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Sep. 28th, 2012 06:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsOKAY GUYS CAN WE TALK ABOUT FROI OF THE EXILES? I just finished it yesterday and I am still stuck in a vortex of "what was that even!"
So Froi of the Exiles is the sequel to Finnikin of the Rock, which is a really well-done, thoughtful exploration of gender roles and the aftermath of trauma and life in a cultural diaspora.
And Froi of the Exiles is sort of trying to do these things too -- less diaspora, more about trauma and cycles of hatred and gender roles and scapegoating and the importance of consent -- except the main plot also on ten times the crack?! I still have no idea if I actually liked a lot of it was doing, but I couldn't put it down!
I should also say first of all, as a giant trigger warning, that there is a LOT of child abuse and rape as backstory in these books. Like, way more than Finnikin of the Rock, which already had a pretty significant amount. Literally EVERY CHARACTER in Froi of the Exiles has had a completely horrific, abuse-filled past, possibly also with some genocide or attempted murder by a family member thrown in. After a few chapters I just sort of stopped even being able to register levels of trauma to be disturbed by in trying to follow the actual plot, which was gloriously convoluted and Gothic as all get-out. At one point the protagonist has this exchange:
PROTAGONIST: [This dude] was your lover, but you had a wife who bore you a son?
OTHER PERSON: No, I've not had a wife. It's far more complicated and tragic than you'd imagine.
PROTAGONIST: EVERYTHING IN CHARYN seems far more complicated and tragic.
AND IT'S TRUE. Decades-long identical twin swaps! Dead baby swaps, unrelated to the identical twin swaps! Princesses with multiple personalities! Assassins impersonating royalty! Priests locked up in towers! People's mothers and/or long-lost lovers unrelatedly locked up in towers! Long-lost secret parents! A secret sex cave! Everyone hopping around the balconies of a great big echoing Gormenghast of a castle where apparently one good jump is enough to get you to from the guest chambers to the towers where everyone else is being imprisoned!
By the time we got to the second half of the book -- the out-of-the-castle, on-the-run half -- it had gone all the way through Gothic and out the other side and the entire thing actually started to feel like one of those quirky indie drama-comedies, like The Royal Tennenbaums or Little Miss Sunshine or something, about bizarre unconventional families undergoing awkward, angry bonding. I mean, a significant portion of the book's pagecount deals with Froi getting increasingly annoyed about the fact that his long-lost, aqueduct-obsessed father is getting it on again with his equally long-lost, somewhat murderous mother, who due to a baby swap is also the adopted mother of the girl who is having his baby, who is also possessed by the ghost of her dead twin sister. The dead twin sister is VERY INDIGNANT about all of this. AND THEY'RE ALL ON A ROAD TRIP with his father's identical twin brother, the gay alcoholic priest, who is maybe getting back together with his old boyfriend if he can come to terms with the kids his old boyfriend has adopted in the meantime. Take out the curses and the world-ending stakes and does this not spell Wes Anderson movie to you?
So basically what it all comes down to is that I have utterly lost my ability to talk seriously about any of the (worthwhile and relevant!) issues that Melina Marchetta still wants to talk about in between all of the crack, and I still don't know if I can actually recommend this book, necessarily, but I cannot WAIT to read the next one.
So Froi of the Exiles is the sequel to Finnikin of the Rock, which is a really well-done, thoughtful exploration of gender roles and the aftermath of trauma and life in a cultural diaspora.
And Froi of the Exiles is sort of trying to do these things too -- less diaspora, more about trauma and cycles of hatred and gender roles and scapegoating and the importance of consent -- except the main plot also on ten times the crack?! I still have no idea if I actually liked a lot of it was doing, but I couldn't put it down!
I should also say first of all, as a giant trigger warning, that there is a LOT of child abuse and rape as backstory in these books. Like, way more than Finnikin of the Rock, which already had a pretty significant amount. Literally EVERY CHARACTER in Froi of the Exiles has had a completely horrific, abuse-filled past, possibly also with some genocide or attempted murder by a family member thrown in. After a few chapters I just sort of stopped even being able to register levels of trauma to be disturbed by in trying to follow the actual plot, which was gloriously convoluted and Gothic as all get-out. At one point the protagonist has this exchange:
PROTAGONIST: [This dude] was your lover, but you had a wife who bore you a son?
OTHER PERSON: No, I've not had a wife. It's far more complicated and tragic than you'd imagine.
PROTAGONIST: EVERYTHING IN CHARYN seems far more complicated and tragic.
AND IT'S TRUE. Decades-long identical twin swaps! Dead baby swaps, unrelated to the identical twin swaps! Princesses with multiple personalities! Assassins impersonating royalty! Priests locked up in towers! People's mothers and/or long-lost lovers unrelatedly locked up in towers! Long-lost secret parents! A secret sex cave! Everyone hopping around the balconies of a great big echoing Gormenghast of a castle where apparently one good jump is enough to get you to from the guest chambers to the towers where everyone else is being imprisoned!
By the time we got to the second half of the book -- the out-of-the-castle, on-the-run half -- it had gone all the way through Gothic and out the other side and the entire thing actually started to feel like one of those quirky indie drama-comedies, like The Royal Tennenbaums or Little Miss Sunshine or something, about bizarre unconventional families undergoing awkward, angry bonding. I mean, a significant portion of the book's pagecount deals with Froi getting increasingly annoyed about the fact that his long-lost, aqueduct-obsessed father is getting it on again with his equally long-lost, somewhat murderous mother, who due to a baby swap is also the adopted mother of the girl who is having his baby, who is also possessed by the ghost of her dead twin sister. The dead twin sister is VERY INDIGNANT about all of this. AND THEY'RE ALL ON A ROAD TRIP with his father's identical twin brother, the gay alcoholic priest, who is maybe getting back together with his old boyfriend if he can come to terms with the kids his old boyfriend has adopted in the meantime. Take out the curses and the world-ending stakes and does this not spell Wes Anderson movie to you?
So basically what it all comes down to is that I have utterly lost my ability to talk seriously about any of the (worthwhile and relevant!) issues that Melina Marchetta still wants to talk about in between all of the crack, and I still don't know if I can actually recommend this book, necessarily, but I cannot WAIT to read the next one.
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Date: 2012-09-28 11:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-29 12:17 am (UTC). . . which, I mean, I did. BUT STILL.
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Date: 2012-09-28 11:52 pm (UTC)i'm intrigued by the dead twin sister. dead twin sisters are always my favorite, it's a cassandra nova thing.
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Date: 2012-09-29 12:21 am (UTC)The dead twin sister was actually my favorite of the princess' personalities. She was pretty great!
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Date: 2012-09-29 01:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-29 02:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-29 12:06 am (UTC)Ahahahaha. This is SO TRUE.
I just read the trilogy this week and I am so glad I had Book 3 when I finished Book 2.
The gender stuff is really interesting, especially how it shifts from rape as a war crime to miscarriage as trauma. Although it never actually loses the rape.
It reminds me a lot of Kristin Cashore, actually, strengths and weaknesses both.
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Date: 2012-09-29 12:36 am (UTC)The gender stuff is both super interesting and weirdly essentialist at the same time -- like, on the one hand, I am actually sort of strangely glad that rape is an equal opportunity backstory trauma thin and not just for the female characters, but there's a lot of 'men react this way to trauma, women react that way to trauma' that I started to notice more in the second book.
With good timing, I actually just started reading Huntress for the first time today!
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Date: 2012-09-29 01:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-29 01:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-29 03:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-29 03:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-09 03:00 am (UTC)The off-putting gender essentialism is definitely worth a mention too. I think I actually noticed it about equally in both books, I think, and unfortunately I don't think it'll be going away in the last book.
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Date: 2012-10-09 03:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-09 03:22 am (UTC)Haha, oh man Froi. I basically was scratching my head at him the entire time, trying to figure out how I actually felt about this kid. And then something else ridiculous would happen and momentarily distract me. I still do not know what I think about him! I guess I can say though that I neither particularly like or dislike him? So there's that.
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Date: 2016-03-06 07:17 am (UTC)Oh, good God. One of them probably is played by Steve Carell. I make this judgment as a person who loved Little Miss Sunshine.
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Date: 2016-03-07 05:29 am (UTC)(I mean, let's be clear: I would genuinely love to see a high fantasy movie which was shot like Little Miss Sunshine and had a soundtrack composed of a variety of quirky indy singer-songwriters.)