A Certain Slant of Light

Megan Whalen Turner’s Return of the Thief starts by introducing a new character: Pheris, the King of Attolia’s newest and youngest attendant, whom the House of Erondites has dumped on the court in something of the nature of a cruel joke. Pheris can’t speak, and limps, and grows almost too stiff to move if he sits still too long, and is so obviously misshapen that his whole family regards him as an omen of ill luck who should have been exposed at birth.

Pheris spends the first hundred pages or so being spat on and kicked, and hiding in corners close to the king because he figures that if he gets outside of the circle of the king’s protection someone will take the opportunity to do away with him (and thus the ill luck he represents). I spent a fair amount of the first hundred pages wailing “This is A LOT OF WHUMP.”

Naturally I ground to a halt just before the whump begins to let up and Pheris starts getting lessons from the ex-spymaster Relius, as I discovered when I zoomed through the rest of the book last night.

I think this is a book that will need some time to settle before I’m quite sure how I feel about it, but for now, here are some preliminary thoughts.

( Spoilers )

My favorite Queen’s Thief novel, The King of Attolia, is both perfectly tailored to my id and transcendentally well-structured. This made it almost inevitable that the next book would suffer by comparison, and indeed A Conspiracy of Kings is my least favorite of the series - although rereading it with suitably checked expectations has helped me appreciate the things that it is doing, even though, alas, one of those things is not having characters fervently swear to march after their liege lords into hell.

But this book is not about finding your king and swearing fealty unto death; it’s about the process of becoming a king, which means (among other things) coping with other people actually fulfilling their fealty-unto-death vows and dying for you.

It’s also about becoming king when you really really really would rather just stay home and read all day, and look, I get it. I feel that in my bones. You could not pay me enough to become king of anything, let alone king of a country that is simultaneously gripped by civil war, fighting a war with a neighboring country, AND threatened by conquest from an empire that could eat your small nation for breakfast.

However, “character yearns to escape Cool Destiny” can be a difficult plot to pull off. Yes, this Cool Destiny (like so many Cool Destinies) actually sucks, and it makes perfect sense that the character would want to escape, but as the Cool Destiny is the engine for the plot, the character’s yearning to escape is often in direct conflict with the reader’s yearning for the story to continue unfolding.

For this very reason, I thought the first half really dragged the first time I read this book. (I may also have been in mourning for the total lack of Costis.) On reread, I found more points of interest in this first half, but I still think the fact that the plot basically stops dead for so long is a structural problem.

( Spoilers from here on out. )

The 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.

( Spoilers, for both the book and the series as a whole )

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.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Years ago someone recommended Lucy Sussex’s The Scarlet Rider to me as a read-alike to A. S. Byatt’s Possession, a juxtaposition almost guaranteed to make The Scarlet Rider disappointing. Like Possession, it’s a book about a modern-day (when the book was written, nearly twenty-five years ago) person investigating a 19th century literary mystery; unlike Possession (rather startling, that Possession is the one entitled… possession), The Scarlet Rider involves the heroine being possessed by the author of the novel she is researching, which means that helpful dreams and other spirit leadings take place of a lot of the sweet, sweet archive action I was craving. We still get a little archival work! Just not as much as I hoped.

( Spoilers )

I also read Toni Morrison’s Sula, which may be the ur-book for the plotline “book about TRAGIC BREAKUP of female best friendship which is remedied ONLY AFTER DEATH (or occasionally right before death)”? I make this assertion utterly without evidence, it’s simply the earliest example that I’ve read and famous enough as a piece of literary fiction that I could totally see other authors cribbing from its structure like that.

Because it’s Morrison, she writes it beautifully, but man, I just don’t get why this seems to be the literary fiction ur-plot for books about female friendship. But I guess really that makes sense; I feel like there’s a certain kind of literary fiction that works by basically being genre fiction but taking out the bit that creates the catharsis in genre. A romance where the lovers break up, a mystery that is never solved, a fantasy novel where the heroes can’t overcome the evil that oppresses them, etc.

I say this without judgment - clearly some people find that very lack of catharsis cathartic in itself! Indeed, there are novels like this that I myself enjoy! - but it’s frustrating in the context of female best friends books because there really is no genre equivalent, unless The Babysitters Club is a genre (or more generally children’s friendship books). And I LOVE children’s friendship books! But sometimes! I would like to read about adult friendships doing something other than crashing and burning, too!

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve started reading Nancy Farmer’s The House of the Scorpion, which is off to a rousingly whumpy start. Our hero, six-year-old Matt, a clone in a world where clones are viewed as lower than animals, is being housed like a hamster in a room with a deep floor of sawdust. He keeps bits of his food in hopes of attracting bugs to serve as entertainment/playmates, as he is otherwise totally isolated without even any toys.

And I go ever onward in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Catriona. We’ve FINALLY reconnected with Alan Breck Stewart… right after Davie Balfour went out to see Catriona’s, whose father is involved in a plot to trap Alan Breck Stewart, which Davie KNOWS about, and yet he went to see her anyway, because he is eighteen years old and in love and oh my God, Stevenson, talk about idiot plotting. But at least we’ve finally gotten away from the lawyers??

What I Plan to Read Next

I should be getting Megan Whalen Turner’s Return of the Thief any day now. ANY DAY NOW.

Subtitle for this post: Books That Will Probably Be of Particular Interest to asakiyume.

First, Grace Lin’s Starry River of the Sky, which did not blow me away quite like Where the Mountain Meets the Moon, purely because I had already read Where the Mountain Meets the Moon and therefore had a pretty good idea what to expect: charming retellings and remixes of Chinese fairy tales, which at first seem unrelated but eventually interlace with the overarching plot.

It reminds me a bit of Megan Whalen Turner’s Queen’s Thief book in that way, if the Queen’s Thief books had illustrations. Which, I think we can all agree, would be amazing. Perhaps they could be stylized like ancient Greek pottery...

Anyway, it’s very much “second verse, same as the first.” As I liked the first very much I enjoyed the book, but I hope for a little more branching out in the future.

And second, another book by Ethel Cook Eliot, who wrote The Wind Boy: The Little House in the Fairy Wood, which is even more like unto The House without Windows than The Wind Boy, and not just because both books reference houses in their titles. Like The House without Windows, The Little House in the Fairy Wood features a child - a downtrodden orphan boy who works in a cannery, in this case - who runs away from home to live in a magical wood, where he meets the magical fairy creatures who live in the woods.

And as in The House without Windows, there’s a restless yearning after freedom: there is, for instance, a Beautiful Wicked Witch who expresses her wickedness by keeping creatures in cages. Both books also feature climatic journeys to the seaside, as a sort of ultimate symbol of freedom.

I particularly liked the half-fairy child Ivra, who is the only one brave enough to dance with the snow witches, and hates to go into town because so many people see her - because of her human side - but, because of her fairy half, don’t believe in her, which is in a way worse than not being seen at all.

MY FICS MY FICS MY YULETIDE FICS! You should read them ALL because they are FANTABULOUS!

(One of my New Year's resolutions is to be more modest. Is it working?)

The main story: Covetous, 101 Dalmations, PG. Beta'ed by the marvelous asakiyume.

It's a story about how Cruella and Anita met. They were at school, right, and Anita had the most glorious hair, and Cru...well. You know how Cruella's hair is.

I actually hadn't signed up for this fandom, but I saw my recipient's prompt and thought, "OBVIOUSLY CRUELLA WANTS TO MAKE NITA'S HAIR INTO A WIG and also if I set it in a school I can create cool secondary characters!" and of course then I had to write it.

The treats

Five Times Jess & Jules Kissed in Public, Bend it Like Beckham, Jess/Jules, PG-13. Beta'ed by brilliant and wonderful radio_silent and entwashian, who saved me from my panic over the ending.

You should read this fic! Because it is awesome and exhilarating and giggly and frightening and fun, just like being young and in love!

I'm ridiculously proud of this story; it's probably my best this Yuletide.

The King's Guard, The Queen's Thief series by Megan Whelan Turner, Gen/Costis (and also a little Gen/Attolia), PG

I love the Queen's Thief books to death, especially the last three (the first one is cute but not awesome while the last three are awesome). They are the books that I want to write some day: the spare but emotional prose style and the rich characterization and the twisty plots that award rereading and the way that half the story lies in what remains unsaid.

And I managed to capture a little bit of all that in this story! I'm totally jazzed! Probably my favorite part is the end, where Gen is shamefacedly 'splaining himself to Attolia, but I think the whole fic is adorable.

And now for something completely different: Sealskin, a fairy tale about a selkie and the girl who falls for her. PG-13 or maybe R.

This is a peculiar story for me because there's not a lot of dialogue - well, actually, now that I look at it there's lots of dialogue. But normally dialogue is the driving force in my stories, and here the driving force is description and atmosphere (the naked selkie dripping on the jagged black rock by the sea). I'm pleased with it; I think it turned out well. Maybe I'm better at description than I thought.