were really rich like Maisetra Sovitre was and wanted an armin to protect them from the wrong sort of men. The wrong sort weren’t just rough men from the south side of the river. Sometimes they were men you weren’t supposed to marry, or men who wanted your father’s money more than they wanted you. You heard stories about that sort of thing and they weren’t the sort with happy endings. It’s funny how everyone says an armin’s duty is to protect your honor, but if you’re a girl that means not letting you marry the wrong man and if you’re a man it means fighting duels for silly reasons.

The maisetra’s armin, Marken, reminded me of my father. Papa never got in fights or arguments at the tavern, but he once made a vicious dog back down just by staring at it. I figured Marken would be like that. He’d never even need to draw his sword. He’d just stare at you until you felt foolish and stopped what you were doing. That was the sort of protection Maisetra Sovitre needed: just someone to keep silly men out of her way so she could get her work done.

Then there was Maistir Chamering—the downstairs folk called him Maistir Brandel like he was just a boy. He was the baroness’s cousin, and he wasn’t an armin for anyone yet, just learning. Because he was family, he lived upstairs.

Tavit was a lot younger than Marken and didn’t look much older than Maistir Brandel unless you looked at his eyes. There was something all tight and fierce inside him, like a wildcat you mistook for the neighbor’s tabby until it turned on you. That’s how Tavit made me feel when I bumped into him in dark hallways. Especially if he was all got up for working. It was like, if he picked up his sword he suddenly got even more quiet and watchful and he looked at you like he wanted a reason to stab you. Maybe that was what the baroness needed him for because everyone was still talking about how he’d had to kill a man for her in a duel at the New Year. The last thing I ever wanted was to have him look at me like that.

What I knew about this book going in was that it concerned a young woman and a mechanical chess-playing automaton in the early 19th century. I expected intrigues and hoaxes and--given that I bought it though a lesbian book distributor--some amount of queer identity. What I didn’t expect was a dark psychological thriller that kept me on the edge of my seat right up to the end. This is not a fluffy, feel-good comfort read. It’s a gripping adventure and mystery that left me both satisfied and emotionally wrung out.

All the content advisories: psychological, physical, and sexual abuse, alcoholism, agoraphobia, dissociation, and in case it needs mentioning, this is not a romance novel. (Which sometimes needs mentioning as readers default to expecting lesbian books to be romance.) The sexual abuse is not presented graphically on the page but everything else is.

What grabbed me from the start was the excellence of the writing. Not only is Lawrence’s prose brutally exquisite, but she has the knack of portraying complex psychological experiences without falling back on modern medical terminology that would be out of place in a historic setting. The first-person protagonist, Kit, lets us know from the start that she will be an unreliable narrator. This leaves plenty of space for uncertainty as the plot twists and turns in ways reminiscent of a Sarah Waters novel. The historic details are both sharp and unobtrusive. I highly recommend this book for those who are up to the tension and the depictions of abuse.

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Note: This next discussion isn't part of my book review proper. I vary in whether I look at other reviews before reading a book, so it wasn't until after I'd read the book and written my review that I ran across a couple reviews that interpreted the portrayal of sexual abuse by a woman against a woman to be homophobic. It is certainly true that in a historic context, one of the tropes associated with female same-sex desire is the "predatory lesbian"--the implication that same-sex desire is inherently controling and abusive. Here's my take on that within the context of this story.

This is a story that focuses entirely on female characters, and those characters encompass a number of different personalities and actions. All of the interpersonal interactions in this story--both bad and good--are between women. So the fact that the abuse is from one woman to another doesn't (to me) single out the same-sex aspect as saying something essentialist about same-sex interactions. The story does not set up predatory same-sex desire in contrast to redemptive and positive different-sex desire. (There is no heroic male rescuer waiting in the wings.The background references to heterosexual relationships mostly involve prostitution.) And the one central redemptive and hopeful relationship within the story (being vague to avoid spoilers) is also between two women. Within the context of the story, it is only potentially romantic and is definitely not erotic (and I'd find it implausible it it were immediately erotic, given the character's history) but it's there.

Secondly, the abusive character is pathologically abusive on all axes. The story would be equally horrific if the sexual element were not in play. (And I want to emphasize that the actual details of the sexual abuse are not described, unlike the other aspects.) Her personality is clearly shown to be about control and not about desire, as such. She is not depicted as having same-sex desire lead to abuse, but rather as being an inherently abusive person for whom sexual abuse is only one part of her toolbox.

This is a powerful book and an angry book, but I don't in any way interpret it as a homophobic book.

I've decided to give myself persmission to DNF (did not finish) books if they don't grab me in the first couple chapters (or first couple stories for a collection). With that as preface, you can guess that The Caretaker's Daughter ended up falling in that category. So why didn't it grab me? This is a f/f Regency-era romance featuring the abused wife of a disabled gentleman ("gentleman" as a class label, not a personality description) and a woman who works on her husband's estate (hoping no one notices that the father whose duties she took over has actually died quite some time ago). The first elements that made me realize the book was going to be a tough sell were the cartoonish villainy of the husband (plus the unfortunate trope that physical disability makes you bitter and abusive), plus the fact that both women have been assigned surnames as their given names: Brontë(!) and Addison. I'm not going to apologize for the fact that improbable naming in a historic setting grates on me.

The book could have risen above those flaws and held my attention if the writing were better. Unfortunately it relies heavily on info-dumps and shifts point of view too abruptly on a regular basis. There's also slut-shaming of a secondary female character (apparently for no other reason than that she isn't the love interest but wants to be so). Maybe the book gets better after the first two chapters, but I'm afraid I'm not going to stick around to find out.

The book also features italicization of random half-sentences but that's the publisher's fault, not the author's, since it's clearly a formatting glitch not an intentional technique.

Today, my department at work is taking me out for a lunch celebrating my 15 year anniversary at the company. My plan and goal (knock on wood) is to be here to celebrate my 20 year anniversary and ideally to retire at some point shortly thereafter. I don’t know whether my career path is at all typical of my generation, but it’s certainly different from that of my parents’ generation and feels different from how my younger friends talk about career expectations. So I thought it might be amusing to set out exactly what my work history has been (with all the serial numbers carefully filed off).

When I graduated college with a BS in a life science, my initial thought was to find a job in the same town where the university was located. Something doing research, perhaps. The why is lost to time, but probably it was just a matter of not having a clear idea what to do next and that was one way to narrow the possibilities down to a manageable level. But I was a practical sort, so the first goal was to get a job, any job, to enable me to continue my career search. That’s how I ended up working in fast food. For a month. Not that the job drove me away, but by the end of that month, one of my housemates had recommended me for a position at his workplace, which had the advantage of being 40 hours a week and better pay. And that’s how I ended up working in mobile home construction. I believe that was for six months. I was continuing my more science-oriented job search through it all, but people with life science skills looking for entry level positions are a glut on the market in a university town. So when an opportunity offered itself for a “wanderjahr” in the UK, I decided it was a good opportunity—one I might never have again.

That opportunity involved room and board in exchange for…well, what it was supposed to be in exchange for was not quite what the expectations turned out to be. (Nothing horrible, but lots of emotional labor in addition to the economic productivity.) I’d originally gone thinking I might be there for a year. I stuck it out for two months, after which I still had enough money to do a further month of sightseeing before heading back home. (The job there did not include pay, so this was money saved up from the construction job.)

Heading literally “home” since I defaulted back to my parents’ house at that point. The life sciences job search began anew, but once I’d gotten a sense of the job market, I decided that the best pickings were going to be in the SF Bay Area. Fortunately I had relatives I could stay with there. I think it was about half a year’s searching to find a job. I’ve never been substantially jobless since then. That job was with a small private clinical lab (doing medical testing for doctors unaffiliated with hospitals). Mostly I did “chief cook and bottle washer” work, washing glassware, preparing media in petri dishes, running the blood chemistry analyzer. I also learned phlebotomy (taking blood samples) and did some of the morning rounds of the care homes that we serviced. I have stories. After a couple years there, I realized that the only step up in that organization was to get certified as a medical technician and perform the more complicated analytic work. And that wasn’t quite what I was looking for. So back to job hunting, though not with any urgency.

The first interview I went to, I was offered the position at the end of the interview. I rushed back to give my boss notice (he was about to go on vacation), found a new place to live, and moved, all in the space of two weeks. That job was at a university-affiliated lab where I mostly worked with lab animals. The job lasted a couple years until the lab was defunded, but a former boss had a lead on a position with her new employer (a start-up biotech company) and I barely had to interview before I was hired. This is something of a continuing motif. I seem to be good at making an impression on the people who hire me.

The biotech company gave me opportunities to learn a lot of new lab skills and my second boss there was delighted to have me tackle database projects, SOP writing, and assorted other skill-accumulation opportunities. I enjoyed the work, impressed the management, and even got a company award. I might have been happy to stay there for quite a while, but two things intervened. One was that I’d been thinking more and more about tackling the intellectual challenge of graduate school—not in the life sciences (which is where I would have been steered if I’d done it right out of college), but in linguistics, as an outgrowth of my historic interests. So I’d investigated the possibilities at a local university and was taking some classes through extension to beef up my application. The second thing? I’d been at the biotech company for 7 years when my employer hit a snag in getting their product approved, resulting a quarter of the company getting laid off. I was laid off and laughed all the way through my exit interview because I was getting 6 months’ severance instead of worrying about when to give notice. I had some mild anxiety during the few months between being laid off and getting my grad school acceptance, but in the mean time, personal connections had landed me a job at a small fiction magazine that would be the perfect half-time job to go along with my academics.

The magazine job filled the next three years until I felt my professional development called for switching to student instructor jobs. Those carried me through the remaining (painful, many) years of grad school until I’d maxed out my eligibility for teaching positions, which meant it was time to hand in my dissertation and return to the Real World. I’d entered grad school thinking in terms of an academic career, but during the (*cough* eleven *cough*) years I was in school, the academic job market had shifted from promising to abysmal and I recalibrated my expectations. I was in my 40s, I was part owner of a house, I owned a lot of stuff™ that I didn’t want to be moving every year until I’d racked up enough short-term positions to maybe earn a tenure-track job somewhere. I said goodbye to the dream of academia and for the first time in 20 years found myself seriously worrying about being unemployed.

On the other hand, I had a lot of possible directions to go. I had experience in biotech, in teaching, in publishing, in writing…and after only a couple months of searching, I landed the perfect intersection of those skills: technical writing and editing for the documentation department of a pharmaceutical company. It was a temp job for a crunch project and the contract was up after I’d been there for five months. I liked the location. I liked the work environment. So I asked my agency rep to see if he could find me something else. Evidently my manager told people I walked on water, because I got a call from another manager saying, “I don’t really have time to do interviews, so can you just start next month?” I didn’t worry about asking what the job entailed; I said yes. And that’s how I landed a job that was even more perfect for my skillset and one I never even knew existed. (Discrepancy investigation.) The job turned permanent after four months and that’s what I’ve been doing ever since (with several promotions). There have been a couple times when I've looked into lateral moves in the company, but when it comes down to it, I love what I'm doing and I'm damned good at it.

It’s not as continuous a career path as a previous generation would have expected. It wasn’t until my present job that I had anything resembling a decent retirement plan. And 15 years is more than twice as long as I've been at any other single job. But it’s a more solid path than many of my contemporaries have enjoyed. And having a retirement plan at all is more than most people expect these days. (Retirement planning is on my mind a lot these days.) Those are just the salaried jobs. There’s also been the writing: not high paying, but fairly regular and varied. The thread through it all is broad-based technical knowledge and language skills. Sometimes the emphasis has been on one, sometimes on the other. Being able to combine them ended up being the secret to my success.

It occurs to me, in this month of graduations and students wondering what they'll do with their lives: none of the major turns of my career path are anything I would have (or even could have) predicted that day I stood at the end of a very long line of black-robed graduates to receive my diploma. (They graduated my whole division in a lump, grouped alphabetically by major. My major was Zoology.) You don't need to know what all the branches of your path will be. The important thing is to start walking and be ready for whatever comes your way.