Ta Grainne Mhaol ag teacht thar saile

Every year when I visit Maine I like to read something nice and nautical, usually about pirates, and this past weekend was no exception. I’d run out of regular pirate history books, though, so I figured it was finally time to indulge in a find I’d made in my Aunt Birdie’s book box when my dad was cleaning out her storage unit: a weeded library copy of a 1986 historical novel titled Grania: She-King of the Irish Seas, by one Morgan Llywelyn.

I expected this book to be very ‘80s and frankly I also expected it to be very bad, and I’m pleased to report that I was quite correct on the first front but not as much on the second. There’s something in the particular cadence of pseudo-old-timey writing and the particular brand of essentialist-but-thinks-its-doing-a-feminism gender politics that reminds me a lot of The Mists of Avalon, but I really can’t figure out a way to describe it other than “it’s what women who were interested in medieval shit wrote like in the ‘80s,” and if you know what I’m talking about then you know what I’m talking about.

For all that it is full of hilarious overwriting and cheesy sex scenes, I ended up getting very sucked into the book! It seems pretty well-researched, though obviously much license is taken for the sake of writing a narratively and thematically coherent swashbuckler. I am also not at all bored by things that apparently bore a lot of other readers, like all the complicated webs of relationships and rivalries that characterize old Gaelic clan life. It’s got exciting naval battles and petty internecine power struggles and a couple of really hateable villains (there’s a terrible priest, who is probably fictional, and Sir Richard Bingham, who sadly is not). The characterization of this version of Grace O’Malley is pretty well-done; she does some character growth over her long life but is a recognizably strong personality throughout. It’s not a fantasy book but there’s some mysticism around the old religion that peeps through. Overall, it was an effective mix of things to mightily entertain me specifically.

I like to read about teenage girls overthrowing the government

Another book that I brought up to Maine was Alwyn Hamilton’s Rebel of the Sands, which I admit I did not really expect to like very much. I’ve sort of gone off YA a bit and basically picked up a few this weekend so that I could get them off my TBR shelves, and figured it was a good weekend to read them because my brain is soft and tired and made of cheese, and I was worried that once my head is good and rested I would simply never be able to read them. Also, I was slightly suspicious of a desert-flavored adventure written by a white author, because fantasy writing is full of white people writing exotic desert locales in very cringey ways, starting with Dune and going from there. So, in short, my expectations were not very high going in.

That said, said expectations were nicely surpassed. Clocking in at around 300 pages, it’s a fast-paced, frequently funny, very readable little gunslinging adventure about djinns and overthrowing tyrants and how much it sucks to live in a dying factory town in a militarized society under unaccountable armed occupation, and lots of terrible dudes get the shit beaten out of them. It is neither subtle nor thought-provoking, but it is fun. I liked it maybe slightly better than Vengeance Road but not as much as Gunslinger Girl, but overall I’d say if you liked one or both of those you may like this one too.