I've finished book #3 of my Sapphic Book Bingo, One Walk in Winter by Georgia Beers. But because of the intense effect the book had on me, I decided I needed to handle the review portion differently than I have been for the other books.
One Walk in Winter is what most would probably call a "comfort romance", a romance that is written specifically to avoid any situations that the reader may find overly unsettling or upsetting. Any injustices the characters experience, or fights they get into, are relatively small and are resolved by the end of the story. There is nothing obviously immoral about any of the characters or the world they live in, at least not in any way that has any lasting impact.
The problem with this very concept, though, is that it has to make assumptions about what a "moral, conflict-free world" even looks like. It has to normalize certain behaviors as fundamentally ethical in and of themselves, it has to normalize certain thoughts and feelings as being too inherently problematic to be worth including. It has to send a message about how a "pure" world is defined and curated, by the hand of an omnipotent author or otherwise.
The idea that this can be done is already inherently disconcerting to me. Seeing an author actually go through with it ended up being upsetting for me in ways that wholly contradict the original intention of a "comfort romance". That said, I don't think the book failed at achieving what the average person most likely expects from a comfort romance--just that I think what I've discovered is I find the entire premise of the genre to be self-defeating in the worst way possible.
As such, I am not sure that I'm qualified to judge the book on its individual merits. My immediate reaction is only to criticize the more general concept that it embodies, using the book only as my main example of that idea because it is what I am most immediately familiar with.
This post is relatively light on spoilers for the book, except that it makes allusions to how the ending is resolved. Personally I feel like the ending could be guessed from the beginning of the book, so I do not consider it to be a major spoiler. I also don't think I'm going to write anything else that constitutes a "spoiler-free review" of the book, so if you wanted anything like that, you're going to have to make do with the following rant instead.
What is the central appeal?
Broadly speaking, a piece of fiction is either a parallel to reality or an escape from reality; or, more accurately, it is some combination of both. Let's focus on the idea that this book aims to be more of an escape from reality. In these cases, I tend to reframe a work as being focused on the joy of exploring or indulging in a particular emotion or combination of emotions. What is that for this book?
When I seek out the things I enjoy in a work, my first inclination is to focus on characters, their emotions and their relationships. Well, the characters in this book certainly have emotions. But in the interests of remaining uncomplicated, it never explores those emotions too deeply. Relationships are also not especially complex, most characters doing no more than exchanging pleasantries with each other, with only the occasional tidbit of worldly wisdom thrown in. Even the relationship between the two protagonists never really goes deeper than "they are both vaguely nice and find each other incredibly hot." The character with the most emotional development is Hayley's dad, and we'll come back to him later.
The next thing I look for in a work is mystery and intrigue. Well, there's not much of that here, either. Yes, a conflict is introduced for our characters at the beginning of the book, and it is resolved at the end of the book, but it is in a way can be predicted at the beginning of the book. This in itself is not a criticism; I assume it's meant to be part of the appeal of a comfort book, and it's one I'm okay with. But it leaves me without any of the stuff I usually want to see in a story, which means my next step is to try to figure out what the book is using as the central appeal. If it's not relationships, emotions, mystery, or intrigue, what's left?
The conclusion I eventually reached is this: Everything in this book would look great on a postcard.
Picture-Perfect Beauty
In the introduction to the book, Georgia Beers writes, "I am no stranger to winter. [...] It can be poignant, make you look inward. But could it be life-altering? I decided I wanted to find out." So from the beginning, I was approaching this book with the idea that its central theme had to do with winter itself, and I was wondering how that would be represented. This is how I eventually landed on the "postcard" idea.
Every place in this book is beautiful. Characters walk with their dogs through forests during snowfall. They work at high-class resorts with delicious food. They visit colorful, vibrant clubs. They walk on trails adorned with sculptures from local artists. And of course, they spend bright and cozy Christmas dinners with their families.
The book does successfully represent this imagery well, and it spends a fair bit of page space giving you the opportunity to soak it all in. It was easily the most "wintry" thing about the book for me, so I have to assume that it's the main thing that Beers was going for in putting the book together. The book isn't so much about the characters in the story as it is about being able to imagine the coziness of being part of the world they inhabit.
Nonetheless, a postcard isn't fully effective unless the subjects of the photo know how to take their respective places within the photo, so it's all framed cleanly and gives the proper impression of beauty and coziness. Similarly, the cast of the story plays its part in creating that coziness.
Well-Oiled Machinery
Our two protagonists, Hayley and Olivia, work as manager and assistant manager of a resort and spa. As such, most of the book's time is spent inside this resort. To maintain that beautiful atmosphere, there's a lot of workers that need to keep the place operating full-speed, and they do.
Olivia knows all of her employees by name, and we see most of them interact with her throughout the book. Staying on top of things, responding to issues as they come up. Reassuring Olivia and the reader that they have everything under control, ma'am. As further reassurance, we get the occasional paragraph describing how busy everyone is, and how long and hard they work. There is a small passage describing how the reason Olivia is close to her two BFFs is because all three of them make sure to work on Saturdays.
Even outside the realm of work, we have characters fulfilling other kinds of duties. Namely, the duties of family members. Olivia's mom goes out of her way to make sure everyone's taken care of for the holidays, and she makes sure that Olivia's being properly nice and polite to everyone. Hayley's dad and brothers keep touch with Hayley to make sure she's being as responsible at work as she should be. Olivia's siblings keep things lively with playful competition and reminders of childhood memories.
Nearly everyone in the book is defined entirely by the job or role that they fulfill. Nothing outside of that.
What postcards represent to me
I come from a family that loves Christmas and postcards. Well, my extended family more than my nuclear family. But the point is, it seems to me like it's heavily rooted in a culture of Protestantism. And a big part of the Christmas tradition for Protestants, along with the tradition for every other part of the year, is keeping up appearances. Postcards are a great way to do that; a perfect snapshot of a perfect moment in time, of a perfect family. A representation of how skilled everyone is at taking their respective place, fulfilling their respective role.
It is through this same culture that I heard of something that happened to a woman--someone I'm kind of associated with, but I don't know well personally, so this is just something I heard about third-hand. But my understanding is that she fell in love with a guy at some point, and dated him for about a year or so, but her parents weren't too keen on the guy. They pressured her into giving up on the relationship, and so she did.
In his place, her parents instead recommended/encouraged her to date a guy that fit the church's values more closely. So she did, and--again, I heard about this third-hand, but--my understanding is that he was abusive to her. It eventually got to be too much for her, so she broke up with him. And then she went back to the original guy she fell in love with and married him instead.
I got a postcard from this woman, her parents, and her husband, with all four of them in the photograph (and maybe a few other family members, I don't remember). So what I've refrained from saying up to this point is that this woman and her family are white, but her husband is black. The photo, which I have to assume was taken by a professional photographer, is clearly framed with the expectation that everyone in the photo is going to be white. The clothes are all white, the background is all white, the people are all white except for this one guy. He stands out, blatantly.
I couldn't help but think about that postcard when I was reading this book with its own postcard-perfect moments. How important postcards are to some people and their lives, how they live their lives around being able to recreate postcards and convince other people that they live perfect, unblemished lives. How they focus on this instead of making their actual lives better. How they work hard to prevent anyone from coming into their lives who might throw their postcards off-balance, instead of redefining how their postcards look as a whole so that those new people look more like they belong in them.
The Protestant Work Ethic
As I said, nearly everyone in this book is defined entirely by their job or the role that they fulfill. Another thing I learned from being raised in a Protestant culture is that this is considered the ideal way for a person to define themselves, or present themselves to others.
I know from more personal experience that it is one of the more emotionally destructive ways for a person to live. Because what does it mean for you, to do your best to remove your own individuality for the sake of more efficiently serving what others expect from you, based on external roles that somebody else made up rather than anything that has anything to do with you as an individual person?
It's not that I don't believe in holding a role and fulfilling the responsibilities of that role. A person's identity is certainly made up of several roles and relationships that are important to them. But that's the thing: several roles and relationships, not just one. And a person is still an individual outside of those roles and relationships, and a person deserves to have time dedicated to fulfilling these more unique parts of themselves as much as any role they may fulfill.
And I firmly believe that it is this individual aspect of a person that makes them better at fulfilling whatever other roles they may fulfill. Like, say you have a brother that you're close to. He may be a brother, but this specific brother is your brother. What's significant is not the generic relationship of support and/or competition that comes from anyone having a brother, it's how your specific brother chose to approach that kind of relationship, what unique traits he brought to it, for his personal sake and for your sake. That's what makes it a special and fulfilling relationship.
And that kind of thing is very much what's missing from the characters in this book. All of them are fulfilling the generic expectations that one might have of a worker or family member in these types of environments. But none of them go beyond that. Which, to me, means the book completely ignores what makes any of those roles and duties actually meaningful when they are fulfilled. It's just checking things off a checklist for the satisfaction of completing a checklist, nothing more.
And this unquestioned dedication to duty is a major contributing factor to another big issue.
Once again, the problem is capitalism
This book treats capitalism as an inherent good. This is offensive to me, and if it's not already offensive to you, I doubt this review of a lesbian romance book is going to convince you otherwise. But I'm going to harp on this point anyway.
From my perspective, the primary conflicts experienced by both protagonists in this book are problems intrinsic to capitalism. Let's take them one at a time.
Olivia has been working her ass off as assistant manager to the Evergreen Resort and Spa for over seven years. She fell in love with the resort at a young age and wants to make it better, wants everyone staying and working at the resort to feel pampered and happy. But she can't, because the actual managers at the resort don't know what they're doing. Olivia has to do all their actual work for them, and when it comes to communicating new ideas to corporate, the actual managers won't do that part and corporate won't acknowledge any of Olivia's ideas.
Hayley is the new manager of the Evergreen Resort and Spa, and she doesn't even want to be there. She doesn't know what to do with herself, she's mourning her mother, she doesn't have any actual experience with management. But her dad forces her into the open manager position at the Evergreen under the threat of cutting her off from financial support, all in order to try to teach her some vague lesson about what it means to take responsibility for herself.
So note here that Hayley gets the manager position due to nepotism, and she's unqualified for the position. Olivia, however, doesn't even know that it's due to nepotism, because Hayley's dad asks her to work under a pseudonym. Olivia does know that Hayley is unqualified, and she's mad about it, but she blames Hayley for it rather than the people at corporate who actually made the decision to hire her.
To make things even worse, Hayley's dad--the CEO--is already expecting the Evergreen to fail in the near future. The Evergreen has been losing profits over time due to mismanagement. Instead of improving management in order to give the resort a chance, Hayley's dad is instead putting his own daughter at the head of it to push it over the cliff in order to make some kind of point.
So let's summarize: Because people cannot live without working under capitalism, Hayley is being forced to take the only job available to her from her personal connections, even though it doesn't fit her skillset or what makes her happy. People who want the position and who would be skilled enough to work it are being ignored due to inefficient hiring practices and a disconnect between upper management and actual workers on the ground floor. CEOs are flippantly making decisions that affect the employment status of dozens or hundreds of workers, purely based on personal whims, purely because they're in an untouchable position. And all of this is being leveraged to set workers against each other rather than the people on top who are responsible for enforcing it.
Does the book ever acknowledge that maybe it's the underlying structure of the system that's at fault for all these problems? No. It's all just unfortunate coincidence, ultimately resolved when daddy steps in and fixes everything at the end.
I hate this. I hate that this is being framed as normal and acceptable. I hate that the book continuously frames it as the ultimate morality for the characters to work hard to continue to support this system. Hayley's consistently made fun of and criticized for not working hard enough. Olivia stresses herself out working herself to the bone without getting the credit she deserves for it, and all she really gets in return is the occasional advice from her friends to let herself live a little--but she still gets praise and encouragement to keep working as hard as she works, too, with more emotional labor on top of that.
I sense an inherent disconnect from the author about how this system affects people. Olivia's mom is a single mom of three kids, working as a dentist, and she's described as having a "middle-class income". After spending a six-day work week doing the job of two managers at a resort (while training the new manager, who has never managed before), Olivia announces to her friends that she has too much energy and needs to blow off some steam.
On the other hand, I found it very relatable when I got the point where Olivia is hit so hard from a sense of betrayal and unfair life circumstances that she escapes into a supply closet to cry for a while, only to demean herself for not working hard enough, forcing her tears to stop so she can go back to fulfilling her duties. Because there's nothing else a person can do to reaffirm their own value except work, right?
It's obvious the book doesn't view the system as the problem, because as stated, everything is resolved due to a change of heart from the CEO. Everything's resolved from the top-down, as it is expected to work under a capitalist system. The problem wasn't inherent to the structure of management, it was inherent to individual managers not doing their jobs properly. We just had to wait for Dad to get a stern talking-to from his secretary about being more honest with his own feelings, and all of a sudden he regretted every unfair action he'd taken towards his daughter and employees. Just like CEOs in real life!! JUST LIKE CEOS IN REAL LIFE!!!!
This CEO got more emotional development than any of the other characters in the book, including the two protagonists. The person most representative of capitalism got the most humanization out of anyone. I feel like that speaks to the book's promotion of capitalism as much as anything else does.
Is this an immoral fantasy?
It offends me that this book prioritizes unquestioned capitalism for the explicit purpose of reducing complex individualism. It is impossible for me to look at this book and what it frames as being a comfortable, beautiful world, and not see the resulting implicit judgments of how people live their lives in real life. The judgments of people who prioritize their personal lives over their jobs, who don't operate at maximum capacity whether due to preference or physical limitation, who don't dedicate themselves to pleasing CEOs and stockholders who will never know or care who they are as people.
All the same, because I am queer, I don't like judging people for the personal fantasies that they have. I admit I really struggled with that fact when reading this book, though. I'm still struggling with it. I have no idea what kind of person is capable of suspension of disbelief on a level where they're able to take comfort in the world built by this story without also believing that this kind of mistreatment of workers, or encouragement of people to eliminate their individuality, is acceptable in reality.
But I have to acknowledge that it might be possible. After all, it is also true that, in the book's world, there is never any questioning of the idea that a woman can fall in love with another woman. No one bats an eye at it. Everyone's happy to see it. Even the CEO. This, too, is part of the intended comfort of the setting.
So I will instead say that, like many fantasies, I can only accept this as an okay fantasy if any person indulging in it is aware that it would be a lot more complicated and potentially harmful if it took place in actual reality. There are many other fantasies like that; violent power fantasies, dangerous sex fantasies. Perhaps a simple winter rom-com seems too mundane to fit in that kind of category, but I really don't think it is. Do not accept this book's world uncritically. There are many people out there who would take advantage of such a fantasy to hurt you and people you love.
And above all else, what I can say with absolute certainty is that this is not a kind of fantasy that's appealing to me. I take much more comfort in a world that allows its emotions to be unique and complex. I do not find this distressing; I see it as allowing me to stretch and flex my own emotions, sort of a form of release through exercise. And it reassures me that people with complicated emotions are accepted as part of the world.
As such, I'm probably going to let this book fill in my "low-angst" slot on the Bingo card, and then I'm going to try to avoid books with the "low-angst" tag where I can. This "low-angst" book gave me way more angst than most "high-angst" works ever have.
I'm not afraid of angst. I'm afraid of people who are against the idea of angst.