lin·gua·phile

delladilly:

you know those things that feminists and social revolutionaries who mostly consume fiction and analyze it to death (aka tumblr) are always wishing for

like gosh it would be fabulous if we had young adult fiction where all the main characters were of color

or where the most important relationship was between two women

or where no women were demonized or hated or belittled or unrealistic or scapegoats, where all women were treated with compassion and respect

or where the love interest actually genuinely respected and listened to the protagonist

or if fantasy used its freedom to investigate the shitty things that bind our world, colonialism and racism and misogyny and a thousand forms of structured oppression that we’re so deeply trenched in that it’s hard to see them properly

like ALL OF THOSE THINGS, if you told me that a book could give me ALL OF THOSE THINGS, I probably wouldn’t believe you, and if I did, I would be satisfied with it, I would be bloated by it, it would be all I would need or want

and I know I sound like an infomercial, but Cold Magic has all of that— AND MORE

it’s steampunk— genuinely steampunk the way steampunk was meant to be, reconstructing history from the ice age onwards to make you think about the way our history happened and how it formed the society that we assume is unavoidable and authentic and real

and this ice age went on longer, and the Roman Empire didn’t fall till the year 1000, and one of the principle arguments of the book, which takes place 800 years later, is that the Romans told lies

and plus there are sentient dinosaurs. 

REVOLUTIONARY ANTI-COLONIALIST FEMINIST THEORY

AND

SENTIENT

DINOSAURS

and the heroine is brave and rude and a little cocky, and she holds her secrets tight to her chest, and she thinks with her feet and keeps going

and she gets the dreamiest unlikeliest most besotted love interest you’ve ever met, who takes an absurd amount of pride in his clothing, who is angry about having sweet tender feeeeeelings

and let me remind you that both of them (plus everyone else of importance!!!) are of color

and there is magic, and magic interacting with politics, and with it investigations into freedom/power/safety/oppression/obligation/choice, and also it is sexy

and there are plagues and ghouls and a beautifully drawn spirit world, actually the most complete world building I’ve seen since His Dark Materials or Harry Potter

and the talking heads of poets

and also kissing, and hilariousness, and thrilling action, it’s described in the blurb as an Afro-Celtic Roman icepunk, like DO I HAVE TO BEAT YOU OVER THE HEAD WITH THIS BOOK TO MAKE YOU READ IT

BECAUSE I WILL

Having now read this and its sequel, Cold Fire, I can get 100% enthusiastically behind this whole squee. I did have some issues with the technical/writerly/craft aspects of the first book in the series, but most of those evaporated in the second installment, and I was able to do what I really wanted to do throughout the entire first book, which is be absolutely in love with everything these books are trying to be.

(Also in context of the whole “wow these are awesome because CHARACTERS OF COLOR,” the cover model for Cat bothers me. I’d be interested to see if Elliott had any say in this. Sometimes her admirable desire to be non-anachronistic and internally consistent makes it hard for me to visualize the people she is describing — and of course human history has just gone differently in this world and certain interracial mixes are way more common there than here, so this adds to the estrangement effect — BUT STILL, I picture Cat and Bee and definitely Andevai as darker-skinned than this cover model, and with a facial structure slightly less recognizably euro/western.)

I love a great number of things about this book. I love the world it creates: the whole idea of “cold magic” is genius, and I’m fascinated by the strange cultural melding that’s gone on to create this new and incredibly fractured society that nonetheless manages (barely!) to function under a social code that keeps it together. I really love the speculative history aspect of it, because seriously guys, imagine a world in which a Napoleon-esque figure manages to escape from exile and ends up getting involved with something like the Chartist movement! (Or am I the only one who thinks this is a really neat way of imaginatively re-working the question of why no revolutions happened in Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries?)

But — and here is where I reveal the extent of my own writerliness — the details of this fascinating worldbuilding were generally deployed in really clunky ways that made it difficult for me to immerse myself in the world. I used to teach a sci-fi/fantasy writers’ workshop, and while I don’t pretend to be a SFF writer par excellence, if you read enough in the genre you get a sense of what seems natural in terms of providing readers with information, and what doesn’t. There is nothing wrong with Elliot’s imagination — see above, where I squeed about this world and could have very well gone on squeeing for much longer — but the facts of the world are often presented in a manner that feels forced, and that slows down the pace of the narrative. There is a certain event that happens around page 100 that suddenly makes the story feel like it is going somewhere — but even in a 500-page novel, I wanted that inciting action to happen sooner. Overall the pacing of this novel seemed to be “off,” and the plot was pretty picaresque (“and then this happened, and then this happened, and…”) in a way that possibly could have used some tightening.

I hate that I am not in love with the craft aspects of this novel, because there are certain characters and certain scenes with which I was absolutely smitten. I am in love with Cat because she is fierce and also frightened, loyal but not blindly so, outspoken but incredibly conscious of the customs she defies in speaking out. I love Bee because she loves Cat, and because she knows how to keep her head in terrifying situations, and because she is beautiful and a little imperious in her own way (a bit like Andevai in this!) but also mischievous and more often an instigator than anyone else would expect. These girls just make me so happy because they are young and compassionate but they are also fighters. The world has dealt them pretty bad hands but they just keep playing and I know that someday this means they’ll win (even if only at a price). And I love Andevai for loving his grandmother, for doing the right thing even when it costs him and will probably continue to cost him dearly, for not being afraid of his own better judgment even when it forces him to reveal his closely-guarded vulnerabilities.

I love the Cat/Andevai narrative for giving them each time to get to know each other “on their home turf,” for the way they keep their distance and prowl and test each other like two cats circling before a fight, for the fact that on the night that ought to be their wedding night it is Andevai who bleeds first and Cat who is wielding the sword. I am so pleased with the way the novel ends, because their relationship is complex and not something that could be worked out effectively in a single novel, and I need to see them continue to orbit each other, pushing each other apart and then coming back together, coming closer and closer each time they meet.  

In their extreme loyalty to their families, Cat and Andevai are really incredibly alike — it just so happens that for them to both serve their families best puts them at cross-purposes. Both, too, are separated from their childhood/familial identities: Cat is first separated from her parents when she’s taken in after their death, and the separation only widens when she learns she isn’t actually a Hassi Barahal; Andevai is taken from his family to be trained as a cold mage, but that’s the only way to protect his family. In many ways this is a novel about kinship, the family we’re born into and the family we choose, and while Cat and Andevai have very different goals to achieve in the future, they both know how to care about people even when it costs them — which bodes well for the possibility that they may one day, very deeply, care about each other.

In conclusion: argh I wish the writing were better, but I may just be a picky person and I am still going to read the next one as soon as the library acquires it for me!

So, for those of you who dislike liveblogging or are just not interested in my thoughts on Kate Elliott’s Cold Magic, set your Tumblr Saviors to block “liveblog,” because although it is 1am here and I should probably be sleeping, I am instead sitting in bed with pillows and comfy blankets and what already looks like it will be an awesome novel.

Right now the plan is to break for sleep by 3am if not earlier. We’ll see how this one works out…