(no subject)

[skygiants]

The last of the four Hugo Best Novel nominees I read (I did not get around to Service Model or Someone You Can Build A Nest In) was A Sorceress Comes to Call, which ... I think perhaps I have hit the point, officially, at which I've read Too Much Kingfisher; which is not, in the grand scheme of things, that much. But it's enough to identify and be slightly annoyed by repeated patterns, by the type of people who, in a Kingfisher book, are Always Good and Virtuous, and by the type of people who are Not.

A Sorceress Comes to Call is a sort of Regency riff; it's also a bit of a Goose Girl riff, although I have truly no idea what it's trying to say about the original story of the Goose Girl, a fairy tale about which one might have really a lot of things to say. Anyway, the plot involves an evil sorceress with an evil horse (named Falada after the Goose Girl horse) who brings her abused teen daughter along with her in an attempt to seduce a kindly but clueless aristocrat into marriage. The particular method by which the evil sorceress abuses her daughter is striking and terrible, and drawn with skill. Fortunately, the abused teen daughter then bonds with the aristocrat's practical middle-aged spinster sister and her practical middle-aged friends, and learns from them how to be a Practical Heroine in her own right, and they all team up to defeat the evil sorceress mother and her evil horse. The good end happily, and the bad unhappily. At no point is anybody required to feel sympathy for the abusive sorceress mother or the evil horse. If this is the sort of book you like you will probably like this book, and you can stop reading here.

I think it's sort of interesting to contrast the works of Kingfisher against the kind of fairy tales that she is often playing around with in her fantasy novels. In a classic fairy tale -- in the Goose Girl, for example -- you can generally recognize a person who is virtuous by their beauty and their aristocratic birth; these things all go together, they are equated 1:1, and anyone who attempts to keep this person from their destined happiness will be harshly punished.

In a Kingfisher book, being a Practical Heroine is equated with virtue 1:1. I understand the appeal; we're living in a dearth of practical heroines in many areas, and Kingfisher is near-single-handedly supplying the market. However, after encountering enough of these Forthright, Practical Women with Hobbies who are eternally guaranteed to stand on a Kingfisher novel's highest ground and trample impractical evildoers beneath their sturdy boots with perfect confidence in their own moral judgment, I am starting to feel that this constant equation is not so far from the classic beauty:aristocracy:virtue bundle as one might initially think.

I also think that if you're going to pick the story of The Goose Girl, in particular, to rotate around and turn on its head, it feels like an obvious move to consider a more radical perspective on servants and servitude, and so it is perhaps a bold if confusing choice of Kingfisher's not to do this at all! The servants who work for Lady Hester and her friends are very contented in their work, and cheerfully serve the plot as supportive infrastructure whose main job is to report with concern that the young abused lady seems perhaps like she's being abused. At one point a lady's maid is murdered; everyone is deeply concerned about the person who is accused of murdering her, but about the actual murder victim we know nothing. To be fair, I don't find this unusual for Regency fantasy, and it probably would have rolled off my back if I had not already been a.) trying to figure out What the book was trying to doing with the Goose Girl (again, I still do not know) and b.) feeling judgy and thus reading ungenerously for reasons of Kingfisher Overdose.

(I also find it a bit weird that Lady Hester's Practical Hobby is goose-breeding and there are several cheerful comments about culling the unfit geese. Obviously this is of course a thing one does in practical goose-breeding and I genuinely do not think it is intended as a metaphor for anything, but for me it was not a charm point.)

Comments

[cyphomandra]

I am still grumpy about this one because I think if you don’t like horses and think they’re evil you should pick a DIFFERENT fairy tale that doesn’t rely so heavily on the horse as faithful companion trope (signed, disgruntled, someone who definitely had both a lengthy horse girl book phase and a much shorter and less competent actual horse riding phase :D )

[slashmarks]

FWIW, I remember being deeply annoyed by Kingfisher's attitude towards horses in the Clocktaur War series.

[sushiflop]

I think it makes a better oeuvre if authors jostle themselves or are in some way jostled out of Who is the Most Virtuous and Righteous in their narrative reckoning of the world tbh... I think Chambers suffers from this too. Like just shake it up now and again.

[sholio]

Yes! I think that's a really great way to put it, tbh, and a big part of my problem with Kingfisher's books (though I don't think I'd quite realized that's what it is, but that IS what it is). And the fantasy of "everyone will just listen to me and recognize how correct I am!" is a perfectly valid thing to want to read - I mean, a lot of romance is also that way, downtrodden and ignored heroine gets recognized and justified without actually having to change much - but it's really not what I want to read, most of the time.

(I say this having had more or less had similar problems with nearly all her books, and yet I keep reading them.)

[evewithanapple]

I will admit to being fed up with Kingfisher from a Doylist perspective (she came out swinging with "do we even know these women EXIST? Check and mate!" when the Neil Gaiman allegations first surfaced and has, to the best of my knowledge, ever acknowledged what a fucked-up thing that was to say) but once you start to see her, from that Doylist perspective, as someone who views Good People as having moral infallibility and never needing to be challenged or admit fault or wrongdoing . . . her books scan differently, that's all I'll say.

Unfortunately, her particular brand of smug virtuousness is very popular with the Hugos crowd (who doesn't want to feel smug?) so I do not expect she will be shaking things up any time soon.

[aella_irene]

She has not only never acknowledged what a fucked up thing that was to say, she now says she didn't actually say it.

(I have withdrawn from one group of fantasy readers partly because they keep wanting to love on her, and I am sat there going "...but she said that? Why do we not care that she said that?" Though it helps that I also ended up over the books very quickly due to them always being the same people. Sometimes in different hats, but always the same.)

[rachelmanija]

I have not read this (but was recently startled to actually like a T. Kingfisher book, Hemlock & Silver, for the first time) and find "The Goose Girl" an odd book to put an evil horse into. It's uhhh well certainly subversive!

Mostly, I am commenting to say that I once wrote a play loosely based on "The Goose Girl," which was about how hateful America is to immigrants. I think Falada getting nailed to the gates might have been a concentration camp metaphor.

[jadelennox]

I found the evil Falada narratively satisfying, mostly because it psyched me out; I was convinced that because the horse was Falada eventually it would do the right thing.

[landofnowhere]

Anyway, the plot involves an evil sorceress with an evil horse (named Falada after the Goose Girl horse) who brings her abused teen daughter along with her in an attempt to seduce a kindly but clueless aristocrat into marriage.

Wait, is this fantasy Lady Susan?

[skygiants]

sadlfjdk I hadn't put that together because it's been so long since I've Lady Susaned but you're right, it absolutely is

[snickfic]

My only experience with Kingfisher's novels are through her horror, but I read 1.5 of those and decided I did not need to read any more Kingfisher. Somehow despite being standalone novels, they both had the same protagonist and basically the same sidekick (although at least in the second one, the sidekick is flamboyantly gay instead of flamboyantly and bafflingly straight and cis). And the one I finished, The Twisted Ones, definitely did not seem to have a clear idea of what it was trying to say about its source material.

[skygiants]

I haven't read any of the Kingfisher horrors -- well, I guess that's not true, I guess The Seventh Bride is sort of horror crossover? -- but I admit to curiosity about whether the Kingfisher horror protagonist is the same person as the Kingfisher other-genres protagonist (my guess is yes.)

[chestnut_pod]

Not as thoughtful as your take, but: I am sad that the horse is evil.

[skygiants]

I think I'm formulating a theory that the whole point of writing a Goose Girl book was so she could make the horse evil.

[cahn]

Honestly, I just wanted the Regency stuff without the fantasy or the murder :) ...which actually now that I think about it may be a less articulate way of agreeing with you from the other standpoint, because I feel like in a straight romance (Regency or otherwise) it's sort of expected and okay to have your heroine be uncomplicatedly heroic for being aristocratic or witty or forward momentum or practical or what-have-you.

I was super confused for the longest time about the horse being evil, because I kept expecting there to be a plot twist where the horse was good after all, because of course the horse was good... right...? and so probably read quite a bit of it athwart what the text intended. (Perhaps because of being confused for so long, I actually did feel a little sorry for the evil horse at times even after finding out it was Evil... which meant I really liked (among many other things) that part of The Incandescent, which I read very shortly afterwards :P )

[skygiants]

Yeah, for sure -- and I also expected there to be a twist wrt the horse! The horse kept winking at her and I was like 'surely this is a communication problem and we're going to learn she shouldn't have jumped one hundred percent to conclusions about how the horse was absolute evil and needed to die?' But no, I do think that it was very important to Kingfisher that the horse needed to be both evil AND undead.

(in contrast to the phoenix in Incandescent. LOVE the phoenix in Incandescent. need to read the final-draft version of Incandescent so I can write it up properly)

[sleepnoises]

I generally quite like Kingfisher's work (some emotional levers were installed in me as a teen) and I dimly recall that I did not like this one! I came out of it feeling that it was thin and unsurprising. I don't know why it got a Hugo nom besides inertia. Also, the cover design is unforgivably lazy and it ticks me off every time I see it. The copy pasted tree >:(

[skygiants]

It's SO lazy. The book does have some good images in it! you could use literally any of them instead of this copy-pasted tree that has nothing to do with anything!!

I think I also probably would have been less judgmental about it if I had not been reading it thinking 'why is this Hugo nominated >:((' which is, again, not a fair way to come to a book. however.

[slashmarks]

I used to like Kingfisher's work a lot, but fell off of it somewhere around The Hollow Places. I'm not entirely sure whether it's more that my tastes have changed or that she's stopped soliciting rigorous editing; having reread some of her older work and found it holds up better, I think it is at least slightly the latter.

[skygiants]

There definitely often comes a point in a successful author's career where what they're doing is working so well for them and their fans that they no longer feel they need much criticism about it to try and push them to be different or better ... and often their fans believe they are right! and who am I to say they are wrong! however.

[lirazel]

The conversation here makes me feel better about the fact that I've never really vibed with Kingfisher. I've always been like, "What am I missing????"

[mirawonderfulstar]

I came looking in these comments to say exactly this. A good friend of mine loves her work and I keep bouncing off of it. I enjoyed What Moves The Dead well enough but every other book of hers I've started to read has left me feeling like, well, if you've read one T Kingfisher book you've read them all.

[rymenhild]

I both still enjoy a lot of Kingfisher (especially the White Rat books) and found this one weirdly unsuccessful. As you said, the fairy tale base just doesn't go with the story she wants to be telling here and I don't even know why she bothers to include that base.

[skygiants]

I like a great deal about the White Rat books, the worldbuilding and the setup especially -- the actual White Rat characters are always a delight! -- but I have decided I need a break from them before her particular romance hot buttons stop being funny to me (ah, the inevitably majestic bazonkadonkas) and start becoming annoying ...

[kate_nepveu]

hmm! I don't think I noticed this as a Goose Girl riff and that does change things.

mostly what I remember about this one is that the evil mom felt rather DWJ?

[skygiants]

Yeah, I think there's definitely a vibe similarity, but -- hmm, so I think the difference for me is that in DWJ no matter how evil the parent there is always a profound echo or resonance between the evil parent and the kid protagonist (the kid protagonist is almost always in danger of growing up to reflect the worst elements of the evil parent, and/or finds a strength in something they learned from the evil parent reapplied in a different context) whereas in this book it does feel like there's almost no connection between the evil mom and the virtuous abused daughter .... the mother is Wicked and the daughter is Good, in a sort of D&D alignment assignment. The daughter is at risk from the mother physically and emotionally but NOT morally.

[julian]

I'm at the "when I am in a mood for This Thing, I will read her work, but I will know what I am getting" point. It is not ambitious. Which is fine! Just. Knowledge.

[genarti]

Same. And, like, I have loved a lot of her work! It's doing This Thing that it's doing, and usually it's doing it well! (Although I haven't read this one, and it sounds like it contains her characteristic things AND some weird additional flaws, so I don't know if I'll like it much whenever I do get to it or if I'll file it quietly as a lesser work.)

There are a lot of authors where I really enjoy their strengths and their predictable things, and others where I don't enjoy it but recognize that there's plenty to enjoy if that's up your alley. Kingfisher/Vernon is largely in the former category for me, though I haven't read all her stuff, but I'm definitely at the point where I don't think she needs any more awards for it unless she does something new and different. Her books so far remain the books that they are, y'know?

[forestofglory]

You might be interested in Little Thieves by Margaret Owen which is Goose Girl retelling form the maids point of view. (It took me until almost the end, when the name of the horse was mentioned, to actually notice this)

[rmc28]

If we are adding Goose Girl retellings, I will throw in Thorn by Intisar Khanani, which I read and enjoyed last year.

[elanid]

I haven’t managed to get very far into any Kingfisher book, but I remember at some point hitting a point of similar frustration with Robin McKinley’s Very Practical Heroines (who I generally love and sympathize with AND who are not really quite as sensible as they imagine themselves to be, to say the least), but I think there’s something very offputting about…the writer having such clear notions about who is worthy of sympathy and how likely they are to be right, I guess?

[skygiants]

Yeah, I can definitely see hitting that risk point with McKinley, too, though for me she was never so prolific that I ended up bouncing up against it (when I was growing up I had Deerskin, the Damar books, and Outlaws of Sherwood, and I think it took me a while to even figure out there were more). I do think Kingfisher is in some ways trying to be McKinley, or at least fill that niche, but never quite hits the moment of Weird Numinous that makes a McKinley book sing.

[starlady]

Apparently she had a traumatic experience with a horse as a child, and this is why the attitude towards horses in her books thus far has been negative. I actually thought making the horse evil was kind of refreshing, as a Goose Girl connoisseur.

Overall I agree, although I enjoyed it, and the lackadaisical worldbuilding details drove me a bit batty. If you're looking for Goose Girl from the perspective of servants, I second the rec for Margaret Owen's Little Thieves in the strongest possible terms! The whole trilogy is excellent but the first book especially is great.

I have been hit or miss with Kingfisher's non-horror books. I really like What Moves the Dead and its sequels and will read books set in that world until the end of time.

[skygiants]

Yeah, on reflection I do think that she decided to do a Goose Girl riff for the pure joy of making the horse evil and you know what, follow your bliss! an undead horse singing about what your mom would want for you is kind of a creepy thing! Anyway, I am very glad to have learned about Little Thieves.

[landingtree]

I've read few enough Kingfishers that they've stayed fresh for me, but never been drawn to read the new ones on a regular basis. I remember thinking 'This has so much Tiffany Aching in it' about her brand of practical heroine, and your post makes me think about the way the Tiffany Aching books have consistent sympathy for their villains, and also the best people in them are constantly 1) making mistakes and 2) watching each other like hawks to make sure they're holding it together and not going to start cooking children in ovens.

[skygiants]

One of the most remarkable things about Pratchett, I think, is that with all his anger he is always such a humanist -- he knows the world is not divided into Good People and Bad People, that they're all just people in the end, and that the greatest and saddest traps for his villains are always the insides of their own heads.

[ceitfianna]

Today I picked up my hold for Hemlock and Silver and this has me thinking about T. Kingfisher's books. I always enjoy the fairy tale ones when I read them but don't reread them. I reread the Paladin ones and some of the Clocktaur ones as well as the younger ones like the fighting baker. It helps that there's always a pause in between the reading because definitely tropes and such, but I think for me, these are books I enjoy and don't spend too long on. I love your thoughts on them and thinking about the other options.

[skygiants]

The Clocktaur ones I think were my first of hers and I enjoyed them very much! Thinking about it, yeah, they are also the only ones I really can imagine myself having an urge to reread.

[kadharonon]

I've been thinking about this one a bit, and part of the problem with this book is that it has the bones of a decent second-chance fantasy regency romance in it, and the bones of a decent dark fairytale retelling in it, and neither story is really served all that much by being in the same book. Like, as someone who generally likes the T. Kingfishery-ness of her books, it was fine. It was a smooth and easy read. But it was just fine, y'know?

[skygiants]

Yeah, I'm not opposed to books that try to be two things at once -- often I enjoy it! gives me more to chew on! -- but I agree that I don't think either story was really serving the other one well here; you want a book like that to feel like it coheres into something greater than the sum of its parts, and that did not happen here.

[mneme]

To me it feels like she has a tendency to put Authorial Insert characters into books who are sensible and always right except when they are temporarily embarrassed by being entirely out of their element.

Sometimes those characters are the MC. At other times (more often I think) they are a helpful side character or secondary protagonist, as in _Sorceress_.

One of the many charms of _Digger_ was that the authorial insert was -very- out of her element and had a number of features that differentiated her from the author herself (like being a wombat).

And one reason I've found this less irritating in the What Moves the Dead horror series is that the insert isn't the main character; it's Ms Potter, so it's harder to get too much of her.

Re horses--I think the most positive use of horses in a Vernon/Kingfisher novel was _Baking_? The horses there were creepy, but I think not evil?

[cleodoxa]

I only read 50 pages of Swordheart but it crystallised a previously cloudy feeling of resentment towards these Practical and therefore Correct heroines. I think a lot of the resentment is because the Practicality in question tends to be more a vibe than earned. We don't see enough of them being hard workers, resourceful, down to earth, we see them just simply having earned the right, before the story began, to have exactly the right emotional and aesthetic values and either bonding with or revealing the wrongness of other characters based on that. But then I don't much like people in real life who smugly say they don't suffer fools gladly.

[sholio]

I only read 50 pages of Swordheart but it crystallised a previously cloudy feeling of resentment towards these Practical and therefore Correct heroines. I think a lot of the resentment is because the Practicality in question tends to be more a vibe than earned.

YES. I think what crystalized this for me was a discussion I was having with someone about The Hollow Places, in which I was complaining about the heroine of that book being practical to the point of stupidity and the person I was talking to pointed out very accurately that she is actually the opposite of practical - she is framed by the narrative as a down-to-earth, practical working girl but in fact refuses to believe in the supernatural to the point where she won't take common-sense precautions against it even when it's actively trying to kill her, thus putting herself and everyone around her at risk. It's not practicality, it's dogmatic adherence to a particular set of beliefs, and once I realized that, I realized a lot of Vernon heroines are like that - they're not actually practical, they're just dogmatically convinced that they're the most clear-thinking and correct person in the room.

[laleia]

I read the book a few months ago and ... completely missed the connection to Goose Girl (despite being a moderate fan of the fairy tale! though clearly not enough to recognize the horse's name!) I thought it was supposed to be a Cinderella variation (the main character being a humanized evil stepsister, Lady Hester being a very take on Cinderella, etc.)

[bloodygranuaile]

As someone who has never read Kingfisher, and who loves a Practical Heroine but has tanked entirely too much psychic damage from eight years in the socialist movement to actually escape into a lot of the escapist fantasies that seem like they ought to be directly pitched at me, this has been a fascinating review and conversation to read. I am now sort of intrigued to read Kingfisher but it sounds like it would quite possibly be outright triggering for me to do so.

[lokifan]

Fascinating conversation! I just read it and came looking for your review. And it makes a lot of sense to me that you didn't like it - I had a great time with it, but it's the first Kingfisher I've ever read, and I didn't get the Goose Girl connection. (Plus in my version, Kingfisher apologises for Falada and promises to write a good horse next.) I did raise my eyebrows a bit at the loyal maid and unflappable butler characters, and how Lord Evermore really just wanted to make things better for "the people who relied on him" - what a fascinating way to spell "servants and presumably tenants" - but was basically very on board with its posh, practical, middle-aged heroine(s). But then I haven't met her in several books before!

(Also, yiiikes on the Gaiman stuff.)