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sunnyskywalkerGraceling by Kristin Cashore is one of the best books I've read in ages.
I was wary of reading it at first, despite several people whose opinions I trust giving it glowing reviews, because the premise sounded like potential bad Mary Sue fic to me. Fortunately, I was dead wrong.
So, in the seven kingdoms, occasionally people are born with Graces, basically a super-enhanced talent, and you can tell who they are by their mismatched eyes (the main character has one blue and one green). You can probably guess why I wasn't so keen on this setup. But! The author handles it so well that you see why this sort of thing became a trope in the first place while appreciating that it's like... I don't know, creating the perfect frilly dress: a hideous disaster in most hands, but gorgeous when done right. Though a frilly dress is a bad comparison for this book. Anyway.
See, being Graced is not all that, as it turns out. First, you might have a totally useless Grace, like the ability to say anything backwards really well. Second, in six of the seven kingdoms, the Graced essentially become the property of the king as soon as they're identified. They're shipped off to the royal nurseries, trained in hopes that their talents will serve the crown, and then shipped back home if it doesn't work out. Third, the Graced are social pariahs. They're kind of like mutants in the world of the X-Men, actually - all most people understand is that the Graced have some sort of freaky power, and they don't care what kind it is, because it's all freaky and they want nothing to do with it. So those Graced kids who get shipped back home had better hope they're lucky enough to be from rural farming families and can stay out of everyone's way.
To make things worse for the main character, she discovered her Grace at age eight when she accidentally killed a distant cousin who was bothering her. Her uncle, the king, things a killing Grace is extraordinarily handy and has her trained as his personal enforcer and assassin. She's his chained beast - as he sees it, and as she learns to stop seeing it - who breaks fingers and shatters legs when someone isn't paying their debts to the crown. She hates it, and hates herself for doing it.
But! Instead of sitting around moping about how the world is so corrupt and blah blah blah, Katsa forms a secret Council which goes around rescuing peasants from bandits and righting wrongs and such, hoping to at least do some good in the world. We first meet her when she's springing an elderly prince from the dungeons of a neighboring kingdom. She carries him home in secret and turns him over to her cousin (the prince, a genuinely good guy and accomplished chemist and healer) to hide and care for until they can figure out why in the world anyone would kidnap a nice old prince and then not ask for a ransom or anything, and who's behind it (the king responsible being essentially a mercenary, not the kind to come up with this on his own).
To make things more complicated, during the escape, Katsa ran into a young Graced man from the Lienid kingdom (the old prince's kingdom - he's the current king's father) who fought exceptionally well until he mysteriously decided to trust her and drop his guard, at which point she knocked him out cold. This young man soon shows up at her home in the Middluns royal court, and it turns out he's one of the sons of the current king, and the old prince is his grandfather. And he keeps trying to be friends. He might be a good ally for the Council, or a danger to it, or... well, what is she supposed to do with him?
And then mystery and intrigue and adventures and romance happen :D
The impressive part of all this, though, is in the details. For instance, Katsa doesn't ever want to get married or have children - and according to the narrative, that's okay. Because marriage is a specific legal and social institution which would essentially make her a man's property, and that's not cool. Just going ahead and sleeping with a guy you like (making sure to use contraceptive herbs) is a perfectly acceptable alternative. And if the reader fears Katsa's lack of desire for children is a symptom of that horrible stereotype where she thinks she doesn't like them until she Learns Her Lesson and starts gushing over the idea of motherhood, don't worry! Someone asks her early on what she has against children, and she explains that she likes them fine, but just doesn't want her own. She later spends quite a while as the bodyguard/mentor of a child, and they get along fine, and Katsa still doesn't feel any need for her own babies. And there are also characters who do want children, and that's fine too. It's so refreshing!
Unlike just about every other Feisty Fighting HeroineTM I've ever read, Katsa doesn't rag on other girls for being shallow and weak. She disagrees with her nurse/serving woman about the desirability of dresses and marriage, but loves her and thinks she would be an excellent caretaker for another girl who needs looking after. At another point, she ruminates on how utterly absurd it is that her society deems it best to not teach girls how to defend themselves and instead just to hope that their fathers, brothers, or husbands will be around to defend them if necessary (and that they aren't the ones the girls need defending from in the first place). She later teaches the girl she's guarding how to use a knife, and then goes on to teach lots more girls combat skills. Because why just sigh about how terrible it is when you can do something about it?
Also, another plot point concerns how domestic abuse is a horrible, horrible thing, especially when nobody believes it's happening, because gosh, he's such a nice guy!
I did twitch a bit when Katsa contrasted the northern six kingdoms' relative restraint to the southern island kingdom's extravagant tastes in jewelery and emotionality, because why does paler/northern always go with "restrained" and darker/southern with "extravagant"? (The Lienid people are Mediterraneanish in complexion.) On the other hand, the author breaks the stereotype a bit when she has Liaaden have greater social freedom for women and the Graced (one Graced woman owns her own ship and is captain, which would not happen in the other six kingdoms). I can't remember ever seeing darker/southern/Mediterranean associated with "greater freedom for women" before. That was nice.
I'm still probably not coherent enough to convey how great this book is, but you should still read it.
I was wary of reading it at first, despite several people whose opinions I trust giving it glowing reviews, because the premise sounded like potential bad Mary Sue fic to me. Fortunately, I was dead wrong.
So, in the seven kingdoms, occasionally people are born with Graces, basically a super-enhanced talent, and you can tell who they are by their mismatched eyes (the main character has one blue and one green). You can probably guess why I wasn't so keen on this setup. But! The author handles it so well that you see why this sort of thing became a trope in the first place while appreciating that it's like... I don't know, creating the perfect frilly dress: a hideous disaster in most hands, but gorgeous when done right. Though a frilly dress is a bad comparison for this book. Anyway.
See, being Graced is not all that, as it turns out. First, you might have a totally useless Grace, like the ability to say anything backwards really well. Second, in six of the seven kingdoms, the Graced essentially become the property of the king as soon as they're identified. They're shipped off to the royal nurseries, trained in hopes that their talents will serve the crown, and then shipped back home if it doesn't work out. Third, the Graced are social pariahs. They're kind of like mutants in the world of the X-Men, actually - all most people understand is that the Graced have some sort of freaky power, and they don't care what kind it is, because it's all freaky and they want nothing to do with it. So those Graced kids who get shipped back home had better hope they're lucky enough to be from rural farming families and can stay out of everyone's way.
To make things worse for the main character, she discovered her Grace at age eight when she accidentally killed a distant cousin who was bothering her. Her uncle, the king, things a killing Grace is extraordinarily handy and has her trained as his personal enforcer and assassin. She's his chained beast - as he sees it, and as she learns to stop seeing it - who breaks fingers and shatters legs when someone isn't paying their debts to the crown. She hates it, and hates herself for doing it.
But! Instead of sitting around moping about how the world is so corrupt and blah blah blah, Katsa forms a secret Council which goes around rescuing peasants from bandits and righting wrongs and such, hoping to at least do some good in the world. We first meet her when she's springing an elderly prince from the dungeons of a neighboring kingdom. She carries him home in secret and turns him over to her cousin (the prince, a genuinely good guy and accomplished chemist and healer) to hide and care for until they can figure out why in the world anyone would kidnap a nice old prince and then not ask for a ransom or anything, and who's behind it (the king responsible being essentially a mercenary, not the kind to come up with this on his own).
To make things more complicated, during the escape, Katsa ran into a young Graced man from the Lienid kingdom (the old prince's kingdom - he's the current king's father) who fought exceptionally well until he mysteriously decided to trust her and drop his guard, at which point she knocked him out cold. This young man soon shows up at her home in the Middluns royal court, and it turns out he's one of the sons of the current king, and the old prince is his grandfather. And he keeps trying to be friends. He might be a good ally for the Council, or a danger to it, or... well, what is she supposed to do with him?
And then mystery and intrigue and adventures and romance happen :D
The impressive part of all this, though, is in the details. For instance, Katsa doesn't ever want to get married or have children - and according to the narrative, that's okay. Because marriage is a specific legal and social institution which would essentially make her a man's property, and that's not cool. Just going ahead and sleeping with a guy you like (making sure to use contraceptive herbs) is a perfectly acceptable alternative. And if the reader fears Katsa's lack of desire for children is a symptom of that horrible stereotype where she thinks she doesn't like them until she Learns Her Lesson and starts gushing over the idea of motherhood, don't worry! Someone asks her early on what she has against children, and she explains that she likes them fine, but just doesn't want her own. She later spends quite a while as the bodyguard/mentor of a child, and they get along fine, and Katsa still doesn't feel any need for her own babies. And there are also characters who do want children, and that's fine too. It's so refreshing!
Unlike just about every other Feisty Fighting HeroineTM I've ever read, Katsa doesn't rag on other girls for being shallow and weak. She disagrees with her nurse/serving woman about the desirability of dresses and marriage, but loves her and thinks she would be an excellent caretaker for another girl who needs looking after. At another point, she ruminates on how utterly absurd it is that her society deems it best to not teach girls how to defend themselves and instead just to hope that their fathers, brothers, or husbands will be around to defend them if necessary (and that they aren't the ones the girls need defending from in the first place). She later teaches the girl she's guarding how to use a knife, and then goes on to teach lots more girls combat skills. Because why just sigh about how terrible it is when you can do something about it?
Also, another plot point concerns how domestic abuse is a horrible, horrible thing, especially when nobody believes it's happening, because gosh, he's such a nice guy!
I did twitch a bit when Katsa contrasted the northern six kingdoms' relative restraint to the southern island kingdom's extravagant tastes in jewelery and emotionality, because why does paler/northern always go with "restrained" and darker/southern with "extravagant"? (The Lienid people are Mediterraneanish in complexion.) On the other hand, the author breaks the stereotype a bit when she has Liaaden have greater social freedom for women and the Graced (one Graced woman owns her own ship and is captain, which would not happen in the other six kingdoms). I can't remember ever seeing darker/southern/Mediterranean associated with "greater freedom for women" before. That was nice.
I'm still probably not coherent enough to convey how great this book is, but you should still read it.
