#4: The Bones of Faerie, by Janni Simner

The Bones of Faerie, by Janni Lee Simner

(Disclaimer: janni is a friend of mine, although I read The Bones of Faerie before I met her.)

Before Liza was born, the world of faerie and our human world went to war. The war is long since over, but her world bears the scars: blackberry brambles invade homes and strangle their inhabitants, food plants resist the harvest, dandelions bite, and trees reach out with sinister intent. Magic—the latent malicious magic left in the plants, and pockets of wild magic left around the world—is the enemy, as are children with strands of shining-clear hair that indicates the touch of magic. All such things found within the safe confines of the village must be destroyed. Liza knows this; it is her life. But when Liza's sister is born with glass-transparent hair, and her father exposes the child on the hillside to die, everything changes. Liza's mother vanishes... and Liza's own unexpected magic power reveals itself: she is clairvoyant. And so she must flee her father and her village, and go out into the deadly danger of the faerie-touched wilderness.

I know janni has referred to this book as post-urban fantasy, and that's a label I like quite a bit for it. And a big part of what I like about it is the setting, the post-fantasy-apocalypse North America. It's set, not in a vague post-apoc location, but in the wilderness near St. Louis, Missouri, and though the isolated villages themselves have a culture of their own (a culture born of the vastly changed world they live in), I love that it's actually set in a specific place, that it touches on the atmosphere, the landscape, and the landmarks of a particular place. I don't even know Missouri, and I loved that the book felt set in a specific place.

I also like the way that the book focuses on the small elements of a post-apocalyptic world. The scarcity and preciousness of food; the dangers of injury and illness and the high value placed on medicine; the tremendous dangers of venturing outside the sanctuary of established enclaves. The dangers in The Bones of Faerie are the dangers of traveling in a pre- (or post-) industrial society, but magnified: rather than brigands or wild animals or hunger or exposure, it's the landscape itself that will do you in. I also just like the concept of a fantasy apocalypse: not one where science destroyed civilization, but one where magic did; not one where nature is crumbling in the face of humankind, but one where humankind is crumbling in the face of nature.

That leads me to the other thing I really like, which is Liza herself. She knows perfectly well that the world outside her village has a fairly high chance of doing her in, but she also knows (from bitter experience) that if her 'faerie' gift, her magic ability of clairvoyance, is discovered, she will also be killed. She considers the odds and takes the chance that an uncertain fate beyond the village is preferable to hiding and living in fear within the village. I like that a lot. She's smart, tough, and survival-oriented. Even when the odds are against her, she acts rather than giving in. And so, even though she's not a physical badass in the mold of, say, Alanna or Katsa, she makes my list of awesome girl characters with agency.

No book is flawless, so there are some things that twigged me. I expected more of an explanation of how and why the faerie war started than I got. And I kind of wanted more of an explanation of the fundamental difference between faeries and humans. But those are minor complaints; I'm hoping to see more of the worldbuilding in the forthcoming sequel.

( Spoilery discussion under the cut )

And now, on to a book I don't expect to like as much (although, who knows, I could be surprised): Vampire Beach: Bloodlust, which I got in a random YA book grab bag. I can't wait. ;)

Reread: Crown Duel, by Sherwood Smith

Crown Duel, by Sherwood Smith. (Also available as an ebook version with additional content at Book View Cafe; the BVC version is what I used for my reread. Crown Duel was originally published as two books, Crown Duel and Court Duel, now combined into one very satisfying volume.)

(Disclaimer: sartorias is a friend of mine, although I first read Crown Duel many years before I met her.)

When Meliara and Branaeric's father, the Count of Tlanth, dies, the siblings swear that they will rise up in revolution against the wicked king Galdran. But, although they expect the other counts and dukes and princes to rise up with them, they end up fighting alone in a guerrilla war doomed to loss. At least, doomed until Meliara falls afoul of a trap and becomes the captive of Shevraeth, one of Galdran's commanders. He delivers her to the capital, but she escapes, and her flight across the countryside is complicated by the fact that politics are a lot more complicated than she expected. And so is war.

I read this for the first time in college and I loved it. And the thing I loved the most about it was Meliara. She's smart, she's determined, she's idealistic to a fault, and she has no intentions of giving up. Ever.

But what I want to talk about as regards Meliara, really, is her flaws. Because she's one of the most flawed sympathetic characters—or perhaps one of the most sympathetic flawed characters—I've read about recently. If I may make a digression: for many years, I was involved in Pern RPGs online. (Yeah, I know.) And one of the things I came to notice most of all was that people realized that their characters needed to have flaws... but they always created flaws that weren't really flaws. She's got a fiery temper and always defends her friends! (Defending your friends is more sympathetic than not.) She's really beautiful but is painfully modest about it! (Insulting your own gorgeous appearance is just a way of fishing for more compliments.) She's too sharp-tongued for her own good! (An excuse to be witty and sarcastic at the expense of everyone around you.)

"Stubbornness" was often listed as a flaw-that-isn't-a-flaw, because most people see tenacity and sticking to your ideals as a good thing. But Meliara's stubbornness (and she is stubborn to the point of being pigheaded) is a real flaw: she alienates people who can help her, she clings to her interpretation of incidents even when that interpretation turns out to be wrong, she holds her opinions past the point where a reasonable person would recognize that they didn't have all the facts and might want to reassess. She's stubborn as a mule, and sometimes incorrectly so, and often to her own detriment. It's a very real flaw.

And yet it's not an unsympathetic flaw. I recognized, the first time I read the book, that Meliara was letting her own limited experience color her encounters... and yet I also understood it. I have been that person, who lets an old slight color her interpretation of future events. And I admired and liked her for her tenacity, her willingness to endure discomfort for her ideals, even while I wanted to shake her for being so mule-stubborn.

The other thing I loved about the book was the romance. I won't talk much about this outside the spoiler cut, but the romance is exactly the kind I like: between two strong personalities, growing gradually over time, so that I wound up rooting for the romance even before the heroine did.

( Spoilers below the cut )

At any rate, I am thrilled that I have A Stranger to Command, the prequel, on my bookshelf to read.