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Aug. 19th, 2025 09:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsThe 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.)
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.)
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Date: 2025-08-24 03:48 am (UTC)