Graceling...
Mar. 21st, 2010 09:33 amMy latest read: Graceling by Kristin Cashore.
It was highly recommended by friends, and has a lot to recommend it, but it never quite engaged my emotions - except for a desire to see what happens next. It's a real page-turner.
It's the story of Katsa, who lives in the kingdom of Middlun, where her uncle King Randa rules. In her world, children are sometimes born with a "Grace", very like a Marvel mutant being born with a superpower. Everyone's Grace is different, and they have to figure out for themselves what it is. Katsa's Grace is the ability to kill - something she learned when she was eight and a man touched her improperly.
The story is deep in Katsa's point of view. She's a disgruntled loner (with friends), a wild child whom almost everyone fears. She hates the killing and intimidation her uncle forces upon her - he's made her a sort of one-girl army for his convenience. (At this point, I was thinking about X-23.) Katsa is a constant mass of emotions: fear, anger, and defensiveness.
So she makes a secret band of do-gooders who help mitigate the harm her uncle forces her to do. In the course of a midnight rescue, she meets a stranger who becomes involved in her story, a prince named Po. With Po's help, she defies her uncle, and takes on a mystery and a rescue that challenge her on every level and help her come to terms with her life and her powers. Er, I mean, her Grace.
I had two primary problems with the story. One was with structure: the beginning didn't lead directly to the end. There was a good chain of cause and effect at each stage of the adventure, but the problem at the beginning didn't tie into the solutions at the end. Insofar as there were solutions.
My other problem was with the characters. I didn't like Katsa enough to stay with her for more than 400 pages without impatience. Her stubborn self-willed passions made her seem just a little too much like a bratty teen. I also came to find her brittle defensiveness somewhat monotonous. Her only moment of joy is in discovering sex. That doesn't last long - though it's an impressive sex scene, both descriptive and hot without being the least bit explicit. Katsa discovered love a few pages earlier, but that brought only angst and distress.
At first I thought her lover Po would be a nice contrast to her temperament: he was delightful. Bright, brave, wise, clever, inventive, strong, insightful, patient, understanding, self-sacrificing, and ready to put up with her every whim with humour and charm. Even when she is being unreasonable. At some point this wore thin. He was the perfect person, her lover and mentor and knight errant rolled into one, and he's a teen-age boy. This isn't like any teen-age boy I ever met. Or any human being of any age.1
I wish I'd liked the book more, but I was left feeling disappointed that the book was essentially shallow. A "fantasy" is that the people in it were unreal, not that the world was invented.
I'm not sure it's in its favour that the villain was possibly the most horrible villain I have ever encountered in fiction.
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1 For some reason I can't explain, because I haven't read it, this made me think of Edward in Twilight. Perhaps because my sense of him is that he too is based on a young girl's fantasy of what an ideal lover should be like.
When I was a young girl, my fantasies weren't like this at all.
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