Book: Graceling
Nov. 23rd, 2013 10:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livAuthor: Kristin Cashore
Details: (c) Kristin Cashore 2008; Pub 2009 Gollancz; ISBN 978-0-575-08530-5
Verdict: Graceling is pacy and exciting but fairly generic YA swords-and-sorcery.
Reasons for reading it: There's been quite a bit of buzz about it as the next big thing in YA so I was curious.
How it came into my hands: Charity shop.
I enjoyed Graceling, I cared about the characters and the plot and was motivated to keep reading. Making allowances for the fact that it's aimed at rather younger readers than me, it is pretty successful. It fits very firmly within its genre niche, it's very much a teen book and very much a standard fantasy though it falls short of being cliched. For an experienced reader, much of it is fairly predictable. The worldbuilding is paper-thin, it's a conflict between obviously evil melodramatic villains and obviously virtuous good guys, and there is really a great deal of id showing through the writing.
Inevitably, as a break-out YA fantasy, Graceling is blurbed as being the next Twilight. Thankfully it very much isn't that, it's a lot more like The Hunger Games (or even Buffy) in that it's about a girl with riduculously awesome powers triumphing over all kinds of ordeals to save the kingdom, and not in the least about a passive non-entity falling in love with a dangerous yet sexy monster. I'm somewhat heartened to compare this to the sorts of things I was reading when I was the age it's targeted to: we can now have a female protagonist who is directly the chosen one and whose specialness is her impossibly brilliant fighting skill, not her beauty or her empathy. I like the ways that Katsa comes across as a believable 16-year-old girl, idealistic but not always very clueful at understanding other people or her own emotions (even if her magical powers are not in the least believable, but then I suppose it is meant to be magic rather than a realistic talent). She's not disguised as a boy in order to have adventures (though she does have a bit of the fighting is so much cooler than stupid girly things like caring about clothes and gossip cliché going on). She genuinely is the protagonist in that throughout the book she is the character with the most agency, not just the most screen time.
The relationship with the male love interest is both fascinating and a bit horrifying. It seems like this millennium we're allowed female protagonists who are directly sexual rather than subtextually so, and don't get punished for it. And we no longer have soul-bonded horses or dragons as a cipher for the perfect boyfriend who perfectly understands you; we have a literally telepathic boyfriend. Po is just too ludicrously the personification of adolescent wish-fulfilment to be believable as a character, but it's interesting to see what wishes are presumed to be fulfilled. He's not quite the gender-reversed equivalent of the impossibly wonderful love interest who is just there as a prize for the hero, but he does need a bit of rescuing sometimes. And we have Katsa worrying that having a boyfriend will tie her down too much and hold her back from having adventures, and Po being sensible and reasonable when of course the thrust of the plot is that the only route to victory is for the protag to be outrageous and desperate. Katsa is also portrayed as vehemently childfree; I do hope there isn't going to be a sequel where Twoo Wuv persuades her to change her mind about this. But the virginity scene is absolutely cringe-making, and there's a trope of fighting (literal physical wrestling) as foreplay, and there is a really bizarre convoluted plot reason for Katsa to have to do whatever Po says unquestioningly for a while, though this isn't dwelled on as much as it could be. And I really did not like the twist around his head injury.
Details: (c) Kristin Cashore 2008; Pub 2009 Gollancz; ISBN 978-0-575-08530-5
Verdict: Graceling is pacy and exciting but fairly generic YA swords-and-sorcery.
Reasons for reading it: There's been quite a bit of buzz about it as the next big thing in YA so I was curious.
How it came into my hands: Charity shop.
I enjoyed Graceling, I cared about the characters and the plot and was motivated to keep reading. Making allowances for the fact that it's aimed at rather younger readers than me, it is pretty successful. It fits very firmly within its genre niche, it's very much a teen book and very much a standard fantasy though it falls short of being cliched. For an experienced reader, much of it is fairly predictable. The worldbuilding is paper-thin, it's a conflict between obviously evil melodramatic villains and obviously virtuous good guys, and there is really a great deal of id showing through the writing.
Inevitably, as a break-out YA fantasy, Graceling is blurbed as being the next Twilight. Thankfully it very much isn't that, it's a lot more like The Hunger Games (or even Buffy) in that it's about a girl with riduculously awesome powers triumphing over all kinds of ordeals to save the kingdom, and not in the least about a passive non-entity falling in love with a dangerous yet sexy monster. I'm somewhat heartened to compare this to the sorts of things I was reading when I was the age it's targeted to: we can now have a female protagonist who is directly the chosen one and whose specialness is her impossibly brilliant fighting skill, not her beauty or her empathy. I like the ways that Katsa comes across as a believable 16-year-old girl, idealistic but not always very clueful at understanding other people or her own emotions (even if her magical powers are not in the least believable, but then I suppose it is meant to be magic rather than a realistic talent). She's not disguised as a boy in order to have adventures (though she does have a bit of the fighting is so much cooler than stupid girly things like caring about clothes and gossip cliché going on). She genuinely is the protagonist in that throughout the book she is the character with the most agency, not just the most screen time.
The relationship with the male love interest is both fascinating and a bit horrifying. It seems like this millennium we're allowed female protagonists who are directly sexual rather than subtextually so, and don't get punished for it. And we no longer have soul-bonded horses or dragons as a cipher for the perfect boyfriend who perfectly understands you; we have a literally telepathic boyfriend. Po is just too ludicrously the personification of adolescent wish-fulfilment to be believable as a character, but it's interesting to see what wishes are presumed to be fulfilled. He's not quite the gender-reversed equivalent of the impossibly wonderful love interest who is just there as a prize for the hero, but he does need a bit of rescuing sometimes. And we have Katsa worrying that having a boyfriend will tie her down too much and hold her back from having adventures, and Po being sensible and reasonable when of course the thrust of the plot is that the only route to victory is for the protag to be outrageous and desperate. Katsa is also portrayed as vehemently childfree; I do hope there isn't going to be a sequel where Twoo Wuv persuades her to change her mind about this. But the virginity scene is absolutely cringe-making, and there's a trope of fighting (literal physical wrestling) as foreplay, and there is a really bizarre convoluted plot reason for Katsa to have to do whatever Po says unquestioningly for a while, though this isn't dwelled on as much as it could be. And I really did not like the twist around his head injury.
