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Jun. 12th, 2026 06:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsA few weeks ago I was grimly gearing up to do the Hugos homework when suddenly I realized that Hugo voting privileges do not actually pass over year to year, only nominating privileges. I'm free! Flinging the nominations list joyously to the wind in favor of catching up on overdue library books and the massive stacks of books in my own home! However before this happy revelation I did read The Raven Scholar which had vaguely been on my list anyway, largely on a series of planes.
I was under a profound misapprehension about the plot of The Raven Scholar. I spent the first several chapters, in which a young woman whose father has been executed for treason gets brought before the reigning Emperor on the occasion of her majority, peacefully thinking to myself "and I suppose from here she's going to end up going to some sort of raven school." Not the case! Very different things happen to that young woman! In case you are confused like me, The Raven Scholar is ostensibly about adults in their late twenties and thirties, although I have to say I found them extremely YAish adults -- kind of a reverse Six of Crows problem, these people extremely felt like teenagers to me -- and the actual heroine is Neema, who has already graduated from raven school and is now a full-fledged raven postgrad.
Neema's plot begins with her at the bottom of the raven postgrad pecking order due to classism and being a poor scholarship student; then she accepts a government order that everyone thinks is a bit evil and gets a big promotion out of it, so by the time the plot proper begins she's the most important raven postgrad in the Empire and also the most disliked. She has a mean girl nemesis, and a sexy chaotic ex-boyfriend from the fox monastery who hasn't spoken to her in the years since she accepted the evil order despite the fact that she's pretty convinced that he himself does government assassinations --
-- there are six important animal schools, by the way, or rather animal monasteries, and they're all associated with Characteristics. Perfect for sorting! The shadow of Harry Potter does inescapably hang over this a bit; we've got our Scholarly Ravens, our Hardworking Oxen, our Brave Bears, our Extremely Classist Evil Tigers, and then we've added to this Loyal Hounds, Artistic Monkeys, Sexy Chaotic Foxes and Weird Magical Dragons, so don't worry! there are eight kinds of people instead of the reductive four! I was also unfortunately reminded of when I had to take management training classes at work and we were taught with great seriousness how to identify our coworkers as lions, peacocks, turtles, and doves --
Anyway! Neema is having problems with her social life, is what I mean to say, and she's in charge of organizing prom, by which I mean the big festival during which representatives from each of the different types of monasteries compete in combat! and absurd little Taskmaster competitions!! to see who will next be awarded the throne now that the current Emperor has ruled the legal amount of years he's supposed to after winning the last competition and is ready to retire!!!
AND THEN ... in the MIDDLE of all of this ... someone is MURDERED.
After my initial confusion, I found the first 2/3 of the book really enjoyable to read on a plane. I think it was very clever of Antonia Hodgson to go "what do people like? well, murder mysteries. And what also do people like? When people have to compete in absurd little Taskmaster competitions." I'm people! I also like murder mysteries and absurd little competitions. The point when it became clear that Neema was going to have THREE DAYS to SOLVE THE MURDER and while ALSO taking the murder victim's place competing in the absurd little Taskmaster competition AT THE SAME TIME was the silliest but perhaps also the highest point for me; "oh I don't need to take this seriously!" I said to myself, "we are just here to have a good time!"
Unfortunately for me, about 2/3 of the book it started to become clear that I was indeed supposed to take all of this seriously, and things were going to dramatically escalate, and everything was going to get very epic about the fate of the kingdom and the gods, and I was like. Okay. Well, regrettably, I stopped taking this seriously three hundred pages ago, so I'm having a hard time getting back on board with this. Oh, the Emperor is neither the principled-but-ruthless reformer originally presented to us, or the mediocre replacement that Neema thinks it is halfway through the book, but actually the most Evil man in the world who's been biding his time pretending to be a principled reformer for fifteen years until he can pull off his master plan and be Really Evil? I can certainly understand why In This Time Hodgson is interested in writing about reactionary movements attempting to claw back social progress via elaborate coups, but that's both the least interesting option of the three to me and also makes the least sense with any of the plot events as presented to date --
Which is a shame, because I actually think the narrative POV trick that the book pulls -- the slow reveal that the story is being told not in close or omniscient third but divine-omniscient first, through the eyes of a school of divine ravens who are trying to push Neema towards their own agenda, which she does not want to be doing -- is actually really fun and clever! I wanted to be on board with it; I think Hodgson does have some cool ideas wrapped up in the very marketable trope bundle, and half of her big twists are smart and well done! ... and then the other half made me go 'hang on a minute, it doesn't make any sense for this to have happened this way except so it can be a big twist.' It's big and fun and maximalist but the cost is that when you start looking at it closely it just doesn't quite hang together.
A small list of other personal observations and complaints:
- Hodgson wants to make it clear that this is a diverse society so she frequently describes characters as white or black in their first intro; this is clearly intended to convey the same basic visual connotations as in our world and she does not want you to ask further questions about the role ethnicity plays in the sociopolitical makeup of this fantasy world. (Obviously she can't say 'Asian' or provide any other more specific descriptors without really raising the very worldbuilding questions she's trying to dodge so it's only no-context white or black or the very occasional 'golden skin' which in and of itself raises some worldbuilding questions...)
- I'm kind of disappointed that the hypocrisy of chaotic fox boyfriend Cain being mad that Neema did morally bad things despite having dome some murders was resolved with the reveal that Cain has never in fact done any murders and is in fact morally pure. This feels like the other half the reveal that the reformist Emperor who did some ruthless things to consolidate power was in fact always morally evil but in disguise
- relatedly, of course all the Hardworking Oxen from the Least Classist Temple are Good, including a pair of Unproblematic Lesbians
-genarti pointed out that Mean Girl Gaida is just two letters away from Galinda and now I can't unsee it, but it does make it even funnier that the book keeps teasing a more interesting explanation for Gaida's Mean Girl behavior towards Neema than 'she was a classist bitch' and then never delivers it
So although I had a good time for much of this book I ended up pretty disinclined to read the next one, but I can certainly see why people liked it and it probably wouldn't have come bottom of my Hugo list, if I was voting. Which, thankfully, I'm not, so I don't have to rank anything!
I was under a profound misapprehension about the plot of The Raven Scholar. I spent the first several chapters, in which a young woman whose father has been executed for treason gets brought before the reigning Emperor on the occasion of her majority, peacefully thinking to myself "and I suppose from here she's going to end up going to some sort of raven school." Not the case! Very different things happen to that young woman! In case you are confused like me, The Raven Scholar is ostensibly about adults in their late twenties and thirties, although I have to say I found them extremely YAish adults -- kind of a reverse Six of Crows problem, these people extremely felt like teenagers to me -- and the actual heroine is Neema, who has already graduated from raven school and is now a full-fledged raven postgrad.
Neema's plot begins with her at the bottom of the raven postgrad pecking order due to classism and being a poor scholarship student; then she accepts a government order that everyone thinks is a bit evil and gets a big promotion out of it, so by the time the plot proper begins she's the most important raven postgrad in the Empire and also the most disliked. She has a mean girl nemesis, and a sexy chaotic ex-boyfriend from the fox monastery who hasn't spoken to her in the years since she accepted the evil order despite the fact that she's pretty convinced that he himself does government assassinations --
-- there are six important animal schools, by the way, or rather animal monasteries, and they're all associated with Characteristics. Perfect for sorting! The shadow of Harry Potter does inescapably hang over this a bit; we've got our Scholarly Ravens, our Hardworking Oxen, our Brave Bears, our Extremely Classist Evil Tigers, and then we've added to this Loyal Hounds, Artistic Monkeys, Sexy Chaotic Foxes and Weird Magical Dragons, so don't worry! there are eight kinds of people instead of the reductive four! I was also unfortunately reminded of when I had to take management training classes at work and we were taught with great seriousness how to identify our coworkers as lions, peacocks, turtles, and doves --
Anyway! Neema is having problems with her social life, is what I mean to say, and she's in charge of organizing prom, by which I mean the big festival during which representatives from each of the different types of monasteries compete in combat! and absurd little Taskmaster competitions!! to see who will next be awarded the throne now that the current Emperor has ruled the legal amount of years he's supposed to after winning the last competition and is ready to retire!!!
AND THEN ... in the MIDDLE of all of this ... someone is MURDERED.
After my initial confusion, I found the first 2/3 of the book really enjoyable to read on a plane. I think it was very clever of Antonia Hodgson to go "what do people like? well, murder mysteries. And what also do people like? When people have to compete in absurd little Taskmaster competitions." I'm people! I also like murder mysteries and absurd little competitions. The point when it became clear that Neema was going to have THREE DAYS to SOLVE THE MURDER and while ALSO taking the murder victim's place competing in the absurd little Taskmaster competition AT THE SAME TIME was the silliest but perhaps also the highest point for me; "oh I don't need to take this seriously!" I said to myself, "we are just here to have a good time!"
Unfortunately for me, about 2/3 of the book it started to become clear that I was indeed supposed to take all of this seriously, and things were going to dramatically escalate, and everything was going to get very epic about the fate of the kingdom and the gods, and I was like. Okay. Well, regrettably, I stopped taking this seriously three hundred pages ago, so I'm having a hard time getting back on board with this. Oh, the Emperor is neither the principled-but-ruthless reformer originally presented to us, or the mediocre replacement that Neema thinks it is halfway through the book, but actually the most Evil man in the world who's been biding his time pretending to be a principled reformer for fifteen years until he can pull off his master plan and be Really Evil? I can certainly understand why In This Time Hodgson is interested in writing about reactionary movements attempting to claw back social progress via elaborate coups, but that's both the least interesting option of the three to me and also makes the least sense with any of the plot events as presented to date --
Which is a shame, because I actually think the narrative POV trick that the book pulls -- the slow reveal that the story is being told not in close or omniscient third but divine-omniscient first, through the eyes of a school of divine ravens who are trying to push Neema towards their own agenda, which she does not want to be doing -- is actually really fun and clever! I wanted to be on board with it; I think Hodgson does have some cool ideas wrapped up in the very marketable trope bundle, and half of her big twists are smart and well done! ... and then the other half made me go 'hang on a minute, it doesn't make any sense for this to have happened this way except so it can be a big twist.' It's big and fun and maximalist but the cost is that when you start looking at it closely it just doesn't quite hang together.
A small list of other personal observations and complaints:
- Hodgson wants to make it clear that this is a diverse society so she frequently describes characters as white or black in their first intro; this is clearly intended to convey the same basic visual connotations as in our world and she does not want you to ask further questions about the role ethnicity plays in the sociopolitical makeup of this fantasy world. (Obviously she can't say 'Asian' or provide any other more specific descriptors without really raising the very worldbuilding questions she's trying to dodge so it's only no-context white or black or the very occasional 'golden skin' which in and of itself raises some worldbuilding questions...)
- I'm kind of disappointed that the hypocrisy of chaotic fox boyfriend Cain being mad that Neema did morally bad things despite having dome some murders was resolved with the reveal that Cain has never in fact done any murders and is in fact morally pure. This feels like the other half the reveal that the reformist Emperor who did some ruthless things to consolidate power was in fact always morally evil but in disguise
- relatedly, of course all the Hardworking Oxen from the Least Classist Temple are Good, including a pair of Unproblematic Lesbians
-
genarti pointed out that Mean Girl Gaida is just two letters away from Galinda and now I can't unsee it, but it does make it even funnier that the book keeps teasing a more interesting explanation for Gaida's Mean Girl behavior towards Neema than 'she was a classist bitch' and then never delivers it So although I had a good time for much of this book I ended up pretty disinclined to read the next one, but I can certainly see why people liked it and it probably wouldn't have come bottom of my Hugo list, if I was voting. Which, thankfully, I'm not, so I don't have to rank anything!
