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Fire by Kristin Cashore


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Young adult fantasy about a young woman so beautiful, the sight of her opens up people’s minds to her control.

No, wait, come back! I know, okay, but just hang on a sec.

I have to confess that I wasn’t all that enamored of this books’ loose companion, Graceling. In the way that it had been so talked up to me that it was a deeper disappointment than normal to find it was pleasing but not shattering.

But this book? I am officially on the Kristin Cashore bandwagon now. It wasn’t the plot: Cashore clearly constructs her books around the internal, personal narrative, which is great, but it means her political plots feel somewhat artificial and mechanistic. And it wasn’t the romance, which was pleasant, but ultimately anticlimactic.

No, here’s what got me. Reading this book was wonderful because it was so . . . vocabulary is lacking. It was really safe. In a good way! Existentially, I mean. I wasn’t reading with that hunched, wary expectation of an imminent kick to the psyche from a burst of genderfail or disabilityfail. Sometimes being a critically conscious reader is like having a severe allergy to glutan; either you never eat a goddamn thing you want, or you spend most of your time miserable anyway because the toxic stuff is in fucking everything.

But Kristin Cashore had this one. I trusted her. This is a book about rape culture, when it comes right down to it, and responsibility and violence and self-determination. Big stuff to take on, and big stuff to land so cleanly.

I do have to pause to do something I almost never do, which is rag on other people’s critical reactions. I ran across a few separate discussions of this book where women complained that they thought Cashore was telling young women that feminism means not having children (a couple of these speakers blithely equated childfree with assuming male roles, which is freighted with so many terrible unconscious problematic assumptions that I’m just not going to touch it here). And I just – okay. Two things. First, I firmly believe that this is a really . . . the word I want isn’t wrong. The word I want is “unuseful.” It’s an unuseful way to approach a book to assume that it is a pulpit from which the author is delivering social prescriptions through the vehicle of plot. I mean, authors do, obviously. But starting from the assumption that an author is telling a story first with the understanding that “message” exists in the intersection of reader and text. Starting there and working out makes you look like a prescriptive twit far less often than ascribing every perceived social comment straight to the author. Also, it makes life a lot more pleasant.

Er, anyway. My actual point was I think imputing that message to this book is quite wrongheaded. This is not a book about how independent women decide not to have children; it’s a book about how a number of young women make a series of choices about their reproductive and romantic identities, because they are smart or afraid or backed into a corner. This is a book about the choosing, not the act. And you bet I think this is a way of thinking about gender that I want young women to absorb.

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