Diary of a Young Sword Lesbian
Aug. 1st, 2021 09:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodygranuaileAfter reading Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint I borrowed a copy of the sequel, The Privilege of the Sword, from Gillian, and this seemed like just the kind of lovely summer weekend to read it. In this one, our protagonist is Katherine, the teenage niece of the Mad Duke Tremontaine, who lives out in the country with her parents and her brothers and the lawsuits the Mad Duke keeps them tied up in. Or at least, she does until the Mad Duke, whomst you may remember from the first book as Alec, sends for her with a deal: she lives with him and trains to be a swordsman for six months, and all the lawsuits will be called off and the debts forgiven.
There is an enormous amount of weird family history behind this decision that eventually makes it sort of make sense, but it certainly doesn’t make any sense to 15-year-old Katherine, who finds herself living in a strange city, with her extremely strange uncle, forced to wear strange clothes (i.e., boys’ clothes), practicing swordsmanship with a series of somewhat infuriatingly mysterious tutors and basically not allowed to do anything else. Nevertheless, as the months progress Katherine does manage to meet people and get caught up in various interesting plotlines that go a lot deeper into politics than she realizes. A number of these plotlines involve a popular sensation novel titled The Swordsman Whose Name Was Not Death, which among other things proves motivational for Katherine to take her swordsmanship studies with some degree of seriousness.
Unlike Swordspoint, this book deals very explicitly with the shitty hand dealt to women of all classes in a feudal society like this one. One of the major secondary characters is Artemisia Fitz-Levi, the sheltered daughter of an aristocratic family. Artemisia is the type of character who could easily have been a villain in a less compassionate story--she’s quite comfortable in her highly privileged class, she likes all the things she’s supposed to like and her goals in life are precisely what they’re supposed to be, and she is just as silly and romantic and superficially charming as women of her class are supposed to be. But the book is brutally careful to show that she is exactly who she was raised to be, and it is not her fault that what she was raised to be is completely defenseless, blindsided by reality after being carefully raised on a lifetime diet of pretty lies. Another secondary character is Flavia, the Mathematical Girl, who is quite simply a woman who is utterly brilliant at mathematics in a world in which that’s not the thing women are supposed to be good at.
Overall, this is extremely my kind of book and especially my kind of comfort read. It’s got many of the same elements that keep me coming back to Tamora Pierce novels year after year--girls dressed up as boys kicking ass with swords, pseudo-medieval fake politics, witty banter, and some poignant coming-of-age stuff, but it’s definitely not YA, which is nice since I’m finding it increasingly hard to read YA as I become increasingly less young of an adult. It’s just a very definitely adult novel about a bisexual sixteen-year-old girl learning to defend herself and other sixteen-year-old girls with a sword in a city full of the most debauched, insane people you’ll ever meet in your life, and occasionally going to the theater. A+ power fantasy nonsense, would read again.
There is an enormous amount of weird family history behind this decision that eventually makes it sort of make sense, but it certainly doesn’t make any sense to 15-year-old Katherine, who finds herself living in a strange city, with her extremely strange uncle, forced to wear strange clothes (i.e., boys’ clothes), practicing swordsmanship with a series of somewhat infuriatingly mysterious tutors and basically not allowed to do anything else. Nevertheless, as the months progress Katherine does manage to meet people and get caught up in various interesting plotlines that go a lot deeper into politics than she realizes. A number of these plotlines involve a popular sensation novel titled The Swordsman Whose Name Was Not Death, which among other things proves motivational for Katherine to take her swordsmanship studies with some degree of seriousness.
Unlike Swordspoint, this book deals very explicitly with the shitty hand dealt to women of all classes in a feudal society like this one. One of the major secondary characters is Artemisia Fitz-Levi, the sheltered daughter of an aristocratic family. Artemisia is the type of character who could easily have been a villain in a less compassionate story--she’s quite comfortable in her highly privileged class, she likes all the things she’s supposed to like and her goals in life are precisely what they’re supposed to be, and she is just as silly and romantic and superficially charming as women of her class are supposed to be. But the book is brutally careful to show that she is exactly who she was raised to be, and it is not her fault that what she was raised to be is completely defenseless, blindsided by reality after being carefully raised on a lifetime diet of pretty lies. Another secondary character is Flavia, the Mathematical Girl, who is quite simply a woman who is utterly brilliant at mathematics in a world in which that’s not the thing women are supposed to be good at.
Overall, this is extremely my kind of book and especially my kind of comfort read. It’s got many of the same elements that keep me coming back to Tamora Pierce novels year after year--girls dressed up as boys kicking ass with swords, pseudo-medieval fake politics, witty banter, and some poignant coming-of-age stuff, but it’s definitely not YA, which is nice since I’m finding it increasingly hard to read YA as I become increasingly less young of an adult. It’s just a very definitely adult novel about a bisexual sixteen-year-old girl learning to defend herself and other sixteen-year-old girls with a sword in a city full of the most debauched, insane people you’ll ever meet in your life, and occasionally going to the theater. A+ power fantasy nonsense, would read again.
