(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 )

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.)

[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?

[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.

[mme_n_b]

What do you mean by "also"? This is a romance. It does romance-y things in romance-y ways. Even the "best friend who's secretly a traitor" is a romance-y plot twist.

[sushiflop]

Yup! I get why authors stick to their niche, their brand, whatever you call it. It does mean their followings get what they want and expect consistently. The downside I think is it can begin to feel very pat in terms of characterization and in the worst case smug...

[chestnut_pod]

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

[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 >:(

[slashmarks]

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

[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.

[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????"

[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.

[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?

[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.

[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)

[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.

[rmc28]

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

[eddishelen]

There's a romance in it, although I guess I'd say it's a c plot at most? It kind of reminded me of the romances in some Agatha Christie novels, actually. Like Why Didn't They Ask Evans?, where they're running around dealing with The Plot that is the actual point of the book, and then in the last chapter or so they're like "and also we should get together"

[mme_n_b]

I read it as a straight romance with an extra dollop of plot, and through this genre lens it's very satisfying.

[sholio]

Nah, I stand by my phrasing, because I'm talking about her writing generally. If she just did it in her romance or romance-adjacent writing, then I could believe that she's Doing A Trope, but it's actually her horror where it annoys me most egregiously, and it most definitely is not a trope in horror.

I hadn't really put my finger on exactly what was grating on me about it until senri phrased it like that, and then I was like, YES, that's it EXACTLY, "self-righteous character is vindicated by the plot without having to learn or change" is her whole entire Thing, and it's fine if you enjoy that - I have actually read about a dozen of her books at this point, so clearly I'm enjoying some aspects of them - but I do think that's exactly why I tend to come away with a faint feeling of "urgh" about her protagonists.

So whether or not this specific book is romance is completely tangential to the point I was making, basically.

[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?