What I was reading Wednesday
Aug. 18th, 2021 09:54 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shallownessI don't do What I'm Reading Wednesday, and I'm not doing it properly now. What I'm currently reading is 'Between Two Thorns' by Emma Newman, the first of the Split Worlds series. It's an English-set urban fantasy with elements of historical fiction and mystery. So far, it's a cracking story. What I'll be (re)reading next is 'Bitterblue' by Kristin Cashore.
But what I was (re)reading was 'Fire' by Kristin Cashore.
I thought I just remembered who Fire ended up with, but as I read, I recalled things like the truth of Cansrel’s death and some characters’ parentage before they were fully revealed.
I suppose this book is best described as Fire’s coming to terms with herself rather than a coming of age. So, the question of whether it was necessary for this to tell Leck’s backstory too is ‘yes’, because of how Fire’s power and his interact.
The story starts with a twisted version of Katsa and Bitterblue’s escape from Monsea over the mountains in ‘Graceling’ as a doting father takes his motherless and Graced son through mountains into unknown territory rather than yield him to his king, as is the custom. Of course, the precocious and ruthless son, who will rename himself as Leck, is controlling his own father.
And then Fire’s story begins, and puts Katsa’s traumas and the seven kingdoms’ difficulties into perspective, because the seven kingdoms range from Monsea under Leck to Lienid, while our heroine and most characters feel under attack in The Dells. They don’t have Gracelings, they have ‘monsters’ in animals with beautiful, multi-coloured feathers and fur that the weak-minded go potty over, which is dangerous when dealing with monster predators. Seventeen-year-old Fire is the only monster human. With extraordinary hair and beauty, she and her blood are a particular target for monster raptors. But she’s also a magnet for unwanted attention from humans, amplified by the fact that she has telepathic abilities and is mentally aware that there are men whose desire for her is twisted into hate. She’s scarred, but still beautiful, and convinced that she will die early.
The kingdom of the Dells is under threat in other ways. Weak King Nax, made worse by the influence of Fire’s monster father, Cansrel, who put his own pleasures first, thrived on attention and was cruel to boot, allowed lawlessness to spread through his kingdom. Both Nax and Canserl recently died, leaving young King Nash, aided by his brother Brigan, commander of the army, facing potential war with two would-be usurpers. The king’s belief that Fire’s abilities can help them offer her the chance to leave a frustrating, restricted life in the north and find out what she’s capable of. But it will also mean facing up to what she is, which may not be what she thought.
There’s great play of the concept of a ‘monster’, in the sense that we think of it and in the specific sense used in the Dells. Fire is wrestling with this as part of her inheritance from her father, although she has an entirely different idea of her power than her father had. But other characters of her generation are wrestling with their inheritance from parental figures too: Nax’s weakness has made things more difficult for his heir, Nash; Fire’s oldest friend, Archer, knows he is not his father’s son by birth; two of Nash’s children, Clara and her twin Garan, were not acknowledged as heirs; and Fire believes that Brigan, who her father Cansrel tried to kill as a teenager as he emerged as a threat because he was so strong minded, has very reason to hate her. Fire and others will learn that it’s all more complicated than they knew, not least as she comes to learn a little more about the non-monstrous mother who died when she was a child and how Fire takes after her too.
There are more secondary female characters of import than in ‘Graceling’, though none of them become as important as Bitterblue: older women such as Roen and Tessa, soldiers such as Musa and Mila, the capable Clara and young Hanna. Cashore continues to write from a feminist perspective, with Fire being having to deal with objectification and the demands of the male ego in extremis, but generally setting it aside to work through what Fire thinks about herself and what she wants. Unlike Katsa, she feels a desperate longing for babies of her own, but chooses to render herself infertile via surgery, in case she begets another Cansrel, while developing her relationship as Hanna’s stepmother figure.
I preferred the love story here, although Fire’s first impression of Brigan is bizarrely Electra complex-y. At first, she thinks him the stern young commander; his mind is walled up against her, so she just has to go on what he says and does, and finds him unusually thoughtful. The more she learns of him, the more her feelings grow.
Both Fire and Brigan have a slightly more complicated past than Katsa and Po, with Fire and Archer’s childhood friendship having become physical, although he took that as leave to be possessive and to try to restrict her to keep her safe (much as Giddon did with Katsa), while thinking there’s no problem with his taking all sorts of women into his bed, while claiming his heart solely belongs to Fire. From the beginning of the book, we can see that she is over all this.
She learns that, for all that he’s 22, Brigan had his own love affair at sixteen that changed his life. It also transpires that Brigan and Archer are more closely intertwined than Fire and Archer presumed. Archer is the first to comment jealously that Fire has feelings for Brigan. There’s an interesting tension in that Brigan will get everything that Archer ever wanted, while Archer loses his life, but it’s nicely complicated by what we know of Brigan’s past and upbringing, and the fact that his love for Fire comes after he has come to trust her, while it is his kindness as much as his strength that draws her to him.
The way the story unfolded and The Dells’ history and politics were revealed to us, sometimes with exposition, sometimes with scenes from Fire’s past was less organic as in ‘Graceling’, but the story got a grip on me from quite early on, because Fire and her struggles are so compelling. But there was a waywardness about the Parts of the story, possibly because Leck was ultimately more important to Fire’s story than The Dells’ story.
Thinking of the series as a whole, I’m interested in how the only known connection to the Seven Kingdoms is Leck – his stories of The Dells seemed like fables in the Seven Kingdoms. Brigan wants to try to spy on them, because if Leck is an example of the Gracelings, the Dells need to be guarded, and these events all precede ‘Graceling’. But in the next book (and I suspect in ‘Winterkeep’) Cashore focuses on the Seven Kingdoms.
But what I was (re)reading was 'Fire' by Kristin Cashore.
I thought I just remembered who Fire ended up with, but as I read, I recalled things like the truth of Cansrel’s death and some characters’ parentage before they were fully revealed.
I suppose this book is best described as Fire’s coming to terms with herself rather than a coming of age. So, the question of whether it was necessary for this to tell Leck’s backstory too is ‘yes’, because of how Fire’s power and his interact.
The story starts with a twisted version of Katsa and Bitterblue’s escape from Monsea over the mountains in ‘Graceling’ as a doting father takes his motherless and Graced son through mountains into unknown territory rather than yield him to his king, as is the custom. Of course, the precocious and ruthless son, who will rename himself as Leck, is controlling his own father.
And then Fire’s story begins, and puts Katsa’s traumas and the seven kingdoms’ difficulties into perspective, because the seven kingdoms range from Monsea under Leck to Lienid, while our heroine and most characters feel under attack in The Dells. They don’t have Gracelings, they have ‘monsters’ in animals with beautiful, multi-coloured feathers and fur that the weak-minded go potty over, which is dangerous when dealing with monster predators. Seventeen-year-old Fire is the only monster human. With extraordinary hair and beauty, she and her blood are a particular target for monster raptors. But she’s also a magnet for unwanted attention from humans, amplified by the fact that she has telepathic abilities and is mentally aware that there are men whose desire for her is twisted into hate. She’s scarred, but still beautiful, and convinced that she will die early.
The kingdom of the Dells is under threat in other ways. Weak King Nax, made worse by the influence of Fire’s monster father, Cansrel, who put his own pleasures first, thrived on attention and was cruel to boot, allowed lawlessness to spread through his kingdom. Both Nax and Canserl recently died, leaving young King Nash, aided by his brother Brigan, commander of the army, facing potential war with two would-be usurpers. The king’s belief that Fire’s abilities can help them offer her the chance to leave a frustrating, restricted life in the north and find out what she’s capable of. But it will also mean facing up to what she is, which may not be what she thought.
There’s great play of the concept of a ‘monster’, in the sense that we think of it and in the specific sense used in the Dells. Fire is wrestling with this as part of her inheritance from her father, although she has an entirely different idea of her power than her father had. But other characters of her generation are wrestling with their inheritance from parental figures too: Nax’s weakness has made things more difficult for his heir, Nash; Fire’s oldest friend, Archer, knows he is not his father’s son by birth; two of Nash’s children, Clara and her twin Garan, were not acknowledged as heirs; and Fire believes that Brigan, who her father Cansrel tried to kill as a teenager as he emerged as a threat because he was so strong minded, has very reason to hate her. Fire and others will learn that it’s all more complicated than they knew, not least as she comes to learn a little more about the non-monstrous mother who died when she was a child and how Fire takes after her too.
There are more secondary female characters of import than in ‘Graceling’, though none of them become as important as Bitterblue: older women such as Roen and Tessa, soldiers such as Musa and Mila, the capable Clara and young Hanna. Cashore continues to write from a feminist perspective, with Fire being having to deal with objectification and the demands of the male ego in extremis, but generally setting it aside to work through what Fire thinks about herself and what she wants. Unlike Katsa, she feels a desperate longing for babies of her own, but chooses to render herself infertile via surgery, in case she begets another Cansrel, while developing her relationship as Hanna’s stepmother figure.
I preferred the love story here, although Fire’s first impression of Brigan is bizarrely Electra complex-y. At first, she thinks him the stern young commander; his mind is walled up against her, so she just has to go on what he says and does, and finds him unusually thoughtful. The more she learns of him, the more her feelings grow.
Both Fire and Brigan have a slightly more complicated past than Katsa and Po, with Fire and Archer’s childhood friendship having become physical, although he took that as leave to be possessive and to try to restrict her to keep her safe (much as Giddon did with Katsa), while thinking there’s no problem with his taking all sorts of women into his bed, while claiming his heart solely belongs to Fire. From the beginning of the book, we can see that she is over all this.
She learns that, for all that he’s 22, Brigan had his own love affair at sixteen that changed his life. It also transpires that Brigan and Archer are more closely intertwined than Fire and Archer presumed. Archer is the first to comment jealously that Fire has feelings for Brigan. There’s an interesting tension in that Brigan will get everything that Archer ever wanted, while Archer loses his life, but it’s nicely complicated by what we know of Brigan’s past and upbringing, and the fact that his love for Fire comes after he has come to trust her, while it is his kindness as much as his strength that draws her to him.
The way the story unfolded and The Dells’ history and politics were revealed to us, sometimes with exposition, sometimes with scenes from Fire’s past was less organic as in ‘Graceling’, but the story got a grip on me from quite early on, because Fire and her struggles are so compelling. But there was a waywardness about the Parts of the story, possibly because Leck was ultimately more important to Fire’s story than The Dells’ story.
Thinking of the series as a whole, I’m interested in how the only known connection to the Seven Kingdoms is Leck – his stories of The Dells seemed like fables in the Seven Kingdoms. Brigan wants to try to spy on them, because if Leck is an example of the Gracelings, the Dells need to be guarded, and these events all precede ‘Graceling’. But in the next book (and I suspect in ‘Winterkeep’) Cashore focuses on the Seven Kingdoms.
