Review: "Must You Be So HONORABLE?"
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 02 8, 2011
In order to fend off the marriage proposal of the local Dirty Old Magistrate (as his third wife, she'd be little more than a kitchen maid With Benefits) Mei Lin announces publicly she will marry no man unless he defeats her in a fight.  Her uncle and aunt (who had adopted the orphan girl and used her as unpaid wait staff at their tea house) are mortified, but Mei Lin refuses to back down and spends the next several weeks defeating all comers, both strangers sent by Dirty Old Zhou and village boys who try to teach her a lesson.  Unfortunately, she knows how this must end; sooner or later some brute will get lucky, but there is something very different about today's stranger and challenger.The female who refuses to marry until she finds a man who can defeat her is hardly new; a number of myths and fairy tales turn precisely on this.  However, the Tang Dynasty setting IS unusual, and Ms. Lin has given us a couple of delightful characters to arouse our interest (and our sympathy).Shen Leung's fame as an honorable man (and solver of problems for the imperial court) precedes him and causes him plenty of problems, particularly the cascading mess that follows from being goaded into challenging the beautiful girl he had first glimpsed standing outside the tea shop.  However, he is bound and determined to do the right thing, the honorable thing regarding Mei Lin no matter his personal feelings, no matter what it costs him.Mei Lin (as you may have guessed) is somewhat mercurial and has a bit of a temper, which can be a problem because she is rather deadly with her butterfly swords:"I thought I would seduce you.  But when I saw you, I realized I had no idea how to seduce a man.  So I thought it would just be easier to kill you."Of course it is obvious how this must end so Ms. Lin was only able to surprise me about HALF A DOZEN times in just 46 pages (Sheesh!), and chances are she'll fool you as well.Defects?  The only one I can think of is length; this story is just too short.  Not that it doesn't work as a short story, it works very well.  Rather, it is that Ms. Lin has drawn us such delightful characters that we want to spend more time with them and hear some of the tales that had to be cut.  How DID Mei Lin get trained?  How DID Shen Leung get started on his "career"?  What happened AFTER "The End?"  Did Mei Lin EVER tell Shen Leung what she kept starting to tell him?I was impressed by how Ms. Lin handled the dialog.  She managed to convey an alien culture and an ancient time, not to mention words originally spoken in another language, with neither clanking anachronisms nor unintended hilarity.  She also took a stereotypical village bully and unstereotyped him, making me want to know more about him.I was left with an even greater desire to read the novel this story is a prequel to,Butterfly Swords, especially after reading the preview enclosed, which details the unusual meeting of the protagonists.Note: For full disclosure I received this ARC from the author in return for agreeing to review it.