The Privilege of the Sword by Ellen Kushner

[lightreads]

About fifteen years after Swordspoint, young Katherine is sent from the country to her uncle the mad Duke, who has a nefarious but possibly brilliant plan to turn her into the first swordswoman.

Okay, so, it went something like this:

First 100 pages: Restless twitching, sighing, picking of fingernails. God, Ellen Kushner, are you seriously telling me you're letting me down in this universe twice?

Next 100 pages: Oh? Oh! Eeee! Well, why didn't you say so earlier? Oh, but you're still doing that thing where you think all your other characters in addition to Richard and Alek are interesting, and you're still wrong, sigh.

Last half of the book: Clever, clever book! Oh, Katherine! Oh, Alek! You are all marvelous and delightful and I love you to distraction! I take it all back – I didn't mean a word of it. Well, except for the part about the first 100 pages being boring, 'cause they kinda are. Sorry!

So, you know, forge ahead. Because this book made me so, so happy. There's clever cross-dressing and power discourse and privilege discourse and tragedy and beauty. This is a book about powerlessness and self-determination with a female protagonist who dresses as a man and becomes a swordswoman, and it's not really about gender. It's about people, and for that alone I could love it.

Comments

[charlie-ego.livejournal.com]

Okay, so, I enjoyed many things about this book, but the plot didn't make any sense to me. Is this because I didn't read Swordspoint? (I have a passing familiarity with the characters from reading a story set in the same universe.)

In particular, why didn't Alec kill Ferris, like, 20 years ago, and why is it suddenly the solution to all the problems now?

(more of my likes/dislikes here (http://charlie-ego.livejournal.com/7826.html))

[lightreads.livejournal.com]

Yes, I think this makes a lot more sense with Swordspoint behind you. There's an awful lot of history carried forward -- that's kind of what the book's about, actually. And I'm quite fond of Swordspoint, at least the Richard and Alek chunks. It's a really nice romance to my eye, actually, come to think on it.

Funny you should bring up the end, because I'm actually still thinking about it. To answer your question in short form, he couldn't do it fifteen years ago because, well, he couldn't. He didn't . . . work that way. Have that personal capacity. He'd watch people die -- all but arrange it -- but he had Richard for the actual wetwork. Which makes the ending here both awesome and sort of disturbing.