You know, I was very careful to say "any prior version" when talking about Ann Rinaldi's creepy, over-sexed version of André because The Traitor's Wife by Alison Pataki is basically an R-rated, worse-written version of Finishing Becca where the heroine is named after a cow, but either one part of this interview is weirdly phrased or Donna Thorland went even harder in Turncoat with André the sexual predator and has him molesting John Cope, who she inexplicably keeps referring to as Caleb. (Caleb was the father. John was the kid. Also André was trying to get Caleb Cope to send John to him in Carlisle, not New York. As soon as André got exchanged, he seems to have completely lost interest in cultivating John Cope's artistic genius. There's no reason to think he ever asked them send him to New York. I think she's either using Thomas Cope's diary or someone who cites Thomas Cope's diary, because Thomas Cope makes it sound like André was in Lancaster until he was exchanged. Note that Thomas Cope was like seven or eight when this was going on and he was writing I think twenty-seven years later after John Cope had just died of something that was probably alcohol-related, so there's stuff he's clearly not remembering correctly.)
Under the cut, I hope, because some people think that humans are way more sex-obsessed than they actually are, and some of those people have somehow managed to get book deals.
I couldn't find "Caleb" or "Cope" (which I had to put in quotes because Google was showing me snippets with the word "deal" in them thanks Google) when I tried searching inside the book, but he has to be in there, otherwise why would she talk about it? I may have to see if the library has a copy because I'm not giving this woman money, but it might piss me off so much that it would be excessively cruel to my mother to read it because then she'll have to listen to me complain for days.
What's particularly unpleasant is that even if he isn't a child-molester, it looks like she went hard on the whole Evil Gay (Depraved Bisexual?) trope, and several reviewers are claiming this is a more realistic portrayal than the older romanticized versions/"how I think of him has completely changed". Um, based on excerpts and reviews, he's seems to be an over-the-top evil secretly gay spymaster in Philadelphia who tries to murder the heroine by drugging her and leaving her in an ice house. Honestly the gay bit is the least unrealistic part here because that's something normal humans do, and it's still wrong.
A lot of the negative reviews are complaining about how rapey this book is, and it's making me think of the terrible Israel Potter novel I did read, which was basically "if James Bond lived during the American Revolution and was written by misogynist porn-addicted incels". (Gone Over? Or maybe that was the first book? Unfortunately there were two of them.) And if you're going "isn't that just James Bond during the American Revolution?", I have read James Bond, and I can tell you, it's not. I actually kind of enjoyed James Bond. These books were awful. By the time André showed up, I was trying to guess whether he would be a depraved pervert like every other male in the book, or gay. I forgot "both" was an option. Fortunately the authors didn't spend unnecessary amounts of time following him to increasingly recherché brothels, like they did with another character who was actually only separated from his wife and kids for like three months before they followed him to Paris in real life, but in this stupid book he's away from them for years because he's too busy watching fake nuns having sex with donkeys.
I don't even remember most of the characters' names. There was Gary Stu; King George III; John André; Depraved Perverts 1-270; Gary Stu's Depraved Pervert Mentor Who Secretly Slept With Gary Stu's Future Faithful Wife; Gary Stu's Convenient Casual Sex Girlfriends Who Get Conveniently Married Off So They Stop Being His Problem; Gary Stu's Lobotomized Faithful Wife Who Forgives Him For Being A Massive Hypocrite About The Fact That She Wasn't A Virgin; Two Million Assorted Whores, Some In Nuns' Costumes; and Squirting Peggy Shippen.
We do get a moment where Gary Stu shows up at Joshua Hett Smith's house and, when André points out the window, there's a bit of narration about how Clinton loves that hand because that's the hand André gives him handjobs with, because this is a completely normal thing to think when you're trying to figure out how to get the plans Benedict Arnold gave André back to New York so the British can capture West Point and win the war. Also, when I say Gary Stu shows up at Joshua Hett Smith's house, I mean he shows up at his house with a boat that he then uses to row himself back to the Vulture, and for some inexplicable reason André still goes back by land with the incriminating papers and gets caught and hanged. I say "some inexplicable reason", but actually I assume it's because André was trying to get himself executed because it was the most effective way of escaping from that horrible book. Sometimes your characters get away from you like that.
Anyway I'm wondering if there's a correlation between authors who think historical realism means straight men were having not-that-consensual sex with women constantly and authors who look at André and think, "Manipulative Bisexual". (Or "Manipulative Homosexual"; six-of-one, half a dozen of the other.) This is partly because I know there was a thing in the mid-20th century about "haha dumb bitch, you think the reason that guy doesn't sexually harass you is because he's gentlemanly and chivalrous, but actually it's because he's gay" and we are really not as far from skeevy early-mid 20th century beliefs about human sexuality as we think we are, and I mean you too, intersectional queer representation tumblr people.
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