SHIBBOLETH, n. This (definitely not Romance!) word came up this week when my husband was trying to come up with a way to say “dog whistle”—a call that can only be heard by a certain group—that wasn’t so strongly associated with racism in US politics.
A shibboleth is like a dog whistle in that it’s a word or phrase that identifies its speaker, but instead of being a secret call to likeminded people, it’s a way to trip up outsiders.
“Shibboleth” comes from Biblical Hebrew שִׁבֹּלֶת / שיבולת, which means “stream, torrent” (as a feminine noun) and “ear of wheat” (as a masculine noun—though the singular is identical). Neither of those meanings is important to the story in Judges 12:5-6 that gives us the English usage. The story is all about phonetics:
5 Then the Gileadites took the fords of the Jordan against the Ephraimites. Whenever one of the fugitives of Ephraim said, “Let me go over,” the men of Gilead would say to him, “Are you an Ephraimite?” When he said, “No,” 6 they said to him, “Then say Shibboleth,” and he said, “Sibboleth,” for he could not pronounce it right. Then they seized him and killed him at the fords of the Jordan. Forty-two thousand of the Ephraimites fell at that time. (New Revised Standard Version)
So the Ephraimites can’t pronounce “sh” and that’s how the Gileadites identify them for purposes of slaughter. The Wikipedia entry for “shibboleth” has a distressing list of examples when people have used pronunciation as a cue for massacres. “Shibboleth” is not really an upgrade from “dog whistle” if you’re looking for a word free of troubling history. Our desire to sort people into the in-group and the out-group is so often ugly.
It’s not always ugly, though. In modern usage, “shibboleth” isn’t necessarily a single code word. It might be a way of speaking or a set of customs—anything that identifies you as a member of a group. A hanky code. A rose emoji in someone’s twitter handle. An inside joke. A certain style of Internet Capitalization. People use these things to find their communities.
Writing this passage reminded me of this wonderful Michael Chabon essay about going to fashion week with his thirteen-year-old son Abe:
Abe had not been dressing up, styling himself, for all these years because he was trying to prove how different he was from everyone else. He did it in the hope of attracting the attention of somebody else—somewhere, someday—who was the same. He was not flying his freak flag; he was sending up a flare, hoping for rescue, for company in the solitude of his passion.
Identifying yourself makes you vulnerable, but it’s sometimes worth the risk.
I didn’t read any Capital-R Romance this week, unless we’re counting Paris y es-tu ?, which is a sort of French Where’s Waldo where you find a lost dog in every illustration. I read it aloud to a friend’s kid.
On the two-page spread depicting Versailles, I started reading the paragraph of description—Louis XIV didn’t like Paris—and was interrupted with “But why? Why didn’t he like Paris?”
Louis XIV was consolidating power by keeping his troublesome nobles under surveillance in Versailles and also getting away from potential angry mobs in the city—mobs who would, at the end of the 18th century, force a different king back to Paris to do some surveillance of their own—but weirdly enough, the illustrated children’s book didn’t say that.
So I said, “Do you like Paris?”
“Yes,” she said. We went back to looking for the dog.
And this week in small-r romance, I only finished one thing, but what a thing it was.
A Heart of Blood and Ashes (m/f, both cis and het, fantasy) by Milla Vane. What percentage of a review can be joyful shrieking before it’s no longer a review and just a shriek? Is eighty percent shrieking too much shrieking? I hope not because GOD I MISSED MELJEAN BROOK SO MUCH.
Context, in case you’re not part of this in-group: sometime between like, 2009 and 2014, Meljean Brook wrote all my favorite paranormal/SFF romances, with magic and adventure and smart, kickass, unusual, and sometimes queer heroines. (Back then, writing the female protagonist of your m/f romance as bisexual really stood out—and to those of us deeply personally invested in this sort of representation, ahem, it still does and always will.) Her female protagonists are such a feast of different character traits and types: anime nerd software developer; down-on-her-luck opera singer turned bartender turned vampire; reserved librarian with a magic, trauma-based affinity for spiders who leans into her own creepiness to freak other people out; high femme assassin with magical control of shadows; brilliant detective disrespected by society for both her sex and her race; illiterate former slave turned fierce tattooed warrior turned magical sculptor; mechanically enhanced piratical airship captain; mecha-piloting engineer raised on a secret island of lesbians; motorcycle-riding literal demon from Hell who outsmarted the devil himself.
Meljean Brook brought sweeping, epic, historical worldbuilding to her romances. She wrote beautiful, complex narratives about pain and consent and love and honesty. She wrote big action scenes worthy of comic books or the movies we now make about comic books, quiet fanfiction-y moments of introspection and emotional growth, barbed banter, gorgeous sex scenes, and Paradise Lost references all over the place. (Seriously, I think I read Paradise Lost mostly so I could understand Meljean Brook better.) I loved her the most. And then she disappeared from publishing.
I missed her, but this is a hard business. Sometimes people stop writing. All you can do is love the books they gave you.
And then a few months ago, she popped back up with a new pen name, Milla Vane. The new work would be darker, so she wanted to keep it separate from her previous career. She didn’t intend for people to know that Meljean and Milla were the same writer, but word got out. I was thrilled.
A Heart of Blood and Ashes has so many hallmarks of her previous work that I want to believe I would have recognized her even if I hadn’t known the two pen names belonged to the same writer. The fantasy setting has expansive worldbuilding, with a long history and folklore for every culture, and many, many invented creatures. (Some of which are dinosaurs by other names!) This book pays loving homage to its genre—walled cities with bustling markets, barbarian riders, princesses locked in towers, magic, gods walking the earth—while still feeling fresh and imaginative. The folklore and the creatures are so specific, and because this book is beautifully plotted, many details you learn about the fantasy animals later come back in a significant way. The book may not work for you if you don’t love this kind of depth and density in your fantasy settings, but I adored it.
The most telling identifier—shibboleth, perhaps—for me is the seemingly impossible situation that Yvenne finds herself in, including a vow she cannot break. So many of Brook’s Guardians novels involved deals with demons, and she’s incredible at making the nature of the bargain seem ironclad. Yvenne, small stabby Machiavellian princess of my heart, finds herself at the mercy of barbarian commander Maddek, who believes her responsible for the murder of his parents. In truth it is Yvenne’s father and brothers who are responsible, but in a moment of grief-fueled rage, Maddek forbids Yvenne from speaking of his mother. Yvenne’s only weapons are her mind and her tongue, and she cannot speak the truth to make Maddek trust her.
I love a romance where the characters have good reason to hate each other in the beginning, the kind of situation that makes you ask but how on Earth will these people ever fall in love? The best romances persuade you that not only are they in love at the end, but they’re perfect for each other, and it is only through their trials and tribulations that any of us could have known that. This book makes use of absolutely every single one of its almost 600 pages; it takes a long time for Yvenne and Maddek to trust each other, as it should. They meet in violent circumstances, and their world is a brutal one. Every time they grow closer, they follow it up by damaging each other in heartwrenching ways. You want them to succeed, but the conflict is real and complicated.
It’s late, so instead of writing the remainder of the review that this book deserves, I will briefly note some favorite bits:
Yvenne, Yvenne, Yvenne, oh my godddddd Yvenne is the heroine of my dreams
Queer and polyamorous supporting characters
Maddek is constantly like “yeah, she’s way smarter than me and I love it”
This fantasy setting has birth control! And this book has periods in it!
Fantasy sex toys! (+ use of the word “cockmonger,” lol)
Yvenne is disabled (she limps) and she doesn’t get Magically Cured
The prose is so unusual and rhythmic and it fits the setting so well
Seriously, Yvenne stabs a man within paragraphs of arriving in the book
Only One Horse
Content warnings from the author, which you’ll want to read especially if consent issues are difficult for you. The site doesn’t mention pregnancy/miscarriage/abortion, but those are the ones I need, so I’m mentioning them here. This is a very dark book in a lot of ways, so proceed with caution. (Not “dark” in that ~dark romance~ way where the male protagonist is a controlling piece of shit, though. The world is very violent all the way through. Maddek is angry and grieving and he lashes out, but he changes.)
And one last thing: Word Suitcase was mentioned in a footnote in this month’s Kissing Books column by Olivia Waite at The Seattle Review of Books, alongside Close Reading Romance, which is delightful in and of itself and because it’s great company to be in. If that footnote is what brought you here, welcome! If you were already here, I highly recommend both Kissing Books and Close Reading Romance.
