From: shark_hat	Date: May 12th, 2006 09:28 am (UTC)		(Link)

That was really interesting, thanks for pointing to it.

	From: jadelennox	Date: May 15th, 2006 03:21 pm (UTC)		(Link)

I found Bet Me to be a very empowering and subversive story -- within the bounds of what it was, which was a mass-market romance novel. The structure of the romance novel, by definition, ends in the marriage. It wasn't chick lit, it was a genre romance. And within the bounds of what makes a genre romance, it was a story with a fat heroine, with a love story in which the difficulty to overcome was the heroine's poor self image and believe that she had to be something other than what she was to be lovable or desirable. And all that without being ideologically heavy-handed, and instead being funny and lovable and hysterical. To ask why the book ends in heterosexual monogamous marriage is to ask something about the genre, not about the book in particular.

And, ideologically, I think that it is much more effectively subversive from within the genre that it would be if it subverted the genre completely and then became not a book to be read by romance readers.