“Ah,” you might be thinking right about now. “They finally finished reading A Court of Wings and Ruin over at Bad Books, Good times! At last, I can read about a different terrible book! How refreshing! What could… oh Jesus Christ, I wish they were reading A Court of Frost and Starlight.”
You know what they say about judging a book by its cover? You can fucking forget that. This is Judging A Book By Its Cover: The Book. Just look at the Amazon summary:
Former Army Ranger Jake Rivers is not your typical Kelton College student. He is not spoiled, coddled, or ultra-lib like his classmates who sneer at the “soldier boy.”
Rivers is not “triggered” by “microaggressions.” He is not outraged by “male privilege” and “cisgender bathrooms.” He does not need a “safe space.” Or coloring books. Jake needs an education. And when terror strikes, the school needs Jake…
Without warning, the sounds of gunfire plunge the campus into a battle zone. A violent gang of marauders invade the main hall, taking students as hostages for big ransom money. As a veteran and patriot, Jake won’t give in to their demands. But to fight back, he needs to enlist his fellow classmates to school these special snowflakes in the not-so-liberal art of war. This time, the aggression isn’t “micro.” It’s life or death. And only the strong survive…
Y’ALL MISS A COURT OF WINGS AND RUIN YET?
Ariel sent this book to me a few months ago and my gut reaction was definitely something like “lol absolutely fucking not”. It sounds exhausting. And maybe it will be and we’ll give it up. How many jokes can we possibly make about what a small, hateful worldview this is? What good does it do anyone saying this book is bad? Fucking obviously it’s bad; this book is preaching to its choir, and it’s not like anyone who reads what we have to say about it is going to be like, “damn, those Bad Books folks make a good point. The patriarchy is bad! I hereby shed my conservative identity!”
But possibly a larger issue than that, is there any point making content about how this is bad content? How funny can it really be in 2018 to go through these angry white dudes’ hateful collection of bad faith arguments? (And I should point out I saw absolutely no point wasting my time doing any research about the authors of this book, although I’ve gleaned that one of them primarily writes Westerns from one of the best, most all-caps Amazon reviews I’ve ever read.)
Man, even Joyce doesn’t want to read this shit. Why should I spend any time and energy on it?
Well.
Maybe if the book were so bad, so clueless, so artless, and so devoid of the mechanical workings of a story, it not only didn’t work as a book about the issues it thinks exists, but it didn’t even work as parody of them?
What does that look like?
This is gonna be a bit of a long one today, because I really feel like it takes until chapter 4 before you get a sense that this book might be BBGT material. And no kidding there’s some truly despicable stuff in here (if you’re feeling uneasy after chapter one, maybe stop before you read chapter two), but did I still laugh out loud when I definitely wasn’t supposed to? Yes. Yes, I did. Because, reader, it’s quite batshit.
Trigger Warning: Chapter 1
Our story begins with Jake Rivers, goddamn American hero, immediately pitted against a world gone mad:
A short, sharp cry in the night made Jake Rivers look up from the book he was reading.
To be honest, he was glad for the distraction. He was on the verge of throwing the book against the wall of his dorm room in disgust.
“Sigh… because it’s full of liberal garbage, right?” Gosh, be patient, reader! All things in good time. Obviously we only learn what was so disgusting about this book on page 6, when it makes the most sense to detail the book he was reading roughly three settings ago.
Jake looks out the window of his dorm room towards the quad (or as the book refers to it, “the large, park-like area in the center of Kelton College’s campus”, which sure is a lot of words for one word), where he sees a woman pursued by a man, who catches up to her and throws her to the ground. Jake jumps up and runs out the door to help. I know, this sounds like a ridiculous thing for a person to do to us progressive types, but this is really what’s happening in this wild and crazy book. SUSPEND YOUR DISBELIEF, FELLOW LIBS. BE STRONG WITH ME.
A group of students was sitting in the lobby talking about something—he heard the words “microaggression” and “privilege” and “cisnormative”—but Jake didn’t even glance at them as he went by, and none of them called out to him. He didn’t have any friends here, and whatever the subject under discussion, none of them wanted his opinion on it.
He was just a big, dumb brute, after all.
Honestly, the longer you read this book, the more it’s almost impressive that the authors probably had to look up so many lefty buzzwords without managing to actually learn anything.
As Jake begins to approach the two, he realizes it’s a “lover’s quarrel”, and reconsiders helping.
None of his business. That was an old-fashioned attitude, and he knew it. But almost everything about him was old-fashioned, including his dislike of a woman being mistreated.
I like how the implication here is that a modern, feminist woman is pro-mistreatment, somehow. YEAH, HOLD ONTO YR BUTTS, APPARENTLY IT REALLY BE LIKE THAT:
Of course, if he did step in to help her, more than likely she would stick up for her boyfriend and turn on him instead, accusing him of perpetuating the patriarchy and the myth of women needing to be rescued.
This is roughly where we start getting into what I mean about how this book doesn’t even work as parody of the types of people who it thinks exist, because… what?
Jake begins to leave, then the man (Craig) slaps the woman (Annie), and then Jake takes action, telling Craig to let her go. Equally important, the man is described as “good-sized”, which I guess is how words work now. Most importantly, everybody in this story continues to act as though they’ve never experienced human society before, because somehow this is the dialogue that immediately follows that:
[Craig] paused. “Are you one of the football players? […] You’re big enough, but Olmsted’s not the athletic dorm—”
“I’m not a football player, and you need to let go of the lady.”
“You don’t have to call me a lady,” Annie said. Just as Jake had expected, she sounded halfway offended.
“I’m trying to help you—”
“That’s no excuse for perpetuating stereotypes and spreading toxic masculinity.”
Jake couldn’t hold back a sigh. Even scared and in trouble, Annie couldn’t stop herself from parroting some of the garbage that had been forced into her head.
I know, Jake. It does sound unrealistic, doesn’t it?
Craig releases Annie in order to throw a punch at Jake, foolishly announcing “I don’t care how big you are!” despite merely being good-sized. Jake dodges and punches back in self-defense, which I’m letting you know right now because Jake will tell us this later about seven thousand times. Craig immediately goes down. Annie screeches that Jake killed Craig and starts hitting him.
“You . . . you fascist!” she screamed. “You oppressor!”
“Hell, lady,” Jake said, knowing the word would get under her skin again, “how’d you know I used to be in the army?”
Note that I didn’t leave out any gaps in the dialogue in this summary. We really went from Craig assuming Jake was on the football team to Annie calling Jake a fascist and an oppressor, leading Jake to conclude that Annie has somehow inferred that he was in the army? Which honestly kind of says more about Jake than it does about Annie.
THEN things get weird.
Jake heard a sudden rush of footsteps behind him and turned to see several black-clad figures charging him. He couldn’t make out their faces, and when they yelled, “Fascist! Fascist!” and the words were muffled, he knew why.
They were wearing hoods over their heads.
Then they were on him, swinging bicycle chains with locks on them, metal pipes, and other objects turned into clubs
Trigger Warning: Chapter 2
Is… is this really happening? Or is this, like, a PTSD dream sequence? Apparently it is really happening, but how the fuck are you supposed to be able to tell:
“I got him!” a female voice yelled. “Kill the fascist! Down with oppressors! Kill him!” […]
“Wait a minute!” he shouted, knowing he was wasting his time but too angry right now to care. “I didn’t do anything wrong! I was just trying to help a woman—”
“Toxic! Toxic!”
“Racist!”
[…]
She screeched, “Rape! Rape!” as she rolled over on the grass, and he wished for a second that he hadn’t been quite so careful.
“An-ti-fa! An-ti-fa!”
Why are people chanting “antifa”??? Is anyone here antifa? Are they trying to summon antifa? Do the Johnstones think “antifa” is a battle cry? Do the Johnstones think antifa march into battle chanting their own name?
Jake starts having flashbacks to his time in the American military in the middle east, including “men in black hoods spouting Arabic as they held a Western journalist and sawed his head off”. And just in case you don’t get that Trigger Warning is drawing a clever, clever parallel between extremists hell-bent on murdering people for having different beliefs than themselves and… (checks notes) social justice movements… Jake’s flashbacks go Godwin’s Law, because of course they do:
Then the memories went back even further to old, grainy, historical newsreel footage he had seen, row upon row of young men in spiffy uniforms and high black boots marching through the streets of a city, lifting their arms in a salute to the madman in front of whom they passed in review, on their way to wipe out anyone who didn’t think exactly the same way they did. They had disarmed the citizenry, taken over all the newspapers and radio and colleges and universities and made it a crime punishable by death to say or even think anything they disagreed with…
And just in case you still don’t get the parallel between social justice movements and literal Nazis, Jake explicitly spells it out for you:
And these people surrounding him now, the bullies in their black hoods and the ones who chanted for them, believed in and supported that hideous evil, all while calling him a Nazi and a fascist…
Then Jake gets tazed by campus police. Don’t feel too bad for him; at one point during his freedom-induced acid trip internal monologue he felt the need to posit – and this is seriously in this book – that communism is “even worse” than the Holocaust. We don’t have to feel bad for Jake at all.
Jake ends up in the chief of campus police’s office. Furious with Jake, he tells him he’s not going to charge him, but “Once the activists and the lawyers and the media start putting pressure on President Pelletier, there’s no telling what he’ll insist on, just to get them all off his back.”
[Frank] turned the screen so Jake could read the headline on the news site the older man had called up. FAR RIGHT EXTREMIST ATTACKS COLLEGE STUDENTS
Again, somehow we got to “far right extremist” from “no, I’m not on the football team”.
Jake tries to explain himself, making the classic “I’m not far right, far left, or far anything else” argument of any feckless white dude who’s had the privilege to never have to be bothered to think about it. Don’t @ me. Frank asks Jake why he’s even here, prompting a very natural transition to a flashback chapter…
“Why are you here, Jake? Is it just because of your grandfather?”
[Jake’s grandfather had] encouraged him to join the army and then to come here to Kelton College.
Problem was, the army wasn’t what it once had been, and Kelton College sure as hell wasn’t.
“Jake?” McRainey prodded.
But Jake was lost in the past.
Trigger Warning: Chapter 3
We get a flashback to six months earlier, where Jake’s grandfather – Cordell Gardner – is trying to convince him to go to college after having left the military. We don’t learn why Jake left the military (aside from how it didn’t “satisfy” him, which either means we have more backstory to learn later, or this book absolutely whiffed its best shot at actually fleshing out Jake as a character, so, whoops), but we do learn he’s flush with cash.
“You didn’t reenlist, so now you have to do something else with your life.”
“Why?” Jake asked bluntly. “I could just sit around and wait for you to die so I’ll inherit that fortune of yours.”
Gardner threw back his head and laughed. He was a big old man, although not as big as Jake’s six-four and two hundred and fifty pounds.
Oh, and we learn that Jake is big. Again. Never forget that Jake is really big.
We do learn that Jake’s dad was a rich lawyer who died of a cocaine overdose, but more importantly, we learn that Jake is spoiled AF. We learn that Jake’s grandfather paid for lawyers that kept Jake out of jail for street racing on multiple occasions and has enough influence at Kelton College from years of donating buildings and scholarships to get Jake accepted.
“Go get your master’s degree. Hell, get your doctorate.” He grinned. “You could be Dr. Jacob Rivers.”
“Doctor of what?”
“I don’t care. Whatever strikes your fancy. That’s what college is for, to find out what you’re good at, and what you enjoy.”
“And here I thought it was a place where parents paid thousands of dollars for their kids to get drunk, do drugs, and have sex.”
As opposed to this true American hero who’s going to dick around in college with the wealth he inherited from his socially connected granddaddy so he can, ya know, like, find himself.
Trigger Warning: Chapter 4
We flash forward to when Jake actually gets to college and learn some horribly troubling news… social justice has ruined college.
His bachelor’s degree was in biology [but] Kelton College was a liberal arts school […]
Just looking at the names of some of the courses listed in the catalog had him frowning and figuratively scratching his head.
Gender, Culture, and U.S. National Identity.
Feminist Critique of Christianity.
Social Justice and American Racism.
The Psychological Impact of Male Microaggression.
Countering Warmongering and Oppression in American Culture.
Understanding Multiphasic Gender Constructs.
Jake had never seen such a load of useless baloney in all his life. Where were the regular courses?
I wish we got the scene of Jake eating breakfast at the diner that morning, figuratively scratching his head while reading through the pancakes section wondering where the omelettes are.
He flipped over to the English section.
Oh! Never mind! I take it back, Jake just figured out how pages work.
Heteropatriarchy in American Literature.
LGBTQIAPK Tales: A Seminar
This is where Jake assures us he’s toooooooooootally cool with gay people, but just doesn’t get why there needs to be “a whole college course devoted to stories about such things”. Gosh, if only there was a way someone could learn about that.
Anyway, ready for things to get wilder yet again?
Jake closed the catalog. He was grateful that he wouldn’t have to mess with any of that sort of course, since he was going for his master’s degree in biology.
He found out different when he met with his faculty advisor.
“Kelton College requires a diverse course load even for specialized advanced degrees,” the professor said. A brass nameplate on his desk read DR. MTUMBO.
The guy was as pale as anybody Jake had ever seen. Tall, balding, gawky, with a receding chin, he looked like a big white bird. Jake couldn’t help himself. He said, “Dr. Mtumbo?”
The man sniffed.
“I identify as African-American. My ancestors were colonialists named Montambault who lived for a time in French Equatorial Africa before immigrating to this country. I simply adopted a more appropriate spelling to honor the unfortunate people they oppressed and exploited.”
Sooooo lots to unpack here.
Y’all, I could spend another 3000 words on Dr. Mtumbo alone, but definitely the best part is how badly the authors tell on themselves with how, in the opening chapters of a book by angry white men about how diversity and identity politics are ruining America, they can’t even imagine a world with characters who aren’t also angry white men.
Jake just couldn’t think of him as Mtumbo, although he realized that was “insensitive” of him
NOPE ACTUALLY THIS IS THE ONE TIME YOU GOT SOMETHING RIGHT, JAKE.
Jake learns that, nope, he really does have to take classes outside his field of study at a liberal arts school. But much worse than that, Jake learns about safe spaces. Or at least what the Johnstones think safe spaces are, vis a vis this man who people would probably need a safe space from.
“We have a very strict code of conduct and accountability here at Kelton.”
“More strict than the army and Marines?” […]
“This is our speech code. As part of our commitment to diversity, Kelton College guarantees all students a safe and inclusive learning environment, so you shouldn’t use any of the words or phrases listed in here.”
Jake frowned.
“I seem to remember reading something about a right to free speech . . .”
Montambault tapped a fingertip against the pages.
“Bringing up the First Amendment is listed in here.”
I like how Jake took one look at a list of insensitive words and started “um, actually”ing about freedom of speech, yet we’re supposed to think Montambault is the intolerant asshole here. I mean, ignoring the whole thing about how he “identifies” as black out of white guilt, which I realize is one metric fuckton of a caveat.
But this is what I mean about how Trigger Warning is too incompetent to work. Montambault is clearly intended to be an ironic figure, but what somehow ends up happening is he almost becomes an accidental parody of a clueless white lib who’s nowhere near as progressive as he thinks he is.
“No means no, eh?”
“Exactly.”
“So yes means yes.”
“No, yes also means no because of our heteropatriarchal, phallocentric culture.”
Montambault is almost a Chapo Trap House bit accidentally written by the fucking polar opposite end of the political spectrum, and the results are befuddling. Montambault is a moron, but for none of the reasons intended by his own book. This is like if Fifty Shades series villain Elena not only taught Christian Grey E L James’s unintentionally kink-shaming version of BDSM, but if James somehow also accidentally wrote Elena as an unfunny parody encompassing a nuanced but flawed progressive critique of, like, Esther Perel or Dan Savage. That probably doesn’t make a lick of sense, but somehow this is where we are on fucking chapter 4 of Trigger Warning.
“Not everyone accepts the antiquated concept of binary gender, you know. Remember LGGBDTTTIQQAAPP. That means—”
Jake held up a hand to stop him.
“That’s all right. I don’t need it defined. But I thought it was LGBTQIAPK.”
Montambault blew out a scoffing breath. “That’s outdated.”
Ok, I think we need to move on from Montambault now, because I just wrote the words “unintentional parody galaxy brained into a strawman argument” and I think that’s a good sign I need to wrap up this post.
After Montambault throws out some more buzzwords the Johnstones looked up that morning (“Education is all about change. Hope and change. And resistance. And social justice.”), Jake asks about student housing, because he wants to try to get the real college experience.
“No, I realize I’m a little older than most students, but I want to get the full college experience. You do allow graduate students to live in the dorms?”
“One floor of Olmsted Hall is reserved for graduate students. I’m not sure if there are any openings.”
“I’ll check into it,” Jake said. He planned on keeping his relationship to Cordell Gardner quiet, but he wasn’t above using it to his advantage if necessary.
Don’t forget, this is our good guy. He isn’t “triggered” by “privilege”. Makes U think.
This is usually the space where I ask you to donate to help support our blog, but today I’m asking for a different donation instead. On a serious note, I feel like it’s impossible to start this attempt at a lighthearted-ish, comedic discussion about a stupid book that comes from such a place of hatred and willful ignorance without acknowledging the tragedy in New Zealand. I’d like to encourage you to donate, if you can, to the victims of the Christchurch shooting (I personally have donated to the New Zealand Islamic Information Centre to help the immediate needs of the grieving families), and in lieu of finding my own meaningful words on the the importance of solidarity and humanity, I’d like to share someone else’s:
#NewZealandShooting pic.twitter.com/0zz6lZY5F8
— Hasan Minhaj (@hasanminhaj) March 15, 2019