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baihe_mediaI posted briefly about the historical novel (with a dash of wuxia, but only a dash) Cover Her Face (遮面, pinyin: zhe mian) a little while ago when it started being serialised. When I saw that the author had finished writing it, I decided to give it a go, mainly because (1) I've never read anything by Qing Tang Shuan Xiang Cai before — even though I know I should, given her prominence in the genre — because she primarily writes contemporary romances; (2) this was a rare historical from her; and (3) it was short. On the whole, I enjoyed it, mainly because I went into it expecting something mostly sweet and uncomplicated and this was exactly what I got.
The main couple in this novel are two young women of around twenty: Chu Ye, a jianghu adventurer, and Bai Ning, the daughter of a noble household. At the point the novel begins, Bai Ning's safety has been threatened by one of her father's political opponents, so her family hires Chu Ye as her bodyguard. Chu Ye risks her life rescuing Bai Ning when the latter is abducted, is seriously wounded, and is brought back to the Bai household to convalesce. During this time, a romantic bond between the two girls grows and strengthens. Some obstacles are thrown in their way, and there are a couple of mini-separations, but overall most challenges get resolved very quickly. The focus of the novel is on their relationship, and it's mostly uninterested in things like politics, familial expectations and tensions and wuxia norms, except insofar as they serve as springboards to move the romance forward. The author makes generous use of tropes — Huddling for Warmth/Intimate Healing gets a lot of page time, especially in the first few chapters, which feature the main characters caught in a snowstorm. Both of the main characters are likable, and while the character work is hardly exceptional, you do get enough sense of their differing personalities to root for the romance. Chu Ye has a jobbing jianghu adventurer's forthrightness and lack of pretension, and (especially around Bai Ning) a cute, almost childlike simplicity of manner. Bai Ning is a little more worldly and subtle, but is fundamentally still a sweet, fairly sheltered young woman feeling her way through her first romance. While the author trips up on period-appropriate prose and dialogue at points, and there was some wobbliness over precisely how well or badly one important secondary character was recovering from a particular condition, overall this was an fun, though in some ways somewhat slight, read.
The thing about this book that surprised me: for a contemporary JJWXC novel (bearing in mind that the platform's standards for overly explicit material have been zooming skywards exponentially over the years), it is very sexy. The author captures that sense of horny, youthful first love quite effectively. Once they get together, Chu Ye and Bai Ning are basically incapable of keeping their hands off each other — and not, as in a good few other baihe novels I've read, as some sort of power play or to establish some sort of relationship hierarchy, but simply because they're in love and horny and having tremendous fun fucking each other. There are a lot of lovingly detailed makeout scenes, leading into (because of JJWXC content standards) somewhat less detailed sex scenes — neither too purple, as in Reading the Remnants, nor crudely mechanical, as in a lesbian short story from a collection of SFFH erotica I read recently and wish I could unread. I found myself wishing that the author had a much less restrictive platform to post on, because I'd like to see the full extent of her sex writing abilities.
The novel also features two secondary f/f couples: Yao San/Qing Liu and Chu Lan/Meng Zhu. Yao San is an expert qin-player and Bai Ning's friend, while Qing Liu is a famous courtesan Chu Ye is paid to grudgingly protect halfway through the novel. Qing Liu is a classic high femme gremlin flirt; a bit of a stock type, but rendered fairly effectively here — there's a fun scene where she flirts with Yao San, Chu Ye and Bai Ning in turn, which I promptly screenshotted and sent toyuerstruly while text-screaming. Yao San, by contrast, is less fully realised. I didn't feel I had much of a sense of her as a person outside of her Slap-Slap-Kiss relationship with Qing Liu. Chu Lan, meanwhile, is Chu Ye's older (adopted) sister, also a familiar type: mild and gentle with a hidden core of steel, self-sacrificing and devoted. Meng Zhu is a childhood friend-turned-lover whom Chu Lan broke up with when she (Chu Lan) became blind, but isn't particularly well-drawn either — I couldn't have told you anything about her beyond that and the fact that she's both angry with and devoted to Chu Lan, though that could have something to do with the fact that she had essentially two chapters' worth of page time.
I read the Chinese original of the novel on JJWXC. There are, as far as I know, no English fan translations available.
The main couple in this novel are two young women of around twenty: Chu Ye, a jianghu adventurer, and Bai Ning, the daughter of a noble household. At the point the novel begins, Bai Ning's safety has been threatened by one of her father's political opponents, so her family hires Chu Ye as her bodyguard. Chu Ye risks her life rescuing Bai Ning when the latter is abducted, is seriously wounded, and is brought back to the Bai household to convalesce. During this time, a romantic bond between the two girls grows and strengthens. Some obstacles are thrown in their way, and there are a couple of mini-separations, but overall most challenges get resolved very quickly. The focus of the novel is on their relationship, and it's mostly uninterested in things like politics, familial expectations and tensions and wuxia norms, except insofar as they serve as springboards to move the romance forward. The author makes generous use of tropes — Huddling for Warmth/Intimate Healing gets a lot of page time, especially in the first few chapters, which feature the main characters caught in a snowstorm. Both of the main characters are likable, and while the character work is hardly exceptional, you do get enough sense of their differing personalities to root for the romance. Chu Ye has a jobbing jianghu adventurer's forthrightness and lack of pretension, and (especially around Bai Ning) a cute, almost childlike simplicity of manner. Bai Ning is a little more worldly and subtle, but is fundamentally still a sweet, fairly sheltered young woman feeling her way through her first romance. While the author trips up on period-appropriate prose and dialogue at points, and there was some wobbliness over precisely how well or badly one important secondary character was recovering from a particular condition, overall this was an fun, though in some ways somewhat slight, read.
The thing about this book that surprised me: for a contemporary JJWXC novel (bearing in mind that the platform's standards for overly explicit material have been zooming skywards exponentially over the years), it is very sexy. The author captures that sense of horny, youthful first love quite effectively. Once they get together, Chu Ye and Bai Ning are basically incapable of keeping their hands off each other — and not, as in a good few other baihe novels I've read, as some sort of power play or to establish some sort of relationship hierarchy, but simply because they're in love and horny and having tremendous fun fucking each other. There are a lot of lovingly detailed makeout scenes, leading into (because of JJWXC content standards) somewhat less detailed sex scenes — neither too purple, as in Reading the Remnants, nor crudely mechanical, as in a lesbian short story from a collection of SFFH erotica I read recently and wish I could unread. I found myself wishing that the author had a much less restrictive platform to post on, because I'd like to see the full extent of her sex writing abilities.
The novel also features two secondary f/f couples: Yao San/Qing Liu and Chu Lan/Meng Zhu. Yao San is an expert qin-player and Bai Ning's friend, while Qing Liu is a famous courtesan Chu Ye is paid to grudgingly protect halfway through the novel. Qing Liu is a classic high femme gremlin flirt; a bit of a stock type, but rendered fairly effectively here — there's a fun scene where she flirts with Yao San, Chu Ye and Bai Ning in turn, which I promptly screenshotted and sent to
yuerstruly while text-screaming. Yao San, by contrast, is less fully realised. I didn't feel I had much of a sense of her as a person outside of her Slap-Slap-Kiss relationship with Qing Liu. Chu Lan, meanwhile, is Chu Ye's older (adopted) sister, also a familiar type: mild and gentle with a hidden core of steel, self-sacrificing and devoted. Meng Zhu is a childhood friend-turned-lover whom Chu Lan broke up with when she (Chu Lan) became blind, but isn't particularly well-drawn either — I couldn't have told you anything about her beyond that and the fact that she's both angry with and devoted to Chu Lan, though that could have something to do with the fact that she had essentially two chapters' worth of page time.I read the Chinese original of the novel on JJWXC. There are, as far as I know, no English fan translations available.
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Date: 2023-11-29 08:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-12-01 08:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-11-29 09:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-12-01 08:56 am (UTC)See also 弃仙 (well the first three volumes anyway).
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Date: 2023-12-06 12:27 pm (UTC)Edit: And thanks to this post I just discovered that there are additional chapters focused on QL/YS that I didn't read before? Nice.
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Date: 2023-12-06 10:02 pm (UTC)