Underdogs is the first novel in the Underdogs series by Geonn Cannon.
Finished on: 4.7.2024

Content Note: queer fetishization, fatmisia, misogyny

Plot:
Ariadne Willow is a canidae – she can transform into a wolf whenever she wants or needs to. Mostly, she does so to do her job as a private investigator. She works together with her assistant Dale Frye. But despite Ariadne’s abilities and Dale’s business acumen, they are only just keeping afloat. So, when the richest family in town offers her a job, Ari thinks that she has finally made it. But the job turns out to be more complicated than anticipated.

I love werewolves, and when you make them queer (and female), I’m even more here for it. So, Underdogs felt like the perfect book for me, despite the fact that PI stories are not so much my cup of tea. But it turns out, the PI part was really the least of my problems with this book that feels more fetishizing than anything else.

When I picked up Underdogs, I didn’t really think about what gender the writer might have had. Geonn, at a quick glance, seemed rather gender-neutral to me. Turns out, it’s pronounced John and the writer here is definitely male. Which in itself is not a problem, just as women can write about gay men, men can write about lesbians. But in both cases, there is a certain risk of fetishization, and damn it, I felt utterly uncomfortable here.

The first warning sign for me was when Ari is described for the first time, and Cannon takes care to mention that her belly is really, really, very, utterly flat, but the shirt still rounds over her small breasts. Then things got worse, when the first encounter between Dale and Ari is described: Dale finds Ari in wolf-form in distress, takes her home, thinking she’s a dog. She leaves the dog on the couch, then goes to sleep, only to wake up to a naked woman crawling into her bed. Her first (half-asleep) reaction is to squeeze said woman (I mean, really???), then she becomes fully awake, there is a bit of fight until the naked woman – Ari – holds Dale down to explain herself. And that’s the start of their friendship, and not of a call to the police, or a very thorough talking to Ari about not climbing into bed naked with strangers while they are sleeping.

And that is not the only time that the book puts its female characters into positions that feel designed for men to go “that’s hot”. Ari is often naked because that’s how shapeshifting works here. In wolf-form, she watches the young woman she should shadow get naked. And Dale has to get into a night-club for plot reasons and when the doorman won’t let her, she just makes out with another woman in line, and there we go.

Add to that a fatmisic joke, a way to describe a character that we are supposed to hate that left me utterly bewildered why we should hate him (until much later when shitty things about him are revealed) because the first complaint that Ari has about him is just that he is big and ugly. And that’s just her subjective feeling, too, because she comments on the fact that he has an online fan community, something she discards with a misogynistic “daddy issues”. Thank you very much.

And the nitpicking cherry on top: the book does not really distinguish between dog and wolf. Ari shifts into a wolf, but such a wolf that everybody mistakes for a dog, and that already is highly unlikely (there are dogs that look like wolves, but then it’s usually the other way round, that they are mistaken for wolves). But wolves are overall very different from dogs. Since it doesn’t really make a difference to the story, the world is full of shifters of any kind, why not have her just be a dog shifter?

If the book hadn’t been short and a rather quick read overall, I wouldn’t have finished it at all. In any case, I won’t be continuing the series or touch anything by Cannon ever again.

Summarizing: hell no.