Fantasy sports--no, not that kind of fantasy sports

I had a lot of good intentions about reading nonfiction on the plane but then there I was sitting in the airport and was like "but I am le tired" so I picked something out of my library that I knew was YA fiction, although I couldn't remember anything else about it, like what it was about or why I had bought it, so I figured I would find out. That book was Kate Elliott's Court of Fives, which turned out to be just the sort of YA girl's adventure fantasy comfort read I was in the mood for.

 

The main character, Jes, is one of four daughters in a stifling upper-class family, which in her case is especially stifling because of the particular ethnic/class system in place in this society: Her father is a Patron, which is basically the favored imperial ethnic class, but he's not a wealthy one, being a baker's son and an immigrant from the part of the empire where that ethnic group originates, and he's only climbed socially due to being an extremely good commander in the army. His social mobility is limited by his building a household with Jes' mother, who is Common--i.e., of the region's native ethnic class--and so he's not allowed to marry her. Their household is also burdened with four daughters and no sons, plus one of Jes' sisters has a clubfoot, which is the sort of thing that Patron families will often let babies die over, in addition to when there's too many girls. The Patron class is modeled after ancient Greek societies and the indigenous Common class is modeled after Egyptian ones, with the particular time and place of Court of Fives drawing heavily on the Ptolemaic period in Egypt, which is pretty cool.

 

In what is at this point a somewhat formulaic setup for YA girl's adventure novels (this is not a complaint necessarily since it is MY FAVORITE FORMULA), Jes feels all stifled and oppressed by the rigid social expectations placed on her as a sort-of upper-class young lady, and she wishes to have freedom and do fun active things, which in her case is compete in the Fives, the main sport in this society (I enjoy fictional societies that have a sport or tournament or other sort of competition that is the only one and is so popular that literally everyone is invested in it, even though I don't really find it realistic anymore, considering how many Olympicses I have managed to pay no attention to). The Fives is basically a five-part obstacle course; it's clearly very dangerous and sounds pretty rad. Like, it seems like it'd be kind of stupid as a real-world competition, but it works narratively and would probably look cool and martial-arts-movie-y onscreen.

 

Anyway, competing in the Fives is Jes' driving passion, because YA protagonists are unique among teenagers in always knowing exactly what they want to be when they grow up, but that's OK, it's how books work. Jes wants to be in the Fives so much that she regularly sneaks out to train, which she gets away with because her father is always away in the wars, and because literally everyone else in the household covers for her. (She thinks she is also sneaking from her mother but she's wrong, because that would be dumb.) This is obviously a terrible idea that will have terrible consequences, especially when Jes' father comes home early and promises to take them to go see the Fives on the day that Jes is secretly registered to compete. The sensible thing to do would be to eat the cover charge and not risk literally fucking up absolutely everything possible for her entire family, but Jes is a teenager and has an all-consuming passion, so of course she competes. She is careful to lose, and so does not get found out immediately, but does put into action a chain of events that results in her father dumping her mother and getting married to a princess and shipped out East for military service, the entire household sold off to a grasping local lord to cover the debts of the family's patron who had mysteriously died, Jes being forcibly separated from her family to train at the grasping lord's "stable" with his nephew, the Obligatory Love Interest, and Jes' pregnant mother and sisters getting walled up inside the dead lord's tomb with an oracle to die. Very worth the chance to compete in an event that she had to lose on purpose, I'm sure.

 

Anyway, most of the plot then becomes a questy sort of adventure where Jes has to team up with various people and use her wits and resourcefulness and athletic ability to rescue her family from being buried alive; in the course of doing so, she learns (which means we learn) a lot of cool stuff about the current empire and the lies it's built on. Very much my jam. The obligatory romantic subplot really didn't click for me even by obligatory romantic subplot terms; I'm not really sure why though. I liked the bit at the end where it all went horribly wrong, though, which means I will probably want to read the sequel eventually.