Human in Death - by Kecia Ali (Hardcover)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

Kecia Ali's Human in Death explores the best-selling futuristic suspense series In Death, written by romance legend Nora Roberts under the pseudonym J. D. Robb. Centering on troubled NYPSD Lieutenant Eve Dallas and her billionaire tycoon husband Roarke, the novels explore vital questions about human flourishing.

Through close readings of more than fifty novels and novellas published over two decades, Ali analyzes the ethical world of Robb's New York circa 2060. Robb compellingly depicts egalitarian relationships, satisfying work, friendships built on trust, and an array of models of femininity and family. At the same time, the series' imagined future replicates some of the least admirable aspects of contemporary society. Sexual violence, police brutality, structural poverty and racism, and government surveillance persist in Robb's fictional universe, raising urgent moral challenges. So do ordinary ethical quandaries around trust, intimacy, and interdependence in marriage, family, and friendship.

Ali celebrates the series' ethical successes, while questioning its critical moral omissions. She probes the limits of Robb's imagined world and tests its possibilities for fostering identity, meaning, and mattering of human relationships across social difference. Ali capitalizes on Robb's futuristic fiction to reveal how careful and critical reading is an ethical act.

Review Quotes

Written both for fans of Robb's popular fiction as well as scholars, Ali uses accessible prose to evaluate how the novelist engages with gender, race, and class in works that centre on crime and justice, but also attend to courtship and marriage. Thus, Ali argues that the central romance betweenprotagonist Eve Dallas and her love interest-turned-husband Roarke falls in line with popular feminist engagement with idealized notions of masculinity that promote dominance and virility.

...Ali's book shows the rich possibilities of analysis that crime fiction offers its readers.

In each chapter, Ali displays a sure command of Robb's oeuvre, of relevant popular romance scholarship, and of contemporary debates among readers. She avoids both dense academic jargon and fannish minutia, creating an accessible text for educated lay readers and a compelling one for scholars of popular romance fiction who do not share her encyclopedic knowledge of all 15,000 or so pages of the In Death books.

About the Author

Kecia Ali is Associate Professor of Religion at Boston University.