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The Forgotten Beasts of Eld by Patricia A. McKillip

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A . . . parable – yeah, that’s close enough – about the sorceress on an isolated mountain the king she raises and the man she falls in love with, and how she is drawn back down into the world of men and politics and power and greed.

This is a hard book. It has this precise, chilly sort of narration, like it’s dissecting this story even as the characters act it out with dramatic, stylized gestures. The sorceress can call creatures to her – a black swan, a dragon – and bind them to her. The book is about that, about the power reaching out and grabbing you, about how it hurts you and makes you angry. And how that’s what family is, too, and love.

A hard book. As in hard edges.

It also does a really good job with portraying a magical assault on someone’s mind as a kind of rape. The word never passes anyone’s lips, but it’s there in the fundamentals of the story, in her horror, in her thirst for revenge, in the instantaneous way everyone around her understands the magnitude of what was threatened.

I have . . . complicated feelings about the way a lot of modern fantasy – and more often modern critics – gloss particular kinds of magical attacks as rape. Or just flat out say they're categorically the same, I think is what I'm really talking about. I can’t articulate why this bothers me . . . something about using acts of real world violation and degradation as a shorthand to explain why this fantasyland psychic assault from atop Mount Doom is bad? Because not all invasions of the self are the same tenor of subjective horror, and piling all these psychic and symbolic-magic assaults into the category of rape muddies the waters on a word we can’t even get everyone to line up and agree on in the real world? A friend of mine recently sat next to a guy on a plane who believed as a matter of course that a prostitute could never be raped. Not the point, just, it stuck with me. I don’t know. Obviously thoughts still very unformed on this.

My actual point being, this book maneuvered that very well, and made me feel the horror and the violation. Let the characters like her husband respond in the way they would to rape, but also let the act be the weird, out-of-our-world magical crime that it was.

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