Laura's Reviews > The Sword-Edged Blonde

Eddie LaCrosse, in keeping with "noir detective" tradition, is a cynical loner with a tragic past he'd rather forget. Also in keeping with tradition he is forced to confront that past when an old friend asks for his help. In general, it's a promising start to a story attempting to be a Raymond Chandler-meets-Fritz Leiber mash-up; unfortunately what could have been an interesting experiment failed for me because of the exclusionary feeling of the world Bledsoe created.

Bledsoe is a male author writing as a male protagonist, which is all well and good except the world he has created only allows female charcters to exist as defined by the degree of their victimization by, and attractiveness to, men. I struggled with using that description because it is all too easily dismissed as a "feminist rant", but in a book where the female characters are two rape victims, an underage princess on the run from her abusive father, two prostitutes who have been tortured by their pimp, a burn victim who literally lives underground because of her scars, a beautiful amnesiac found naked in the forest, and a bi-sexual goddess who tritely declares "all women are goddesses" (gag!) before having sweaty sex with Eddie, there isn't much room for quibbling. None of the women have any power in their own lives or take any active role in the plot and the only normal, apparently happy woman in the book is married, has five children, and barely any dialogue. Oh, and Eddie is careful to point out that she is still sexually attractive, even after all those kids. In addition, a man guilty of two counts of attempted rape is excused as being a "good man" who is "capable of love" except when he drinks, and the victim takes personal responsibility for his violence because she made the "mistake" of giving him alcohol in the first place. And that doesn't even take into account the incredibly transparent plot setup that forces Eddie to pin a naked, imprisoned woman to a bed and "separate her legs" against her will when a brief conversation might have substituted. Yuck.

Even a single three-dimensional female character could have saved this book from being an all-male club with a "no girls allowed" sign on the door. A character to identify with would have allowed female readers to feel involved in the story but as it is I felt pushed to the side by Bledsoe's refusal to portray a woman as anything other than an accessory to a man's life.

I really hesitated about this review, because I don't think Bledsoe was trying to write a book that only appealed to male readers, but in the end, although there are some very clever moments - such as when Eddie returns to his horse to find a parking ticket tucked under the saddle - my general impression was that the entire book was written by a gifted fifteen year old boy who never had a real conversation with anyone female.