Book Review: The Queen of Attolia
Jan. 27th, 2022 08:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerThe Queen of Attolia came out when I was twelve, not long after I had read and loved The Thief, so I bought it in hardcover (this was an honor shared by, as I recall, Harry Potter books and Tamora Pierce’s latest releases) and read it on vacation, on a sunny day in a park where the exterior wall of the bathroom had been painted as a mural copying Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte.
As you can perhaps guess by the fact that I remember the circumstances in such detail, The Queen of Attolia scarred me for life.
I came into this book utterly unprepared for Eugenides to come to any lasting harm and I was DEEPLY UPSET when the book kicks off with the Queen of Attolia chopping off his hand. This was not, in my experience, within the realm of things that HAPPEN to protagonists, particularly protagonists like Gen who spent their first book being plucky and delightfully obnoxious and getting out of every tight corner they get into, sometimes suffering bodily harm it is true, but never anything lasting. In The Thief Gen takes a sword through his shoulder, but nonetheless escapes from prison within the next forty-eight hours!
Then in The Queen of Attolia he gets into a tight corner he cannot escape and ends up getting his hand cut off and I found the maiming both very compelling (rereading it now, I find that I memorized whole passages from that section: the bit where Attolia visits Eugenides in his cell and he says, “Please.” His voice was low but clear. “Don’t hurt me anymore”…) but also a betrayal of the way that I understood stories to work.
I was also totally baffled by Eugenides burning desire to marry the queen who cut off his hand, and similarly baffled by the fact that the queen evidently fell in love with him in the act of cutting his hand off. Sort of like Hercules falling in love with Penthisilea in the act of stabbing her, it occurs to me now. Very classical. Only Attolia had the good fortune to merely maim Gen rather than murder him, so he’s still around to marry afterward.
In short I found this book VERY confusing and it gave me MANY feelings and I was not sure I LIKED that even though, clearly, a part of me did like it enough to read the most-maiming prison portions approximately 237 times.
I also really liked the part where Eugenides’s limp body gets dragged out of the litter in the courtyard of the palace at Eddis; the sickbed scenes; the part where Eddis tells him to stop making an ass of himself and take his lethium; the part where Nahuseresh has captured Eugenides and the Eddisian forces, and Attolia comes over and puts a hand on Eugenides’ face and that’s all she needs to do and he nearly collapses in terror, but even so maintains enough presence of mind to make a snarky comment. For which Attolia boxes his ears. Look, this book BRINGS the whump and the hurt/comfort. Truly magnificent.
Okay, now that I’ve shared my FEELINGS, a couple of more analytical thoughts.
The scene near the end, where Eugenides demands an answer from the gods, and three times Moira tells him no and three times he insists, and then the glass ceiling shatters down, and the gods answer? One of the best scenes that I’ve read in anything, ever.
Rereading this book after Thick as Thieves really throws Kamet and Nahuseresh’s interactions into a different light. The first time that I read the book, I didn’t pay too much attention to them - they’re just the baddies, right? But this time I was reading more closely, and there’s this scene where Kamet comments that there aren’t many slaves in Attolia, and jokes that he could run away and be free, and Nahuseresh jokes back that Kamet would be easy to catch because he looks so different from the Attolians… and it really jumped out at me that just underneath this joking tone, you have Kamet floating a trial balloon on the idea and Nahuseresh just blowing it out of the water.
Onward to The King of Attolia! This is my favorite book in the series (and the one I wrote fanfic for, lo these many Yuletides ago) and I am VERY excited.
As you can perhaps guess by the fact that I remember the circumstances in such detail, The Queen of Attolia scarred me for life.
I came into this book utterly unprepared for Eugenides to come to any lasting harm and I was DEEPLY UPSET when the book kicks off with the Queen of Attolia chopping off his hand. This was not, in my experience, within the realm of things that HAPPEN to protagonists, particularly protagonists like Gen who spent their first book being plucky and delightfully obnoxious and getting out of every tight corner they get into, sometimes suffering bodily harm it is true, but never anything lasting. In The Thief Gen takes a sword through his shoulder, but nonetheless escapes from prison within the next forty-eight hours!
Then in The Queen of Attolia he gets into a tight corner he cannot escape and ends up getting his hand cut off and I found the maiming both very compelling (rereading it now, I find that I memorized whole passages from that section: the bit where Attolia visits Eugenides in his cell and he says, “Please.” His voice was low but clear. “Don’t hurt me anymore”…) but also a betrayal of the way that I understood stories to work.
I was also totally baffled by Eugenides burning desire to marry the queen who cut off his hand, and similarly baffled by the fact that the queen evidently fell in love with him in the act of cutting his hand off. Sort of like Hercules falling in love with Penthisilea in the act of stabbing her, it occurs to me now. Very classical. Only Attolia had the good fortune to merely maim Gen rather than murder him, so he’s still around to marry afterward.
In short I found this book VERY confusing and it gave me MANY feelings and I was not sure I LIKED that even though, clearly, a part of me did like it enough to read the most-maiming prison portions approximately 237 times.
I also really liked the part where Eugenides’s limp body gets dragged out of the litter in the courtyard of the palace at Eddis; the sickbed scenes; the part where Eddis tells him to stop making an ass of himself and take his lethium; the part where Nahuseresh has captured Eugenides and the Eddisian forces, and Attolia comes over and puts a hand on Eugenides’ face and that’s all she needs to do and he nearly collapses in terror, but even so maintains enough presence of mind to make a snarky comment. For which Attolia boxes his ears. Look, this book BRINGS the whump and the hurt/comfort. Truly magnificent.
Okay, now that I’ve shared my FEELINGS, a couple of more analytical thoughts.
The scene near the end, where Eugenides demands an answer from the gods, and three times Moira tells him no and three times he insists, and then the glass ceiling shatters down, and the gods answer? One of the best scenes that I’ve read in anything, ever.
Rereading this book after Thick as Thieves really throws Kamet and Nahuseresh’s interactions into a different light. The first time that I read the book, I didn’t pay too much attention to them - they’re just the baddies, right? But this time I was reading more closely, and there’s this scene where Kamet comments that there aren’t many slaves in Attolia, and jokes that he could run away and be free, and Nahuseresh jokes back that Kamet would be easy to catch because he looks so different from the Attolians… and it really jumped out at me that just underneath this joking tone, you have Kamet floating a trial balloon on the idea and Nahuseresh just blowing it out of the water.
Onward to The King of Attolia! This is my favorite book in the series (and the one I wrote fanfic for, lo these many Yuletides ago) and I am VERY excited.
