lightreads

Return of the Thief

4/5. Conclusion to this long-running (in years, not pages) YA fantasy about the thief turned king.

I went on a journey with this one. I started out with oh come on, a completely new narrator again? and then very rapidly pivoted to oh, keep being amazing, sweetie, and from ugh, so she's keeping the main players off center stage for yet another book, come on to yeah . . . actually . . . Gen and Irene are exhausting, if we had to spend this whole book up close with them yelling at each other and having sex, I'd have to put it down every other page.

Anyway, I'm not actually sure this is terribly good as the end of a series. There are a lot of things solved by divine power (an actual lightning bolt!) that seemed to me to transgress some of the narrative rules of this universe, which was previously focused more satisfyingly on divine power operating painfully through human effort. I liked it better when all the gods did was tell Gen to stop whining. Still funny. But oh, this universe. Of course its final tale should be told by a young man with multiple severe disabilities. Of course. Absolutely no one else would do. I will miss them all, and what good friends they made (or, in several cases, more, even the offscreen queers arrrrrgh).

Content notes: References to the murder of disabled children, war, torture with few details, miscarriage and fears of maternal mortality.

A Conspiracy of Kings by Megan Whalen Turner

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


So feel free to jump in and tell me if I get any of this wrong, but I think the way this works is I read a book for pleasure and then I talk about it. It’s the “for pleasure” that’s really throwing me.

I read this book two months and the bar exam ago, and I don’t actually have a lot to say about it. Young adult fantasy politics series that makes me flail and emit high-pitched noises. These are books that are not nearly as young as they pretend to be. They are about violence and disability and taking responsibility for your actions and getting hurt and getting better. And being clever and awesome and causing trouble.

This book is not as awesome as the last two. Nothing really wrong with it, though the romance is a bit, “and they entered the arc two-by-two,” if you know what I mean. I think my problem is that this is a transitional book, moving several key pieces across the board. Fine, but I realized why I have been mentally categorizing this series as I have: like Francis Crawford of Lymond, Miles Vorkosigan, and Peter Wimsey, the intense personal charisma of the series protagonist overwhelms everything else, so even when other characters are awesome, they only really exist to me in their relationship to him. And this book was only a little bit about that.

Next book, please and thank you. And the one after that, since you’re up.

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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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