Reread: Crown Duel, by Sherwood Smith
Feb. 27th, 2010 08:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
coraaCrown 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.)
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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.
The romance! I much prefer the romance with a slow build, where I wind up cheering on the romance even though the protagonists are still fighting it. It's so much more satisfying to me than a romance where the author declares that the principals are infatuated (or in love) and then has to convince me.
Shevraeth, aka Vidanric, is just as flawed as Meliara although in different ways. She's stubborn as a mule; he's fully convinced of his own ability to manipulate any situation. These two skills/flaws hit head-on: she's annoyed by his manipulations, he's baffled by the way she sticks to her guns in the face of his subtleties, which work on everyone else. But that's exactly the kind of romance that really gets me, which, I guess, is why the romance in Dreamsnake didn't work for me at all, but the one in Graceling worked for me, in spades.
To be honest, while I enjoyed the first half of this book (the 'Crown Duel' portion), my favorite was the second half, the part that was once the book 'Court Duel.' Smith has a deft touch with the subtleties of court manners and politics, and presenting them through the eyes of Meliara (who, being a sheltered rustic, is learning them from scratch) was a smart move. It allowed readers such as myself, unfamiliar with the delicate interactions of court politics, to gradually learn what was going on.
This was a book that was very different upon second reading. I read it for the first time in college, and when I did, I was 85% sure that Shevraeth/Vidanric was a 'good guy,' and would eventually be the love interest. This time, of course, I knew for certain that he was/would be, and so I interpreted everything he did just a shade differently. Very interesting. And then, of course, since I was reading the Book View Cafe version with the epilogue-style scenes from Vidanric's point of view, I got confirmation of what exactly Vidanric was thinking at various points.
At any rate, I am thrilled that I have A Stranger to Command, the prequel, on my bookshelf to read.
(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.
The romance! I much prefer the romance with a slow build, where I wind up cheering on the romance even though the protagonists are still fighting it. It's so much more satisfying to me than a romance where the author declares that the principals are infatuated (or in love) and then has to convince me.
Shevraeth, aka Vidanric, is just as flawed as Meliara although in different ways. She's stubborn as a mule; he's fully convinced of his own ability to manipulate any situation. These two skills/flaws hit head-on: she's annoyed by his manipulations, he's baffled by the way she sticks to her guns in the face of his subtleties, which work on everyone else. But that's exactly the kind of romance that really gets me, which, I guess, is why the romance in Dreamsnake didn't work for me at all, but the one in Graceling worked for me, in spades.
To be honest, while I enjoyed the first half of this book (the 'Crown Duel' portion), my favorite was the second half, the part that was once the book 'Court Duel.' Smith has a deft touch with the subtleties of court manners and politics, and presenting them through the eyes of Meliara (who, being a sheltered rustic, is learning them from scratch) was a smart move. It allowed readers such as myself, unfamiliar with the delicate interactions of court politics, to gradually learn what was going on.
This was a book that was very different upon second reading. I read it for the first time in college, and when I did, I was 85% sure that Shevraeth/Vidanric was a 'good guy,' and would eventually be the love interest. This time, of course, I knew for certain that he was/would be, and so I interpreted everything he did just a shade differently. Very interesting. And then, of course, since I was reading the Book View Cafe version with the epilogue-style scenes from Vidanric's point of view, I got confirmation of what exactly Vidanric was thinking at various points.
At any rate, I am thrilled that I have A Stranger to Command, the prequel, on my bookshelf to read.
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Date: 2011-06-21 06:05 am (UTC)