The Queen of Atolia

[lightreads]

The Queen of Attolia by Megan Whalen Turner


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Well well! So our pleasant, feather-brained little fantasy romp grew a bigger, bitchener sequel. Turner made the very good choice of switching from first person to roaming third, and tossed us straight in to political intrigue and war and post trauma.

So – and, frankly, this is one of those spoilers that has to be revealed because talking about the book without it is like talking about Harry Potter without talking about magic . . . this sentence was going somewhere. Since when is drunk reviewing this hard?

Anyway this book! Which I liked very much, this book is about acquired disability, and identity changed by trauma, and all of that stuff. I reflexively withdraw from books with sudden acquired disability plotlines. I am predisposed for dislike from two directions: I have the lifelong disabled person’s disdain for badly done flailing and trauma and howling and “how will I ever survive I’d rather be dead” (um, you may have heard me demurely mention this on a previous occasion), and at least in the past four years I’ve also had the periodic raw-nerved sensitivity of sudden loss that can’t tolerate acquired disability actually done well. So it’s not that my standards are high so much as that they are . . . complicated.

So reading this book and watching myself respond to it was actually really instructive in pinpointing what works in acquired disability stories and what doesn’t. What I liked about this book was that the acquired disability and the post-violence trauma were different processes. People almost never get that right, but they really are. Even when they spring from the same event, and even though they are both fundamentally a kind of violence done to identity, they . . . operate in different keys. They are different necessities to reconcile the old identity with the new circumscribed reality, with what you can’t do now and with what everyone else thinks you can’t do (also two different things).

The other thing I liked was that the disability in this book was not about fetishizing pain or woobiness, but instead about fetishizing the person who came out the other side. The former is far more frequently creepy than the latter. And here the process is nicely drawn, with some beautiful moments in Gen’s long, quiet winter in his room, feeling out the new boundaries of his body one tiny increment at a time. And, “I thought I was doing so well.” Oh, yes.

Here’s what I didn’t like. I think it is cheap and it is easy for author’s to shorthand their character’s post-disability trauma entirely into their discomfort with the injury being seen. It does make sense – the gazes of others are of course self-definitive, and this is a thing that people go through. But when you channel so much of the aftermath trauma into body discomfort you’re playing with fire. Because disability is not biological. It is not somatoform. Disability is a sociological condition rooted in the embedded culture’s incapacity to, I don’t know, embrace universal fucking design, and the resultant discord it projects back at the disabled person. I realize I’m being all modern social theory at a little young adult fantasy book, but you know what? You do have to deal with the physical pragmatics, but when you get bound up in this idea of body-based disability shame, you’re permanently stuck in the physical and you can’t get anywhere else. Anywhere a lot more interesting, frankly. Also, modern theory is just how I roll when I’m tipsy.

So anyway. It’s a book about a smart-mouthed kid who gets hurt, and how he gets up again after, and how it hurts the people around him, and how it hurt the person who hurt him. Big stuff, for a silly little young adult fantasy.

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Comments

[spiffikins]

this sounds intriguing in the way that you've described it - I shall add it to my list!

[readerjane]

Son just brought home the first book for me from the library yesterday.

Now that I read your review of book #2, I'm even more eager to try this series.

[lightreads.livejournal.com]

Everyone who recced these books to me was absolutely right: the first book is silly fun, the second book is really interesting, and the third book is awesome. The third book actually reminds me in a few ways of bits of the ADS verse, to be honest.

[charlie-ego.livejournal.com]

Okay, this was really interesting to read. Thanks for putting that up!

Here’s what I didn’t like. I think it is cheap and it is easy for author’s to shorthand their character’s post-disability trauma entirely into their discomfort with the injury being seen.

I'll take your word for it, since a) I wasn't paying close attention to this particular thing when I last read it, and b) you've read it more recently, but I got kind of the impression that Turner wasn't shorthanding it so much as Gen was in his brain (so that, while he was angry about that, he didn't have to deal with everything else). But clearly I am going to have to go back and read it again!

(On the other hand, diverting into the channel of the injury being seen line makes the end of the third book that much more awesome. Embracing universal design, indeed.)

I realize I’m being all modern social theory at a little young adult fantasy book

Well, with this one it kind of kicked the door open to... being taken a bit more seriously, I think. So, that's really cool. And I really like your summary.

[lightreads.livejournal.com]

Yes, and I love that moment at the end of the third book -- have I said this? I'm v. v. tired -- where someone calls him on how he's totally been faking his body shame. I loved loved loved that, because he was so ruthless about the way he used it.

Someone else said on goodreads that, for him in particular, the loss of a hand was really bound up in the physicality of it, because he was a thief, and she was totally right.

[charlie-ego.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I would have said that Gen's main problem with losing his hand was coming to grips with how that had an impact on his identity as a thief, and possibly the loss of that identity -- although in the end he doesn't lose it totally (at that point; more so when he becomes king), as he goes on to steal the queen. Though I guess he loses a lot of his identity as a solitary thief, and that's a blow too.

Speaking of which, he uses the body shame fake in the second book too, right? Where everyone assumes he doesn't want to be seen with his hand, and instead he's off doing his own thing? Though not nearly as awesome as that cathartic moment where he holds up the hook in the third book.