House of Women was right in between those two projects - Darwin ended in 2013 and the book came out in 2014; Embarrassment was a 2020 book; House hit in 2017. (There's also The Oven, just before House, and maybe projects more recent than Embarrassment.) House is a solo book, but her collaborative work has an asterisk: Goldstein was always the professional, trained comics-maker of the two; Jordan is a historian (described as a doctoral student during the Darwin years, which I choose to believe means she's a post-doc or working academic now) and, I think, the folklore expert.
So House is interesting for me to see what Goldstein does when she's not collaborating. Her art is basically the same, though this particular project is black and white - with particularly stark blacks at times. The story and the telling of it are driven by conversation, as the collaborative books were, but I feel like there are more silent pages, more sequences of motion and action, more pure comics panels without people talking.
And, while the two collaborative stories were contemporary and fantastic, set in a modern urban society like our own, differentiated from our world because basically every folkloric or mythical thing was real, House is medium-future science fiction. Four emissaries, all women, of "the Empire" arrive on the distant frontier planet Mopu, to "civilize" the natives. There was a previous expedition, which built or furnished or appropriated a large hilltop palatial compound, but it disappeared without a trace some time ago.
The only other person in the vicinity - possibly on the entire planet - from the wider Empire is Jael Dean, the representative of Grendel, Inc., who presumably exports some materials from Mopu for sale in the Empire - we don't see him do anything like this, or any ships come to gather his shipments. His role in the book is to be The Man - mysterious, sexy, knowing, possibly already "gone bush" in good or bad ways, the local guide.
We don't know if the fact that all of the emissaries are women is standard, or important. We suspect their modest, constricted dress - hoods, corsets, dresses with floor-length skirts and long sleeves - is important, and gives us a sense of the culture of the Empire. We're prompted to think of them as colonizers: benign ones, in their own minds, but looking to mold the natives in a particular way to fit the purposes of a larger human polity.
The main activity of this outpost will be to teach young natives civilized ways. The students are all female: again, we don't know if at first this is just because the emissaries are female, but we come to understand, later, that the Mopu natives have some kind of complicated transformational lifecycle, that perhaps they all begin as female and some or all change to male later on. All of the native girls are given human names; most of them are just background characters but one, Zaza, already knew some of the common language and is their leader and translator and exemplar and possibly student teacher.
(Sidebar note: some reviews have noted that House draws some inspiration or themes from the movie Black Narcissus; I don't know that movie but, at a glance, the parallels are really obvious. There's also more than a bit of Ursula K. Le Guin in House's influences, and second-wave feminist SF in general.)
Tensions rise, as more than one of the emissaries is interested in Dean and the lifecycle of the natives comes to be more clear. Everything comes to a head, and not all of the emissaries make it out in the end. As usual with stories of colonializers trying to change native populations without understanding them, it all ends badly.
House is a bit derivative, and a tad obvious in retrospect, but it knows the story it wants to tell and tells that story well. Goldstein's art is particularly impressive here, full of repeated motifs and intricate page designs. Anyone looking for Le Guinian SF should check it out.
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