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I just read Kristin Cashore's Graceling, a YA fantasy novel set in a world in which some people are born with specific superpowers/magical talents, known as Graces. The Graced, as these people are known, are easily recognizable, as their eyes are two different colors. They are generally feared and disliked. In most of the seven Kingdoms that make up the Graceling universe, the Graced are the property of the King.
Our heroine is Katsa, a Graceling whose Grace is killing. She discovers this, rather traumatizingly, when she is about eleven, and an older male relative tries to fondle her under the table at a banquet, and she reflexively punches him through the face. Not in the face--through the face. From then on, she is trained as a killer and is used as a hit man by the King of her realm, who is a power-drunk, mean-spirited douchebag. Feared, ostracized, and forced to commit horrific violence on a regular basis, Katsa grows up into a distrustful, defensive, self-loathing, undersocialized mess. But due to her innate awesomeness and strength of character, she is also empathetic, insightful in her own way, fiercely independent, self-reliant, and highly skilled at defeating people in combat with the minimum of damage. In order to deal with her guilt at her job, she helps run a sort of subversive black-ops ring called the Council, which secretly helps people, doing stuff like freeing the wrongfully imprisoned.
The plot is more or less as such: During one of these Council missions, Katsa frees the father of the king of the Leinid kingdom, who has been kidnapped and imprisoned by one of the other kings; they don't know why. Over the course of this rescue mission, she meets another Graced fighter. Later, the other Graced fighter shows up at her king's court; it turns out he is the youngest son of the Leinid king; he is looking for his grandfather who is now mysteriously disappeared and no one knows where he is, because Katsa and her awesome cousin Raffin (who has a medicine-making/healing Grace and accidentally dyes his hair blue and is generally awesome and we should see more of him) are hiding him. The Leinid prince's name is Po. I lol'ed. Katsa and Raffin and Po and some other people try to figure out why Grandfather Tealiff (the Leinid have really stupid names) was kidnapped and who was behind it (they are pretty sure the king whose dungeon he was actually in was paid off). Most of the Kings in the seven Kingdoms ofWesteros the Graceling Realm are suspected, except for one King Leck, one-eyed ruler of the kingdom over the mountains that no one pays much attention to, until Po, for reasons that are spoilery so I will not say anything about them, begins to suspect that maybe no one suspects him because of sketchy magical reasons. So then it is up to Katsa to tell her evil uncle the King to fuck off and that she is not going to hitman for him any more, and she and Po go off to Monsea (Leck's kingdom; it is called Monsea because it is stuck between the mountains and the sea (if you think this is dumb you should hear the names of the other five kingdoms; the one in the middle is the Middluns, and the ones around it are Nander, Sunder, Wester, and Estill)) to find out what is going on and, if necessary, rescue Leck's wife Ashen and daughter Bitterblue, who also happen to be Po's aunt and cousin. Then there is a Long Ride and things are really kind of weird and disturbing; Leck can basically get away with anything because people magically believe whatever he says, so all sorts of totally fucked up shit happens; there is animal cruelty and heavily implied child sexual abuse. Also, Katsa and Po have a romance, which we all saw coming from a mile away, but it is cute and it does not totally suck. Po is not threatened by Katsa's ass-kickery, and believes that she has it in her to stop being an emotionally stunted, self-hating product of her hyperviolent upbringing, and helps her see that she is not stupid and terrible and is actually awesome, and is generally the genderswapped version of The Civilizing Influence Of The Love Of A Good Woman. It's actually kind of annoying at times, even though Po is not exactly in a position to have a lot of friends or develop normal relationships either, due to spoilery things about his Grace. Katsa is not all that keen on getting married or having babies, so they decide to be lovers and not get married. I thought this was awesome.
Then I made the mistake of reading some other people's reviews on Goodreads and Amazon, in case there were things I skimmed through that I ought to have stronger opinions about, and I sort of came away with "OMG I HATE EVERYBODY CAN NOBODY READ" and other misanthropic thoughts like that.
In addition to the predictable whinings of various patriarchal douchecanoes who denounce the book as "man-hating" and "feminazi propaganda" because it occasionally offers frank portrayals of the threats of male violence and sexual entitlement (including familial sexual abuse) that a goddamn motherfucking lot of women actually face and do not stop facing just because talking about it hurts your fucking precious feelings, someone somewhere seems to be advertising this to Twilight fans? So there is really quite a shocking number of reviews by people who find it completely intolerable that Katsa and Po do not get married and start popping out babies at the end. This bugs me for numerous reasons:
1. Some people do not want do get married and have babies. Most people do, but some don't. The people that do not want to get married and have babies, are people who do not want to get married or have babies. When these people find the "right" person for them, the "right" person isn't going to be a person who suddenly makes them change all their life goals and their feelings about marriage and babies. The right person for a person who doesn't want marriage and babies will be someone who doesn't fucking try and make them have marriage and babies.
2. Personally not wanting marriage and babies is neither necessarily anti-marriage nor anti-babies, and this book really does go out of its way to explain that it really is just Katsa not wanting them for herself and not passing judgment on other people, but apparently a lot of people who read this book cannot read.
3. If you want to read a book where the heroine gets married at the end, even a book about a strong-willed independent kick-ass heroine who gets married at the end, you can read, oh, any other motherfucking book with a female character in the history of writing books with female characters. Tamora Pierce's heroines get fucking married at the end (sometimes creepily--Aly marries a dude who is actually only three years old because he used to be a goddamn bird, is that better?). Katniss Everdeen gets married at the end (to a dude who has been conditioned to try and kill her on sight, ISN'T WUV WONDERFUL). Princess Cimorene gets married and becomes Queen of the Enchanted Forest and goes on adventures while pregnant. Jo March gets married at the end, although only because the publishers wouldn't print the book if she didn't. Jacky Faber gets engaged at like fourteen and spends the entire series trying to get married at the end of each book (she fails, but she tries REALLY HARD). Katsa and Po decided to have their relationship on their own terms instead of the legalistic expectations dictated by their society and the cliches of storytelling, and that makes them AWESOME, and if you have a problem with that, YOU ARE NOT AWESOME ENOUGH; YOU SHOULD FEEL BAD ABOUT YOURSELF UNTIL YOU BECOME MORE AWESOME AND LESS JUDGMENTAL. Period.
4. My fourth problem is a problem that I have partly with the readers... but also partly with the book. It is this: Katsa talks about her feelings about what marriage "is," in emotional and metaphorical terms, but they do not actually say anything about what marriage is objectively in this book--how the legal institution of marriage actually works. So I think a lot of the people who are disappointed in Katsa not choosing marriage are just bringing their own ideas of what marriage "is," both in terms of their own emotional feelings about it, but also their modern idea of what is actually is--that in the face of any mention of marriage laws in this world, they assume it's more or less the same as in ours. I think these particular readers likely read a lot of romance but not a lot of books specifically dealing with criticizing medieval and pseudo-medieval patriarchy. I, on the other hand, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, assumed that, since this was a medieval-ish book, they probably had medieval-ish marriage laws--one where Katsa would have significantly fewer rights than her husband, be considered his legal property, be unable to obtain a divorce (either because divorce did not exist, or some sort of situation where the husband can obtain a divorce by saying "I divorce your fat ass" in public three times but the woman has to prove physical abuse to the point of hospitalization with fifteen male witnesses and a written confession, or something), have "marital duties" (i.e. no laws against marital rape), etc.
The book says absolutely nothing whatsoever about any of this, one way or another. And this is where I realized I had my biggest complaint about the book, which I didn't even realize until other people started interpreting it so radically differently--there's way too much stuff that just isn't actually in it that needs to be in it. There's a lot of room for the audience to sort of fill in whatever they figure makes the most sense, and I ended up filling in stuff that made sense to me, which also happened to be awesome, socially critical stuff in the vein of all the socially critical fantasy novels I read. But apparently, that is just me! And so I am unsure how much the novel actually made it clear that Katsa is not supposed to be perfect--that she is deeply fucked up, and part of the story is her becoming less fucked up--or if it really is that easy to read Katsa's fucked-upness as being somehow glorified or a strong role model even if you aren't a clueless illiterate who doesn't understand characterization; if it really is just me seeing that there is a clear relation between her role as a hit-man and her emotional stuntedness; stuff like that. I also read Katsa's rejection of dresses and having long hair as a combination "Katsa personally dislikes these thing because she does, and it's sexist to assume she doesn't" and "These are manifestations of a particular type of expectation that Katsa is forced to conform to whether she likes it or not, and that is a fast track to resenting the shit out of something." But thinking back on it, this is not there. It is just "Dress; do not want." In the absence of anything whatsoever, this could also quite easily be read as the overdone-to-death trope of "Rejection of all feminine-coded things as shorthand for how awesome and not frivolous or stupid our heroine is," which I despise. I don't know if that's what's going on here; you are free to make it up as you go along because... it ain't there.
But... yeah. That is pretty much my only complaint about the book, even though the more I think about it, the more major it seems: A lot of really serious political issues are touched on and not explained, explored, or developed. The world-building is really weak, and particularly the social structure, which is problematic because it is hard to discuss social issues without knowing what the social structure is, and the social issues are clearly very important, because people are having lots of feelings and discussions about them!
But, er, basically, if you are genre-savvy enough that you can fill in like half of what's going on with assumptions made from similar books, THEN IT IS GREAT. Just do not read what Twilight fans have to say about it.
Our heroine is Katsa, a Graceling whose Grace is killing. She discovers this, rather traumatizingly, when she is about eleven, and an older male relative tries to fondle her under the table at a banquet, and she reflexively punches him through the face. Not in the face--through the face. From then on, she is trained as a killer and is used as a hit man by the King of her realm, who is a power-drunk, mean-spirited douchebag. Feared, ostracized, and forced to commit horrific violence on a regular basis, Katsa grows up into a distrustful, defensive, self-loathing, undersocialized mess. But due to her innate awesomeness and strength of character, she is also empathetic, insightful in her own way, fiercely independent, self-reliant, and highly skilled at defeating people in combat with the minimum of damage. In order to deal with her guilt at her job, she helps run a sort of subversive black-ops ring called the Council, which secretly helps people, doing stuff like freeing the wrongfully imprisoned.
The plot is more or less as such: During one of these Council missions, Katsa frees the father of the king of the Leinid kingdom, who has been kidnapped and imprisoned by one of the other kings; they don't know why. Over the course of this rescue mission, she meets another Graced fighter. Later, the other Graced fighter shows up at her king's court; it turns out he is the youngest son of the Leinid king; he is looking for his grandfather who is now mysteriously disappeared and no one knows where he is, because Katsa and her awesome cousin Raffin (who has a medicine-making/healing Grace and accidentally dyes his hair blue and is generally awesome and we should see more of him) are hiding him. The Leinid prince's name is Po. I lol'ed. Katsa and Raffin and Po and some other people try to figure out why Grandfather Tealiff (the Leinid have really stupid names) was kidnapped and who was behind it (they are pretty sure the king whose dungeon he was actually in was paid off). Most of the Kings in the seven Kingdoms of
Then I made the mistake of reading some other people's reviews on Goodreads and Amazon, in case there were things I skimmed through that I ought to have stronger opinions about, and I sort of came away with "OMG I HATE EVERYBODY CAN NOBODY READ" and other misanthropic thoughts like that.
In addition to the predictable whinings of various patriarchal douchecanoes who denounce the book as "man-hating" and "feminazi propaganda" because it occasionally offers frank portrayals of the threats of male violence and sexual entitlement (including familial sexual abuse) that a goddamn motherfucking lot of women actually face and do not stop facing just because talking about it hurts your fucking precious feelings, someone somewhere seems to be advertising this to Twilight fans? So there is really quite a shocking number of reviews by people who find it completely intolerable that Katsa and Po do not get married and start popping out babies at the end. This bugs me for numerous reasons:
1. Some people do not want do get married and have babies. Most people do, but some don't. The people that do not want to get married and have babies, are people who do not want to get married or have babies. When these people find the "right" person for them, the "right" person isn't going to be a person who suddenly makes them change all their life goals and their feelings about marriage and babies. The right person for a person who doesn't want marriage and babies will be someone who doesn't fucking try and make them have marriage and babies.
2. Personally not wanting marriage and babies is neither necessarily anti-marriage nor anti-babies, and this book really does go out of its way to explain that it really is just Katsa not wanting them for herself and not passing judgment on other people, but apparently a lot of people who read this book cannot read.
3. If you want to read a book where the heroine gets married at the end, even a book about a strong-willed independent kick-ass heroine who gets married at the end, you can read, oh, any other motherfucking book with a female character in the history of writing books with female characters. Tamora Pierce's heroines get fucking married at the end (sometimes creepily--Aly marries a dude who is actually only three years old because he used to be a goddamn bird, is that better?). Katniss Everdeen gets married at the end (to a dude who has been conditioned to try and kill her on sight, ISN'T WUV WONDERFUL). Princess Cimorene gets married and becomes Queen of the Enchanted Forest and goes on adventures while pregnant. Jo March gets married at the end, although only because the publishers wouldn't print the book if she didn't. Jacky Faber gets engaged at like fourteen and spends the entire series trying to get married at the end of each book (she fails, but she tries REALLY HARD). Katsa and Po decided to have their relationship on their own terms instead of the legalistic expectations dictated by their society and the cliches of storytelling, and that makes them AWESOME, and if you have a problem with that, YOU ARE NOT AWESOME ENOUGH; YOU SHOULD FEEL BAD ABOUT YOURSELF UNTIL YOU BECOME MORE AWESOME AND LESS JUDGMENTAL. Period.
4. My fourth problem is a problem that I have partly with the readers... but also partly with the book. It is this: Katsa talks about her feelings about what marriage "is," in emotional and metaphorical terms, but they do not actually say anything about what marriage is objectively in this book--how the legal institution of marriage actually works. So I think a lot of the people who are disappointed in Katsa not choosing marriage are just bringing their own ideas of what marriage "is," both in terms of their own emotional feelings about it, but also their modern idea of what is actually is--that in the face of any mention of marriage laws in this world, they assume it's more or less the same as in ours. I think these particular readers likely read a lot of romance but not a lot of books specifically dealing with criticizing medieval and pseudo-medieval patriarchy. I, on the other hand, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, assumed that, since this was a medieval-ish book, they probably had medieval-ish marriage laws--one where Katsa would have significantly fewer rights than her husband, be considered his legal property, be unable to obtain a divorce (either because divorce did not exist, or some sort of situation where the husband can obtain a divorce by saying "I divorce your fat ass" in public three times but the woman has to prove physical abuse to the point of hospitalization with fifteen male witnesses and a written confession, or something), have "marital duties" (i.e. no laws against marital rape), etc.
The book says absolutely nothing whatsoever about any of this, one way or another. And this is where I realized I had my biggest complaint about the book, which I didn't even realize until other people started interpreting it so radically differently--there's way too much stuff that just isn't actually in it that needs to be in it. There's a lot of room for the audience to sort of fill in whatever they figure makes the most sense, and I ended up filling in stuff that made sense to me, which also happened to be awesome, socially critical stuff in the vein of all the socially critical fantasy novels I read. But apparently, that is just me! And so I am unsure how much the novel actually made it clear that Katsa is not supposed to be perfect--that she is deeply fucked up, and part of the story is her becoming less fucked up--or if it really is that easy to read Katsa's fucked-upness as being somehow glorified or a strong role model even if you aren't a clueless illiterate who doesn't understand characterization; if it really is just me seeing that there is a clear relation between her role as a hit-man and her emotional stuntedness; stuff like that. I also read Katsa's rejection of dresses and having long hair as a combination "Katsa personally dislikes these thing because she does, and it's sexist to assume she doesn't" and "These are manifestations of a particular type of expectation that Katsa is forced to conform to whether she likes it or not, and that is a fast track to resenting the shit out of something." But thinking back on it, this is not there. It is just "Dress; do not want." In the absence of anything whatsoever, this could also quite easily be read as the overdone-to-death trope of "Rejection of all feminine-coded things as shorthand for how awesome and not frivolous or stupid our heroine is," which I despise. I don't know if that's what's going on here; you are free to make it up as you go along because... it ain't there.
But... yeah. That is pretty much my only complaint about the book, even though the more I think about it, the more major it seems: A lot of really serious political issues are touched on and not explained, explored, or developed. The world-building is really weak, and particularly the social structure, which is problematic because it is hard to discuss social issues without knowing what the social structure is, and the social issues are clearly very important, because people are having lots of feelings and discussions about them!
But, er, basically, if you are genre-savvy enough that you can fill in like half of what's going on with assumptions made from similar books, THEN IT IS GREAT. Just do not read what Twilight fans have to say about it.