In which I sort of want to be Lirael when I grow up

[bloodygranuaile]

I took a weekend off all my commitments (including forgetting to actually cancel on like, half of them) and instead lounged about on Martha's Vineyard drinking Apothic Red and rereading Garth Nix's Old Kingdom trilogy. The bulk of this weekend was spent plowing my way through the 700-page Lirael, a proper doorstopper of a YA fantasy.

 

Taking place twenty years after Sabriel, and forming a single plot arc with Abhorsen, Lirael feels much richer and fuller than the first book, because the story's much more epic in scope. But it's still very much the same series and it has all the same basics that make this my comfort genre: a coming-of-age story about a teenage girl discovering her magical powers and learning about her heritage and saving the world with the aid of a talking animal companion.

 

One of the things that I like about Lirael better than Sabriel and also literally every other entry into this my lifelong favorite of genres is the lack of a romantic subplot. It seems a bit like it's geared towards one--there are dual main viewpoint characters, and the other one is now-Queen Sabriel's teenage son Sameth. Sameth and Lirael eventually meet up to have adventures together, and Sameth notices that Lirael is rather attractive. However, Lirael promptly tells him she's actually 35 (she is not) and then later we find out that she's actually his aunt. Lirael goes on to fail to demonstrate any romantic interest in anyone at any point, and lies about her age to the only other teenage boy she runs into as well. It's delightful and I want more plot twists like this, especially in YA.

The first half or so of this book follows Lirael as she grows up in the glacier home of the Clayr, an all-female society of prophetesses. The Clayr's gift is called the Sight, and it tends to awaken in them sometime during the preteen years. Lirael still doesn't have it at fourteen, at which point, some of the most powerful Clayr take pity on her enough to give her a real job, which is working in the Clayr's giant occult library. I love me a good occult library almost as much as I hate me a poorly done romantic subplot, so already we're on firm ground here.

Though Lirael does not have the Sight, she is an extremely strong Charter mage, so for a while she just has magical adventures in the Library, including creating a pet dog out of magic. The spell goes not quite as planned and the Disreputable Dog turns out to be a real creature of mixed Charter and Free magic, rather than merely a canine simulacrum as originally intended. The Disreputable Dog is much nicer than Mogget, who does eventually show up too, and just as funny.

The main plot here involves a refugee crisis wherein a civil war somewhere in the south is sending a lot of refugees up to Ancelstierre, and a bunch of Ancelsterrian racists are trying to get rid of them by sending them up further to the Old Kingdom. The Old Kingdom doesn't want this to happen but not because they're racist but because the areas in the Old Kingdom southlands near the border are currently being scourged by bad magic and Dead things, and so sending the refugees there basically means feeding them directly to necromancers. Why Sabriel and Touchstone can't figure out how to move the refugees out of the border area faster and resettle them in the more habitable areas of the Old Kingdom is not addressed. Anyway, the refugee crises turns out to be merely part of a larger plot involving Free Magic and necromancy and a long-bound evil power that some dipshits are trying to free, kind of like last book but bigger and older and eviler. The big bads inexplicably attempting to free a power that might destroy the entire world are aided in their efforts by the political connections of Sameth's school friend Nick, a good-hearted enough fellow but definitely a Very Rational Science Dude who doesn't believe in the Old Kingdom's magic despite going to school in an area where magic actually works sometimes, because being completely incapable of integrating new information into your worldview is definitely the true spirit of scientific inquiry. This brand of narrow-mindedness makes him very susceptible to being taken over by evil magical things.

The expansion of the Old Kingdom's magic system and history is also really fun. Lirael spends a lot of time being sad about not being a proper Clayr, but she is a fantastically strong Charter Mage, and then later we find out that she's something called a Remembrancer, which is like a Seer in reverse. Sameth, the Abhorsen-in-Waiting, is a shitty Abhorsen-in-Waiting but a good Charter Mage in his own way, and through his storyline we learn a bit more about a previously under-discussed line of Old Kingdom magic workers, the Wallbuilders. And of course, we get more excellently creepy varieties of necromancers and reanimated corpse monsters.

I'm honestly a little surprised I didn't read this series a lot earlier than I did and that I didn't get hugely, obsessedly into it back when I had the time to get hugely obsessed with new series, because this shit is EXTREMELY my jam in just about every way.