skygiants | (no subject)

Zen Cho's Sorcerer to the Crown (link still to Amazon until I have time to figure out if/what I want to switch it to) is probably the book I've been most looking forward to this year and it DID NOT DISAPPOINT. I don't know how Sorcerer to the Crown manages to have its cake and eat it too, but it absolutely does -- as a book, it's a sparkling homage to the Regency novel of manners, while simultaneously giving all the incredibly ugly politics of racism and imperialism that the Regency novel of manners so often awkwardly sidesteps a straight death stare.

Protagonist A is Zacharias Whyte, a polite and responsible young man who as a child was first purchased, then adopted by a reform-minded sorcerer as the walking demonstration that black people who could do magic. After his adopted father's death, Zacharias has found himself in the extremely difficult and unwanted position of being England's first non-white Sorcerer Royal. Additional challenges:

- England seems to be losing its magic, a fact that people are inclined to blame on him
- his adopted father keeps showing up as a ghost to give him frequently unwanted advice, but won't let him tell his grieving adopted mother about it
- he's suffering from a mysterious magical illness
- unrelatedly, people keep trying to magically assassinate him
- the government keeps trying to get him to involve himself magically in the affairs of the small but strategically important Southeast Asian island of Janda Baik, which he really does not want to do
- a disapproving elderly witch from Janda Baik also keeps popping up at the least convenient times to try and get him to stop his government from involving itself in Janda Baik's affairs, which he does not have the power to do
- also, there is Prunella

Prunella Gentleman is Protagonist B, an orphan with an ignominiously dead British father and a mysterious but presumably Indian mother, being raised as a charity case by a friend of her father's in a school for teaching young ladies how to suppress their magic. (Ladies are not supposed to do magic because it is too much for their delicate frames, you know.) Prunella, however, is excessively magical. She is also excessively ambitious. Unfortunately for Zacharias, who takes after his father in being reform-minded and is intrigued by the idea of a young woman who just wants to LEARN!, what Prunella really wants is to be introduced into high society, marry extraordinarily well, and live out the rest of her life with wealth and power to spare. (Learning is nice and all, but you can't exactly live on it -- at least not if you're a dark-skinned orphan girl in England.)

I would list out the other problems that Prunella has got to overcome, but there's no point because unlike Zacharias, Prunella is very willing to just bulldoze her way straight through them -- a fact which changes the shape of the book tremendously. Prunella is extremely charming, quite pragmatic, totally ruthless, and possessed of more power than even she is aware of. The book loves her A LOT, and so do I.

Of course, I also love Zacharias, and all the other characters -- spirits and dragons and vampires and dandies and a lovely collection of Zen Cho's trademark intimidating aunts. Possibly my favorite thing of all is Zacharias' complicated relationship with his loving and supportive adopted parents who are possessed of large blind spots about such things as, i.e., the fact that they purchased him away from his enslaved birth parents long ago. But maybe my favorite thing is the dragons? I LOVED A LOT OF THINGS, OK, Sorcerer to the Crown is really, really good!