(no subject)

izilen has been doing an excellent job promoting things I told her to read recently, so it seems only fair that in exchange I finally take a chance to tell everyone here to read Melina Marchetta's Finnikin of the Rock, which she recommended to me this summer.

Finnikin of the Rock is a book that seems, at first glance, to be vaguely similar to a lot of fantasy novels -- tragedy in the kingdom! vanished royal family! hunt for the long-lost prince! -- when it is in fact really hard at work subverting ALL of these ideas.

To start off, while an Evil Scheme By Bad Guys is the spark that triggers the Bad Things at the heart of the book, the real tragedy is about the nation tearing itself apart -- a minority group becomes a scapegoat, and ordinary people perpetrate terrible violence. (Um, I guess this is a good place to put a trigger warning for terrible violence!)

The kingdom also exists in a wider political, cultural and linguistic landscape, and one of the biggest themes of the story is about life in a diaspora, when return to a homeland no longer seems possible. The title character, Finnikin, is not actually thinking about the royal family at all anymore; instead, he's at work trying to find a sympathetic political leader to set aside land for the refugees where they can find some kind of permanent home.

However his plans are interrupted when a mysterious girl pops up -- a novice nun called Evanjalin -- and starts indicating that she has had VISIONS of the LOST PRINCE!

Finnikin's face is pretty much just like this: >__<

Then, when it turns out that this (quiet! female! novice nun!) has in fact ALL the agency and is quite possibly calmly manipulating everyone for mysterious purposes of her own, his face becomes more like this: >:O

(with a small side order of >.> which here indicates 'uncomfortably turned on.')

This leads into the biggest subversion in the book, and by that I mean Melina Marchetta is a glorious troll. ( Not really plot spoilers, but thematic spoilers! )

Even without that, this would have been a book that I respected -- it's not afraid to look a lot of painful and complicated things in the face, and deal with the consequences of them. But that last subversion made it a book that I loved.