book review: Bitterblue
Jun. 12th, 2012 12:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraBitterblue by Kristin Cashore. One of the most hotly-anticipated books of the year, for me, but I ended up feeling lukewarm about it. Not *bad*, but it felt more like Fire than like Graceling, and I much preferred Graceling.
Or, goddammit, Leck again. He was a fine antagonist in Graceling, but I thought the Origin of Leck bits in Fire were entirely unneccessary, and finding out that book three was going to be all about Leck: The Lingering Aftereffects was not good news to me.
What I really liked about Graceling was Katsa. Katsa is awesome. She's a classic power fantasy with some great lines and a romance full of yay. Po and Leck provider her with a plot - they're both her opposites, although in opposite ways, her converse and her inverse, her supreme physical capability complemented by Po's receptive mind reading and threatened by Leck's projective mind control. She fights the baddie and gets the boy and it's all very satisfying, but (to me) all ultimately rests on her appeal as a character.
Where I think things went wrong - where Cashore went wrong, because this is a guessing-at-authorial-intentions sort of theory - is that her characters became too real to her. If there really was a Leck, there really would be mass PTSD requiring an enormous ongoing recovery process. I don't know whether Cashore wanted to write about that because she wanted that healing for her characters, or because she thought it would make a good story, or because she wanted to honor the real struggles of real trauma survivors by not letting her characters magically off of that hook (there's some evidence in her acknowledgments for that last possibility, in that she talks about the ending of Graceling, where Po is blinded but can use his abilities to compensate, as being problematic from a disability-politics perspective and disrespectful to disabled people). And, I mean, I think that's fine, I think that as a matter of respect, the opinions of actual people with disabilities and actual trauma survivors *should* be a higher priority for an author, in writing a book for public consumption, than my personal entertainment. On the other hand, I am not myself a PWD or survivor, I can only read as myself and evaluate in terms of my own personal enjoyment. Po's magical cure may be problematic but it also sets up the most interesting-to-me subplot in Bitterblue, Po's struggle with secrecy over his mind-reading and his burgeoning impulse to out himself. Bitterblue's work may be necessary and admirable - in the real world, her work to promote literacy, establish the Leck Truth Commission, etc, would absolutely be heroic - but for me it was not tremendously exciting reading.
And I think part of the problem there was that Katsa defined Leck, but Leck defines Bitterblue. Leck has mind-control because that's what a physical superhero can't fight (Superman is famously only vulnerable to kryptonite, the light of a red sun, and *magic*), but Bitterblue has to become "a truth-seeker and puzzle-solver" because of Leck's lies. This is entirely realistic (that Bitterblue is permanently shaped by Leck, that we can't ever know who she would have been in the absence of that trauma) but hardly satisfying in the fantasy-fulfilling way that Katsa is satisfying. The problem is further compounded in that once Bitterblue's strengths are developed in the directions of cryptography and witnessing stories, Leck has to be retroactively twisted to play to those strengths, leading to the invention on Cashore's part of his Very Secret Diaries, a plot twist that seemed to me radically out of line with everything we'd previously seen of his character. (I guess maybe the point was supposed to be that even the most compulsive liar and historical revisionist still has a thirst for a true record? But why would he write in a complex cipher when he could just mind-control people to never read 'em? (Except that Cashore wanted to throw in more cool codebreaking bits?))
In the end, the thing I liked most about Bitterblue was the new secondary character Death the librarian. Graceling has Katsa being physically badass, Bitterblue has Death being archivally badass. Death frantically rewriting from memory the books that Leck burned - and Bitterblue calculating how long it would take him to replace them all - were far and away the most powerful scenes in the book for me. I feel a little bad that Bitterblue's ordinary, unGraced heroism doesn't do it for me - that it takes superheroics to really engage me - but then, that's part of why I read fantasy in the first place, for the heightening of reality, the concretization of the internal, the presentation of the familiar in vivid extremes.
The similarities in tone and theme between Bitterblue and Fire make me suspect that Cashore is never going to recapture the innocence and written-from-the-id intensity of Graceling. And that's okay - I'm sure someone out there prefers their fantasy sober and sad. I'll probably even still read them, if only for the little funny or sweet moments like Holt listening to his queen and clearing the room by picking up Thiel and Death and carrying them out, or the sleepy kiss between Raffin and Bann, or even just because the relationship between Katsa and Po is one of my all-time favorite book romances and the off chance that Cashore might write something like that again is worth it. (I really liked the "kissing festival" set-up for Bitterblue and Saf, and didn't especially care about their 'ship otherwise.) I'd like to see what she does with a new world and all-new characters, I think a clean slate might be more promising than continuing to elaborate the increasingly minute details of the future of the Graceling crew. Although I would read a Raffin book in a heartbeat. Gay science nerds in love FTW, and Katsa giving away Raffin at his climactic wedding to Bann would just be perfect. (Okay, one more thing I really liked in Bitterblue, Katsa and Po's constant, exuberant wrestling and making out, and Bitterblue's sort of wistful eye-rolling over it all. See, it wasn't a *bad* book, there was tons of good stuff, it just needed, like, some kind of new *problem* other than the endless problem of Leck.)
Or, goddammit, Leck again. He was a fine antagonist in Graceling, but I thought the Origin of Leck bits in Fire were entirely unneccessary, and finding out that book three was going to be all about Leck: The Lingering Aftereffects was not good news to me.
What I really liked about Graceling was Katsa. Katsa is awesome. She's a classic power fantasy with some great lines and a romance full of yay. Po and Leck provider her with a plot - they're both her opposites, although in opposite ways, her converse and her inverse, her supreme physical capability complemented by Po's receptive mind reading and threatened by Leck's projective mind control. She fights the baddie and gets the boy and it's all very satisfying, but (to me) all ultimately rests on her appeal as a character.
Where I think things went wrong - where Cashore went wrong, because this is a guessing-at-authorial-intentions sort of theory - is that her characters became too real to her. If there really was a Leck, there really would be mass PTSD requiring an enormous ongoing recovery process. I don't know whether Cashore wanted to write about that because she wanted that healing for her characters, or because she thought it would make a good story, or because she wanted to honor the real struggles of real trauma survivors by not letting her characters magically off of that hook (there's some evidence in her acknowledgments for that last possibility, in that she talks about the ending of Graceling, where Po is blinded but can use his abilities to compensate, as being problematic from a disability-politics perspective and disrespectful to disabled people). And, I mean, I think that's fine, I think that as a matter of respect, the opinions of actual people with disabilities and actual trauma survivors *should* be a higher priority for an author, in writing a book for public consumption, than my personal entertainment. On the other hand, I am not myself a PWD or survivor, I can only read as myself and evaluate in terms of my own personal enjoyment. Po's magical cure may be problematic but it also sets up the most interesting-to-me subplot in Bitterblue, Po's struggle with secrecy over his mind-reading and his burgeoning impulse to out himself. Bitterblue's work may be necessary and admirable - in the real world, her work to promote literacy, establish the Leck Truth Commission, etc, would absolutely be heroic - but for me it was not tremendously exciting reading.
And I think part of the problem there was that Katsa defined Leck, but Leck defines Bitterblue. Leck has mind-control because that's what a physical superhero can't fight (Superman is famously only vulnerable to kryptonite, the light of a red sun, and *magic*), but Bitterblue has to become "a truth-seeker and puzzle-solver" because of Leck's lies. This is entirely realistic (that Bitterblue is permanently shaped by Leck, that we can't ever know who she would have been in the absence of that trauma) but hardly satisfying in the fantasy-fulfilling way that Katsa is satisfying. The problem is further compounded in that once Bitterblue's strengths are developed in the directions of cryptography and witnessing stories, Leck has to be retroactively twisted to play to those strengths, leading to the invention on Cashore's part of his Very Secret Diaries, a plot twist that seemed to me radically out of line with everything we'd previously seen of his character. (I guess maybe the point was supposed to be that even the most compulsive liar and historical revisionist still has a thirst for a true record? But why would he write in a complex cipher when he could just mind-control people to never read 'em? (Except that Cashore wanted to throw in more cool codebreaking bits?))
In the end, the thing I liked most about Bitterblue was the new secondary character Death the librarian. Graceling has Katsa being physically badass, Bitterblue has Death being archivally badass. Death frantically rewriting from memory the books that Leck burned - and Bitterblue calculating how long it would take him to replace them all - were far and away the most powerful scenes in the book for me. I feel a little bad that Bitterblue's ordinary, unGraced heroism doesn't do it for me - that it takes superheroics to really engage me - but then, that's part of why I read fantasy in the first place, for the heightening of reality, the concretization of the internal, the presentation of the familiar in vivid extremes.
The similarities in tone and theme between Bitterblue and Fire make me suspect that Cashore is never going to recapture the innocence and written-from-the-id intensity of Graceling. And that's okay - I'm sure someone out there prefers their fantasy sober and sad. I'll probably even still read them, if only for the little funny or sweet moments like Holt listening to his queen and clearing the room by picking up Thiel and Death and carrying them out, or the sleepy kiss between Raffin and Bann, or even just because the relationship between Katsa and Po is one of my all-time favorite book romances and the off chance that Cashore might write something like that again is worth it. (I really liked the "kissing festival" set-up for Bitterblue and Saf, and didn't especially care about their 'ship otherwise.) I'd like to see what she does with a new world and all-new characters, I think a clean slate might be more promising than continuing to elaborate the increasingly minute details of the future of the Graceling crew. Although I would read a Raffin book in a heartbeat. Gay science nerds in love FTW, and Katsa giving away Raffin at his climactic wedding to Bann would just be perfect. (Okay, one more thing I really liked in Bitterblue, Katsa and Po's constant, exuberant wrestling and making out, and Bitterblue's sort of wistful eye-rolling over it all. See, it wasn't a *bad* book, there was tons of good stuff, it just needed, like, some kind of new *problem* other than the endless problem of Leck.)
