A girl, her guns, and a city built on death

[bloodygranuaile]

 The year, thus far, has been cold, but the coldest part of the year was right in the beginning. New Year's was what would be less than halfway through a deep freeze of near-zero and subzero temperatures that would hang around for nearly three weeks. This would sound like a good time to stay home under a large pile of blankets and read, but my life doesn't work like that. On the first, Lyndsay and I went to see Molly's Game, despite it being, like, a single degree out. On the second, her debut novel was launched.

 

The weather has returned to degrees in the double digits, but it is still a good time of year to hole up in bed and read a good rollicking adventure story while drinking tea and having the cat sit on you, and I finally scraped up some time to do so this week. So of course I read Gunslinger Girl, which I had previously helped workshop a few chapters of, but of which I had not yet read a full draft.

 

Gunslinger Girl is the story of Serendipity Jones, known as Pity, a sixteen-year-old resident of a farming commune somewhere in a post-apocalyptic North America. (The apocalypse in question was called the Pacific Event, but other than that, we don't quite know what it was, only that it then set off the Second Civil War.) Pity inherited a set of guns and excellent sharpshooting skills from her mom before she died, leaving Pity to the mercy of two douchebag older brothers and a father who hates her. When Pity finds out she's going to be sold off to a mining commune with some creepy older dude, she grabs her guns and her best friend and runs away, planning to go east to the big cities. The plan gangs agley, as they aft do, and Pity finds herself instead going west, away from what passes for civilization, and toward the lawless border town of Cessation.

 

In Cessation, Pity's skill with firearms lands her a gig doing trick sharpshooting shows for the Theatre Vespertine, a Cirque de Soleil-ish spectacle put on in the opulent brothel/gambling hall/all-around pleasure palace of Casimir. Casimir is the property of one Miss Selene, the de facto boss of Cessation (if the city has an official mayor or anything like that, they're not too important). Miss Selene is a stone cold mobster and femme fatale, and I loved her. The Theatre is the pet project of one Halcyon Singh, an ambitious, theatrical man with dreams of taking the Theatre on the road. But there's one part of the Theatre that probably wouldn't fly in the "civilized" cities of the Confederation of North America, and that's the Finale.

 

Pity, really, really does not want to ever have to perform a Finale, and it would be easy to say that the central moral question is whether she'll have the moral strength to refuse. But it's actually a lot more complicated than that, since Pity's not sure it's about refusing so much as just being unable to pull the trigger (in this case literally, not metaphorically), and does that really mean she's got moral strength at all, or just too weak a stomach to face up to the realities that enable her to live the nice life she's got now? And who of her new friends will she be willing to sell out, or give up, or toss onto the streets, if her refusal or inability to participate in the Finale just happens to pull a thread in a giant tangled web of political intrigue that could bring the entire Theatre--or indeed, all of Cessation--down?

 

These questions are made more complicated by the wonderful set of friends Pity picks up in Casimir. I love a good set of secondary characters and I love YA books where the protagonists have awesome friends, and Pity finds great ones. Most of them are service workers of some sort within Casimir, but her, uh, most special friend is an artsy dude called Max who works as a set and costume designer for the Theatre, and who has a mysterious past and some sort of emotional trauma that causes bouts of distance and extreme seriousness. The rest of the time he is actually great, though, so he's not all Brooding YA Hero and it's easy to see why Pity, a reasonably sensible human, likes him.

 

Pity has to be sensible or she wouldn't have survived, especially considering she has a few marks against her that means she almost doesn't--like that she's grown up in a brutal but fairly sheltered environment, so she's not familiar with navigating the mafia politics of a place like Cessation; and like that, while she loves her guns, she's not comfortable committing violence in cold blood. Also, she's kind of a lightweight. But she's pragmatic and fairly quick on the uptake and is good in a fight once the fight has actually started, and she takes care of her friends, so I think she's a great protagonist. It can't have been easy to make a sympathetic, relatable character out of someone whose driving conflict is "Should I execute someone in cold blood in order to keep living in this gang-run brothel-casino?", but it works. Probably because every girl secretly wants to be Annie Oakley a little bit, don't we?

 

In addition to being a solid story on the merits, this book is also full of little tidbits for readers who may have interests that align with the author's. In addition to Pity's last name being Jones, we get a badass female bounty hunter whose last name is Bond. One of the villains is named Jonathan Pryce, whom I envisioned as Jonathan-Pryce-as-Colonel-Peron because I haven't actually seen Tomorrow Never Dies. Pity's six-shooters are inspired by the Tiffany-decorated Smith & Wesson revolvers at the Met. I'm pretty sure there's a sighting of a Harry Potter book. I shouldn't give anything else away, should I.

 

Anyway. The book is a standalone, but it leaves open the possibility of a sequel, which I am sure many readers will be agitating for, especially readers that are interested in exploring the corrupt corporate underbelly of the Confederation of North America proper and its dependence upon military contractors. But also, more circuses and gambling.