MAR - Graceling

March review for Eclectic Reader's Challenge 2015: Graceling by Kristin Cashore, 2008. [YA Adventure category]

Graceling by Kristin Cashore was recommended to me by my brother years ago, as I recall. Because my bookshelves are getting very full and my pockets a little emptier, I have made it a goal to endeavor to use only books that I've purchased already for this challenge in an attempt to read through my eternally growing To Be Read list. Graceling is my YA adventure book for the year, beating out others like Insurgent because I thought it was standalone, but upon further inspection I have found that it is not. (Discussion of why many genres are chock full of series stretched to the bone is for another time and place, however.) This book follows Katsa of the Middluns, Graced with killing and forced to be a thug for her uncle the king. It describes Katsa's subversive endeavor, known as The Council, that is slowly spreading across the Seven Kingdoms in opposition to some of the mercilessness and horror enacted by the kings across the land. We follow Katsa as she rescues a member of Lienid royalty and later befriends the Lienid's grandson, who is also Graced and understands (to a degree) what it is like to see the world differently and be seen differently by the world. Friendship like this is something Katsa never considered for her life, so total is her self deprecation and loathing, and through her relationship with Po (whose real name is Greening Grandemalion, but we'll get to that weirdness later), she learns more about herself, her powers, and her world than she ever thought possible.

Without going into too much detail, the inciting action of the story is when Katsa realizes she has more control over her destiny than she thought, and she separates herself from her king uncle, setting off on a quest with Po to find a truth hidden far away. This truth turns out to be something that Katsa cannot defend herself from, an entirely novel concept to her as she is wholly used to being invincible and in total control of her faculties, due to her Grace, and it is possibly this realization of human weakness that opens her up to the humanity she thought was quashed by her Grace, by the monster she thought her grace had made her into. By admitting that she was not capable of protecting herself under the influence of this truth, Katsa learns to allow herself to rely on other people, and even open herself up to maybe loving someone. This story is one of capability and how one copes with something (or someone) that robs one of their capability, and how to deal with it, grow, and move on. It is a story that grows to understand happiness not as something alien and unreachable and strictly qualified, but something that is amorphous and moldable to each individual's worldview, something that each individual deserves a chance at. Katsa comes into her own over the course of this book, and the text itself often attempts to address larger issues through the foil of its fantasy framework, which I will discuss further.

A number of reviews I glanced at of this book condemned it as a vapid, bullheaded attempt to capitalized on YA adventure and coming of age novels, and while some of the reviews made some salient points, I would not go so far as to condemn this book entirely. Sure, Graceling is a simplistic book, almost fluff in its readability, one that has jarring naming conventions and less-than-realistic portrayals of 10-year-old dialogue, but as I mentioned, it does attempt to address some bigger issues, which is impressive for an author's debut in such a fraught genre. Cashore attempts to bring up prejudice, gossip, societal conventions, femininity, and numerous other themes in terms of the world she has built here, and many of them are well-thought out and intentioned, if not entirely mature or high-flown in their execution. For example (IMPORTANT NOTE: SPOILERS FOLLOW), toward the middle of the novel it is revealed that King Leck of Monsea may in fact be Graced himself, with what amounts to a gossip Grace, or the ability to control what people think of him and how they act toward him simply through the power of his own words. The interesting thing about this, I thought, is that the Grace retains its strength once the words leave Leck's immediate conversational purview: things that are said about him, however far away, carry this heady manipulation, as long as it is an idea or a story that he originally spread. This differs from many mind-control powers that I have come across throughout my reading in this way, and I was heavily intrigued by the direct parallel I saw with the idea of influential but misinformed gossip. Something as intangible as a person's words and influence completely decimate the unilateral capability that Katsa is built upon, reinforcing the idea that words have a weight that can disarm as well as any fighting move, and many cannot be countered once given their own life.

Such discussion of words brings me to my next point of interest for Graceling. I mentioned the naming conventions earlier, particularly in reference to the Prince Po, or Greening Grandemalion, because that is one of the most ridiculous names I've ever come across and I've read A LOT of YA fantasy. There is a king named Thigpen, reading which I can only ever picture Pig Pen from the movie Out Cold, so that's sort of ridiculous too. But not all the naming conventions I noted were ridiculous. King Ror of Lienid is loud. The names of the Seven Kingdoms are interesting in that they are very directionally-based (Nander is the northernmost, Estill is to the East, Wester is to the west, Sunder is south, Middluns is in the middle), except for the two outlying ones that care little for the drama of the other five and which play more of a role in the story (Lienid, which is an island to the southwest of the mainland, and Monsea which is attached to the mainland on the southeast border of Sunder and Estill). A huge part of world building for tales such as these relies on organic naming conventions, and I believe Cashore stumbles a little with this, as many times the evocations brought about by a name for me weren't necessarily connotations or other bits that would fill out and develop the word and its place in the world, but rather arrest my disbelief and take me away from the story Cashore is so earnestly trying to weave.

Finally, I'd like to touch on the feminism of the book. Most obviously, this book is an adventure with a Strong Female Character (and a physically strong one at that), but it also allows her to be strong in her imperfections. Katsa is constantly re-discovering and re-analyzing things she thought she knew, about herself and about the world, particularly in her attempt to reconcile her love for Po and her abhorrence of marriage, of her discovery of a possible gray area in which she could find an answer to the question "Could she be his lover and still belong to herself?" (page 234). Not that I'm saying that a SFC must be a rebel or unconventional in order to fit the bill, but rather that she must be allowed to think about these things for herself without judgement from author or story. I have read countless essays picking apart these ideas, from an essay on Trinity Syndrome by Tasha Robinson to an essay on the conflation of "strong" and "perfect" characters by Tom Gauld, and I'm currently reading a book called "How To Be A Heroine" by Samantha Ellis that actually discusses these ideas in terms of the literary heroines the author had growing up. As a woman writer, I feel that these are subjects that I am constantly re-evaluating in my head both as a consumer and as a producer of content, and I appreciate the way that Graceling has contributed to the dialogue.

FEB - Let The Right One In

February review for Eclectic Reader's Challenge 2015: Let The Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist, 2004. [set in a country starting with S category - Sweden]

This month's category is "set in a country starting with S," appearing easy enough, and right off the bat I probably would've picked Spain because I'm obsessed with Spain, but I picked this book up shortly after seeing the film and it's been on my vampire shelf (yes, I have a section of a shelf for vampire stuff, and no Twilight is not on it) taunting me. And conveniently, the fact that it was set in Sweden caused this book to be a perfect fit for this month. I haven't read many books about Sweden, save the Stieg Larsson books, and I thoroughly enjoyed venturing into a country I didn't know much about. The streets and towns and shorthands were unknown to me, allowing me to immerse myself a little more fully in the story. The prologue began after the events of the story took place, and they whisked you back effectively enough to merit the hungry turning of every page.

The book is divided up in days, stretching from October 21 to November 13, detailing events taking place in Blackeberg, a suburb of Stockholm, in Sweden. The point of view is omniscient, moving from different characters, their stories slowly seeping together over the course of nearly a month of interactions in a small town. Lindqvist is excellent at character development, allowing us at least a sliver of each one's interior monologue, enough to get us to remember them as the tale weaves on. The main plotline follows Oskar, a pre-teen boy growing up with his divorced mother in a small Swedish town, a boy who is bullied constantly and viciously every day by kids at school. He meets a mysterious girl next door, Eli, who is barefoot and seems entirely nocturnal, and they strike up an unlikely friendship. Eli's counterpart is a pedophiliac (human) father-figure named Håkan, who serves her in terms of acquiring sustenance and maintaining their house. With Håkan we come across a number of topics that were excised almost completely from the film adaptations like pedophilia, child rape, and child prostitution. Such themes are only a few of the uncomfortable topics that Lindqvist deals with in the text, perhaps in an effort to never allow any reprieve from the discomfort associated with his story.

One review I read of the book called it "unrelentingly grim," which I completely agree with. There are some moments where the unrelenting grimness sort of falls away, but these are few and far between. The beauty of this book is that it spans terrors from the supernatural (vampires) to the everyday (bullying), and it treats them with equal weight. For example, Lindqvist describes Oskar's rage at being bullied and his thoughts of vengeance and violence, sometimes tending even toward murderous thoughts, and he allows Oskar to feel these things and describe them to us without demonizing him. In the same way, he describes Eli and her situation with a vagueness that belies the secrecy of their person, but also does not make many judgments on them, beyond those that are put forth by Oskar himself. All in all, Oskar and Eli each represent a sort of childhood neglect and outsider status that transcends their differing situations. Oskar is living with his divorced mother, his father having left earlier in his life, taking with him the only sort of male role model he can turn to--and even this role model disintegrates throughout the story. Oskar is overweight, odd, and easy to pick on, and the boys at his school do so relentlessly. Oskar is aware of the game he is embroiled in, the role he must play, and his only solace is clipping violent news articles and pasting them into his scrapbook, imagining himself as the perpetrator of these crimes. Eli, in their own way, has been forced into outsider status by their very nature, the history of which is slowly revealed to us as it is to Oskar. There are physical signs of Eli's neglect, from their ratty pink sweater to their bare feet and strange smell.

I don't think the word "vampire" is used to describe what Eli is until very very late in the book, but it is pretty clear from the beginning what the pieces are adding up to. I may say that because I've seen both movie versions, and that might have colored my reading of the story to some extent, and also my vampire radar is pretty great. If only they were real....*sigh*. In any case, the vampiric aspect of this tale is one I particularly enjoyed. There are a number of vampire lore tropes that were played with here. Needing permission to enter, tears of blood, pain when exposed to sunlight, the list goes on. One that I was particularly interested in is one that Eli uses a number of times to share her past with Oskar: they share a kiss, and Oskar can immediately see through eyes that are not his, experience things that have not happened to him, things that took place many years before.

The book ends with the same detached tone as it began, an epilogue describing the situation from the outside once again. There is still a sense of ominous foreboding that wafts around Eli's other-ness. I find it interesting that the text ends with an actual outsider to the story, as most of the characters have been societal outsiders in their own way, in addition to Oskar and Eli. There are the drunks who frequent the Chinese restaurant. Håkan as a pedophile. Tommy as an addict. Everyone we are introduced to has a darkness within them, and other reviewers have argued that this makes it difficult for the reader to remain engaged as there is no sympathetic outlet, but I enjoyed it. Not in a sadistic way, just in terms of the overarching feel of the story. Let The Right One In is most certainly a depressing and uncomfortable story, but the eloquence of the writer and characters are more than worth the skin-prickling that accompanies it.