This week's novel is The Privilege of The Sword by Ellen Kushner. This one was recommended to me by my friend Dani, who thought I would like that the main character is a girly girl who has to learn to sword fight (and also probably thought I'd like the steamy parts). She was correct. This book was fun.
Katherine is a noble country girl, whose family has been in a legal battle with her uncle, The Mad Duke, for years and it is bankrupting them. When her uncle randomly says he'll forgive all their debts and leave them alone if they send Katherine to him, Katherine thinks she's going to have a season in the city, living in an elaborate house and wearing beautiful, expensive gowns and going to parties to meet eligible young men. Instead, her uncle decides that she's going to learn to be a swordsman, handle his duels for him. He gives her very nice clothes, but they are clothes for a swordsman, and therefore involve pants. Horrors!
Katherine was a fun character. I appreciated the complex relationship she had with learning to sword fight. She's resistant to it because it's typically a thing that men do and she's the girlie-est of all girly girls and it's going to ruin her reputation as a Lady. But she's also honor bound to help her family the same way she would help them by marrying well, and her putting up with the Duke's whims is going to do that. And then she starts being really good at it. She takes it seriously and prides herself on learning. Then she gets obsessive in a very teen girl way about a book about swordsmen, and she's drawn to the drama romance of her new profession, to the point of getting upset when it turns out that real duels are kind of boring and unintelligent and over less than heroic squabbles. The push and pull is really interesting, as is her growth through the story.
It was also a really well put together queer narrative. The Mad Duke is openly bi (I assume. He never says how he identifies so it might be more along the lines of pansexual). But more interesting than that is Katherine's sexual awakening. She's also bi (again, I assume), and her discovery of that is really well handled. In their pseudo-Regency society, no one has really talked to her about sex, so when she realizes she wants to kiss ladies, she has to simultaneously piece together all the innuendos that have been going over her head (which is an entertaining thing for a lot of the book). She freaks out because she feels sexual attraction, not because she feels it towards women. And she never feels guilty about it, which is really cool. It's more of a light bub moment than a dread filled moment.
The other thing that stands out for me about this book is that it's fantasy because it's set in this word that's not ours and doesn't really exist. However, there's no magic or monsters or supernatural forces of any kind. It's people doing people things in a sort-of-Regency setting. I find it gratifying how malleable the fantasy genre can be.
The narrative often shifted from Katherine's point of view to cover some side character or another, and I wondered why I should care about them and how they fit into Katherine's story. They all come together in the end, but a lot of the time I felt as if I was missing something.
***
Next week: The Masked City, the sequel to The Invisible Library, by Genevieve Cogman
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