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Sep. 22nd, 2014 04:35 pmJoshua Palmatier - the Skewed Throne
This book was a pretty decently written and quick paced first novel with an interesting premise.
This books should have been a book I could cheer. The main character is a girl/woman (She grows up from 14 in the course of the book) whose motivation isn't about a man, or men, or anything of the sort. She's driven by survival, desire not to slide back to what she was, a much smothered and denied, but visible, wish to be loved or embraced by family, and conflicted pride in her own rather violent skills. The city-state in which it takes place is ruled by a woman, and always has been, as the successor is chosen by the Skewed Throne itself.
The white fire, a strange magical effect which has swept over the city twice in its history (Once "a thousand years ago" an incident about which there seems to be a surprisingly accurate remaining history*, and once just a handful of years before the action starts,) is a mystery clearly meant to be solved in the sequels.
Varis is living in a market area on the fringe of the slums of the great city to start. And this is where my big problem crops up.
In poor and poorly patrolled places, one usually gets an interesting and broad variety of crimes. People are looking for escapes, so drugs or alcohol or cigarettes, or at least the untaxed and unregulated varieties, tend to run rife. For similar reasons, gambling dens and their hope might come up, though they tend to be a middle to upper class thing. People will go into prostitution in hopes of making extra money, or will kidnap and pimp out others so as to get he money without the risk. Taxes tend to put a strain on already tight purses, so there tend to be smuggled goods, ranging from staples to luxuries. This creates a world of smugglers, people with a hidden still in their basement, people running honest shops with something less honest available in the back for those who know how to ask. Loan sharks take advantage of the desperate. Thugs and bodyguards crop up all over, to protect a smuggler or pimp, to squeeze blood from a stone from the desperate victims of the loan sharks. Kids and adults both realise working in groups gets more than working alone, and form gangs, which soon, as a sheer matter of self defense, realise that letting members go who know anything is very bad for business, and develop both perks and threats to keep members in. Thieves and opportunists hang around to snag whatever can be snagged.
In the underworld we're shown here, we only see the thieves and opportunists, of which our heroine is one, and one gang, which she belonged to but fled with zero consequences. Otherwise, all the crime in the market?
Is rapists and serial murderers of women. Women kidnapped off the street and raped then killed, some of them it seems so fast our heroine can't even follow from across the street and down a couple of alleys before it's done.
ALL OF IT. Oh, except one man we see beat his girlfriend, the girlfriend of whom seems honest (Although she eventually kills him in self defense).
True, there are, I think, 2-3 men whose actual crimes we don't know who are hunted by the law (Which in this city state means being marked for death). And Bloodmark, our heroine's rival, who does kill men as well as women, mostly in the name of the law. When he does so with any excuse OTHER THAN "It's a legal target", it's revenge on Varis - so that even as the violence kills a man, it's all to hurt a woman. (I suppose fridging a man for a woman's sake is at least a bit of variety -- although I find it interesting that it's implied Varis has actually traded about 10 words with the man in question, in spite of how important she considers him. I'm hoping I misunderstood their encounter).
But this is not a real underworld. It's a bloody mess where women are targets. Except Varis.
And Varis remains the only exception. Every other woman mentioned as existing in the market is a target, either of her, or of another thief, or of a rapist-murderer.
Once we cross the river into the merchant levels of the city, we get cutthroat merchanting, bodyguards, paid assassins, and some more thieves and would-be-rapists of opportunity. There's no underworld here, but there's a whole lot more of what we should have seen as an underworld. and while there's a paucity of female characters even compared to the first section (Mostly waitresses or prostitutes working in bars), at least they're not automatically and all targets.
Varis gets hired as a bodyguard here, then slowly converted into paid assassin. There's an excellent undercurrent to this section, where she looks like she's going to be accepted into a family, and you can tell she wants that, but it never happens; if anything, she slides further and further back over time from a possible family member to a mere bodyguard then to a mere tool to use.
Then - and this isn't a spoiler as the first chapter explains it - she's been hired to kill the Mistress of the city, whom the white fire has driven mad.
So the entire book and Varis's life history are all leading to and pointing to her meeting with the Mistress, the ruler of the city, who seems to be mad.
This book finally passes the Bechdel test on page 349 of 375. (There might have been enough dialogue in flashback between Varis and her mother to count. ONCE. before that.) And - well, the Mistress IS mad. She's coherent enough to give Varis a little warning before the spoilery ending stuff, but I don't know. It felt a bit underwhelming as a scene with the fate of their city-state in question. Oh, and the flashbacks that Varis get of centuries of history include yet another woman raped and murdered.
Ultimately, I think it comes done to, only Varis is allowed to be strong AND female.
A pity. She was a good character. Some of the men around her were interesting characters who needed more done with them - Erick, and William both felt like they could use more time. (Borund was well drawn but used about the right amount)
Someone tell me Palmatier/Tate got better? Enough better I won't feel like I want to leave his worlds as fast as possible before someone murders me?
* I've ranted before about thousand year timelines in fantasy novels, and what happens to history, traditions, and technological levels. Unless you're dealing with elves or the like. Which so far we're not in this series.
This book was a pretty decently written and quick paced first novel with an interesting premise.
This books should have been a book I could cheer. The main character is a girl/woman (She grows up from 14 in the course of the book) whose motivation isn't about a man, or men, or anything of the sort. She's driven by survival, desire not to slide back to what she was, a much smothered and denied, but visible, wish to be loved or embraced by family, and conflicted pride in her own rather violent skills. The city-state in which it takes place is ruled by a woman, and always has been, as the successor is chosen by the Skewed Throne itself.
The white fire, a strange magical effect which has swept over the city twice in its history (Once "a thousand years ago" an incident about which there seems to be a surprisingly accurate remaining history*, and once just a handful of years before the action starts,) is a mystery clearly meant to be solved in the sequels.
Varis is living in a market area on the fringe of the slums of the great city to start. And this is where my big problem crops up.
In poor and poorly patrolled places, one usually gets an interesting and broad variety of crimes. People are looking for escapes, so drugs or alcohol or cigarettes, or at least the untaxed and unregulated varieties, tend to run rife. For similar reasons, gambling dens and their hope might come up, though they tend to be a middle to upper class thing. People will go into prostitution in hopes of making extra money, or will kidnap and pimp out others so as to get he money without the risk. Taxes tend to put a strain on already tight purses, so there tend to be smuggled goods, ranging from staples to luxuries. This creates a world of smugglers, people with a hidden still in their basement, people running honest shops with something less honest available in the back for those who know how to ask. Loan sharks take advantage of the desperate. Thugs and bodyguards crop up all over, to protect a smuggler or pimp, to squeeze blood from a stone from the desperate victims of the loan sharks. Kids and adults both realise working in groups gets more than working alone, and form gangs, which soon, as a sheer matter of self defense, realise that letting members go who know anything is very bad for business, and develop both perks and threats to keep members in. Thieves and opportunists hang around to snag whatever can be snagged.
In the underworld we're shown here, we only see the thieves and opportunists, of which our heroine is one, and one gang, which she belonged to but fled with zero consequences. Otherwise, all the crime in the market?
Is rapists and serial murderers of women. Women kidnapped off the street and raped then killed, some of them it seems so fast our heroine can't even follow from across the street and down a couple of alleys before it's done.
ALL OF IT. Oh, except one man we see beat his girlfriend, the girlfriend of whom seems honest (Although she eventually kills him in self defense).
True, there are, I think, 2-3 men whose actual crimes we don't know who are hunted by the law (Which in this city state means being marked for death). And Bloodmark, our heroine's rival, who does kill men as well as women, mostly in the name of the law. When he does so with any excuse OTHER THAN "It's a legal target", it's revenge on Varis - so that even as the violence kills a man, it's all to hurt a woman. (I suppose fridging a man for a woman's sake is at least a bit of variety -- although I find it interesting that it's implied Varis has actually traded about 10 words with the man in question, in spite of how important she considers him. I'm hoping I misunderstood their encounter).
But this is not a real underworld. It's a bloody mess where women are targets. Except Varis.
And Varis remains the only exception. Every other woman mentioned as existing in the market is a target, either of her, or of another thief, or of a rapist-murderer.
Once we cross the river into the merchant levels of the city, we get cutthroat merchanting, bodyguards, paid assassins, and some more thieves and would-be-rapists of opportunity. There's no underworld here, but there's a whole lot more of what we should have seen as an underworld. and while there's a paucity of female characters even compared to the first section (Mostly waitresses or prostitutes working in bars), at least they're not automatically and all targets.
Varis gets hired as a bodyguard here, then slowly converted into paid assassin. There's an excellent undercurrent to this section, where she looks like she's going to be accepted into a family, and you can tell she wants that, but it never happens; if anything, she slides further and further back over time from a possible family member to a mere bodyguard then to a mere tool to use.
Then - and this isn't a spoiler as the first chapter explains it - she's been hired to kill the Mistress of the city, whom the white fire has driven mad.
So the entire book and Varis's life history are all leading to and pointing to her meeting with the Mistress, the ruler of the city, who seems to be mad.
This book finally passes the Bechdel test on page 349 of 375. (There might have been enough dialogue in flashback between Varis and her mother to count. ONCE. before that.) And - well, the Mistress IS mad. She's coherent enough to give Varis a little warning before the spoilery ending stuff, but I don't know. It felt a bit underwhelming as a scene with the fate of their city-state in question. Oh, and the flashbacks that Varis get of centuries of history include yet another woman raped and murdered.
Ultimately, I think it comes done to, only Varis is allowed to be strong AND female.
A pity. She was a good character. Some of the men around her were interesting characters who needed more done with them - Erick, and William both felt like they could use more time. (Borund was well drawn but used about the right amount)
Someone tell me Palmatier/Tate got better? Enough better I won't feel like I want to leave his worlds as fast as possible before someone murders me?
* I've ranted before about thousand year timelines in fantasy novels, and what happens to history, traditions, and technological levels. Unless you're dealing with elves or the like. Which so far we're not in this series.
