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attackfishThe library here in Alabama is so much bigger than the one back home. I swear, my old library could fit into the Children’s section of this one. I love it. I have tests proctored there, and the whole place smells so wonderfully of books that I just can’t help taking a few home each time. Anyway, I finally had the chance to read Bitterblue, the sequel to Graceling and Fire.
Eight years have passed since Katsa killed the cruel king Leck of Monsea, and the scars he has left behind run deep. His daughter, Queen Bitterblue has only just come of age. Reliant on her father’s damaged, guilt-stricken advisers to help rule her kingdom and repair the damage her father wrought, Bitterblue feels trapped and useless in her own castle. But when she starts to sneak out of the castle at night and into the city, she gets much, much more than she had bargained for.
As ever, there are spoilers below the cut, but I have tried not to give away anything too big. Also, Bitterblue, and my review of it, need all the trigger warnings: rape, murder, torture, child sexual abuse, self harm, suicide, gaslighting, domestic abuse more generally... No, seriously, everything. I’m sure I’m missing a few.
Well. Chashore has grown tremendously as a writer since Graceling and Fire. Fire, and especially Graceling were books I enjoyed, but given the subject matter, really should have sucked me in much more than they did. Bitterblue, meanwhile sucked me right in. Although it’s more than five hundred pages, it’s a quick read, and the plot is swift moving. Bitterblue herself is a clever, and engaging heroine, and the characters I had fallen in love with previously, like Katsa, Po, and even Fire, now an old woman, make their appearance.
Cashore weaves together several well beloved common plots in ways that don’t ordinarily fit. For example, Bitterblue strongly invokes the story of Bluebeard. Bitterblue’s palace has heavily renovated by her father, who aside from being king, was a prolific serial killer and torturer, whose surreal and disturbing sleeping quarters have been barricaded off. She has a set of keys, literal and figurative, pictured on the front of the American hard cover edition, that lead her discover and confront more and more aspects of her father’s sadism. The skeletons in the closet are frighteningly literal, and not confined to the closet, but strewn throughout her kingdom. Even Bitterblue’s name, also the name of the novel, evokes Bluebeard.
Now, ordinarily, the drama in a Bluebeard style gothic story comes from the “wife” figure, usually a woman or girl, as Bitterblue is, is trapped physically within Bluebeard’s castle, the space the Bluebeard figure dominates, and Bluebeard is alive and ready to kill her when he catches her. Of course, that’s not how it is for Bitterblue. Leck is dead. Bitterblue is queen. She sneaks out her castle at night, which is something that ordinarily never happens in a Bluebeard plot. That’s why a Bluebeard plot works. She can’t leave, so she is always under threat. Bitterblue is able to leave the control of her father’s space, which only serves to highlight the control her father still has over her castle, and over the people she relies on. But even when Bitterblue sneaks out, and note, she is sneaking out, instead of walking freely into the streets of her own city, she never really leaves her father’s control and memory. And she has to go back. Her sneaking out is clearly demarcated from her normal life. It’s when they start to blend that she finds herself losing control.
Cashore is able to use the Bluebeard type of story with these elements that would ordinarily destroy a Bluebeard plot because of the simple fact that her story isn’t about the moment of trauma, or a current, ongoing trauma, but about the after effects of trauma, years later, after the grand victory has been won and the monster is dead.
A serial killer like Leck is an extremely unusual concept for a fantasy novel. Most evil kings in fantasy are evil because they try to conquer people, or tax them into the ground (actually, come to think about it, fantasy seems to have a bit of a libertarian monarchist bent) or oppress them like a fascist dictator would. Sometimes there’s genocide, but not usually, and most murder and torture is instrumental, and therefore understandable. Leck just enjoyed himself by torturing and murdering men, especially women, and especially children, little girls.
More unusual is that as I said, Bitterblue concentrates on what happens after the monster is dead, in a country that has suffered such an extreme national trauma. In Bitterblue, the good queen is already on the throne. I’ve written elsewhere on this blog about my dislike of the fantasy genre’s fixation on the “good monarch” as the solution to everything, and Cashore shows some of what is wrong with this attitude in this novel. The bureaucracy has not changed since Leck’s time. Her chief advisers are his chief advisers. The government, other than her, has a vested interest in forgetting about Leck, and keeping Bitterblue ignorant.
This is, as many fantasy novels are, certainly most of my favorite fantasy novels, a novel about power. Bitterblue feels powerless, and yet as queen, she wields tremendous power. Bitterblue had her power delegated from her, and she reclaims it to deligate it in a way she chooses. Her power makes her responsible for the people she has power over, and separates her from people she wishes to be close to. Power is what locks her in Bluebeard’s figurative castle. Cashore even mentions privilege, and how privilege and power make themselves invisible to the people who have them. She mentions in the afterward some of what she had learned about disability politics since the writing of Graceling, and how she has fallen down with the portrayal of Po. I would argue that she continues to fail in similar ways in Bitterblue, unavoidably, probably, as she had written herself into a corner with him in Graceling, however this goes to show that she is thinking about these issues. Sadly, there are no characters of color, but there are multiple queer characters and queer relationships, including the bisexual love interest to the main character, all of whom are dealt with respectfully and without shame, and the novel is itself implicitly feminist. Which brings up another point. Patriarchy is strong in the seven kingdoms. All of Bitterblue’s advisers are men, and I have to wonder if they would dare do the same things to a young king as they do to their young queen. In this book about being silenced, where women are silenced most of all, Ashen, Bitterblue’s dead mother, speaks in feminine ways, through embroidery, hidden from her husband’s eye because of its very femininity. Leck’s journals speak of how much he hated Fire, the beautiful woman who fought and overcame him.
I would argue that while the novel talks a little about privilege and power, though, Cashore never goes far enough in challenging this view of monarchal fantasy, and in the end bows to it. Bitterblue begins to claim the power she nominally has always had as queen, and begin to lead her country, and the healing begins. There is no mention of her probably deficient skill set, where she is going to find new advisers and bureaucrats, whether she holds any of the destructive political beliefs that many good people hold... In short, Bitterblue becomes a real queen, and the healing begins. This is our ending. This is not where the novel shines.
Where it does shine is in the emotional thriller realm. Cashore digs into what it means that all of the characters, every last one of them, is deeply, deeply damaged, in all sorts of ways by this truly massive trauma that they all share. This is a trauma that some in the story deal with through self harm, substance abuse, suicide, and even murder of the people who will not let them forget. Cashore also talks about, without recrimination the ways in which Leck made his victims complicit in his crimes and the ways he made them hurt other people.
This is something deeply and powerfully insightful that Chashore realizes. With my own abuser, who would become my first stalker, the things that left the deepest wounds were not the things she did to me, but the things she convinced me to do to others. While as a ten-year-old, my crimes at her behest were small, things she told me to say to other people to make them feel small, in order to drive them away so that I couldn't rely on them, and while afterwards, these people forgave me more thoroughly than I forgave myself, it shows a side of yourself to you that you never want to see. It makes you feel small, and weak, but also vile, evil, and foul, like you want to crawl out of your own skin and become someone else. It becomes too much to deal with, not only the pain, but the guilt, and just not thinking about it, forgetting it, looks like the only way to function. Of course, this is deceptive. You can’t forget, and the more you try, the more it just comes back in all the worst ways.
This is in the end, the central conflict of the story, between the victims of Leck’s, who desperately want to forget, and to forget the culpability he forced upon them, and the ones who just as desperately need to remember, need to talk about it, need to hear other people talk about it, to reassure themselves that this horrible thing that happened to them did in fact happen, to affirm that what scares them, and haunts their dreams is real. The need for many to seek reparations, or to steal back what Leck made them create is much more about that than it is about any sort of justice, or any way the money taken can help heal the wounds of what else Leck took.
Bitterblue is a magnificent and powerful novel that deals with, as so few fantasy novels do, the simple fact that when the monster is dead, the hard times, and the healing have only just begun.
Bitterblue is a solid, thrilling, third installment in the Graceling universe, one which leaves many questions still to be answered. I hope Cashore continues the series!
Kristin Cashore can be found online at her blog, This is My Secret.
Eight years have passed since Katsa killed the cruel king Leck of Monsea, and the scars he has left behind run deep. His daughter, Queen Bitterblue has only just come of age. Reliant on her father’s damaged, guilt-stricken advisers to help rule her kingdom and repair the damage her father wrought, Bitterblue feels trapped and useless in her own castle. But when she starts to sneak out of the castle at night and into the city, she gets much, much more than she had bargained for.
As ever, there are spoilers below the cut, but I have tried not to give away anything too big. Also, Bitterblue, and my review of it, need all the trigger warnings: rape, murder, torture, child sexual abuse, self harm, suicide, gaslighting, domestic abuse more generally... No, seriously, everything. I’m sure I’m missing a few.
Well. Chashore has grown tremendously as a writer since Graceling and Fire. Fire, and especially Graceling were books I enjoyed, but given the subject matter, really should have sucked me in much more than they did. Bitterblue, meanwhile sucked me right in. Although it’s more than five hundred pages, it’s a quick read, and the plot is swift moving. Bitterblue herself is a clever, and engaging heroine, and the characters I had fallen in love with previously, like Katsa, Po, and even Fire, now an old woman, make their appearance.
Cashore weaves together several well beloved common plots in ways that don’t ordinarily fit. For example, Bitterblue strongly invokes the story of Bluebeard. Bitterblue’s palace has heavily renovated by her father, who aside from being king, was a prolific serial killer and torturer, whose surreal and disturbing sleeping quarters have been barricaded off. She has a set of keys, literal and figurative, pictured on the front of the American hard cover edition, that lead her discover and confront more and more aspects of her father’s sadism. The skeletons in the closet are frighteningly literal, and not confined to the closet, but strewn throughout her kingdom. Even Bitterblue’s name, also the name of the novel, evokes Bluebeard.
Now, ordinarily, the drama in a Bluebeard style gothic story comes from the “wife” figure, usually a woman or girl, as Bitterblue is, is trapped physically within Bluebeard’s castle, the space the Bluebeard figure dominates, and Bluebeard is alive and ready to kill her when he catches her. Of course, that’s not how it is for Bitterblue. Leck is dead. Bitterblue is queen. She sneaks out her castle at night, which is something that ordinarily never happens in a Bluebeard plot. That’s why a Bluebeard plot works. She can’t leave, so she is always under threat. Bitterblue is able to leave the control of her father’s space, which only serves to highlight the control her father still has over her castle, and over the people she relies on. But even when Bitterblue sneaks out, and note, she is sneaking out, instead of walking freely into the streets of her own city, she never really leaves her father’s control and memory. And she has to go back. Her sneaking out is clearly demarcated from her normal life. It’s when they start to blend that she finds herself losing control.
Cashore is able to use the Bluebeard type of story with these elements that would ordinarily destroy a Bluebeard plot because of the simple fact that her story isn’t about the moment of trauma, or a current, ongoing trauma, but about the after effects of trauma, years later, after the grand victory has been won and the monster is dead.
A serial killer like Leck is an extremely unusual concept for a fantasy novel. Most evil kings in fantasy are evil because they try to conquer people, or tax them into the ground (actually, come to think about it, fantasy seems to have a bit of a libertarian monarchist bent) or oppress them like a fascist dictator would. Sometimes there’s genocide, but not usually, and most murder and torture is instrumental, and therefore understandable. Leck just enjoyed himself by torturing and murdering men, especially women, and especially children, little girls.
More unusual is that as I said, Bitterblue concentrates on what happens after the monster is dead, in a country that has suffered such an extreme national trauma. In Bitterblue, the good queen is already on the throne. I’ve written elsewhere on this blog about my dislike of the fantasy genre’s fixation on the “good monarch” as the solution to everything, and Cashore shows some of what is wrong with this attitude in this novel. The bureaucracy has not changed since Leck’s time. Her chief advisers are his chief advisers. The government, other than her, has a vested interest in forgetting about Leck, and keeping Bitterblue ignorant.
This is, as many fantasy novels are, certainly most of my favorite fantasy novels, a novel about power. Bitterblue feels powerless, and yet as queen, she wields tremendous power. Bitterblue had her power delegated from her, and she reclaims it to deligate it in a way she chooses. Her power makes her responsible for the people she has power over, and separates her from people she wishes to be close to. Power is what locks her in Bluebeard’s figurative castle. Cashore even mentions privilege, and how privilege and power make themselves invisible to the people who have them. She mentions in the afterward some of what she had learned about disability politics since the writing of Graceling, and how she has fallen down with the portrayal of Po. I would argue that she continues to fail in similar ways in Bitterblue, unavoidably, probably, as she had written herself into a corner with him in Graceling, however this goes to show that she is thinking about these issues. Sadly, there are no characters of color, but there are multiple queer characters and queer relationships, including the bisexual love interest to the main character, all of whom are dealt with respectfully and without shame, and the novel is itself implicitly feminist. Which brings up another point. Patriarchy is strong in the seven kingdoms. All of Bitterblue’s advisers are men, and I have to wonder if they would dare do the same things to a young king as they do to their young queen. In this book about being silenced, where women are silenced most of all, Ashen, Bitterblue’s dead mother, speaks in feminine ways, through embroidery, hidden from her husband’s eye because of its very femininity. Leck’s journals speak of how much he hated Fire, the beautiful woman who fought and overcame him.
I would argue that while the novel talks a little about privilege and power, though, Cashore never goes far enough in challenging this view of monarchal fantasy, and in the end bows to it. Bitterblue begins to claim the power she nominally has always had as queen, and begin to lead her country, and the healing begins. There is no mention of her probably deficient skill set, where she is going to find new advisers and bureaucrats, whether she holds any of the destructive political beliefs that many good people hold... In short, Bitterblue becomes a real queen, and the healing begins. This is our ending. This is not where the novel shines.
Where it does shine is in the emotional thriller realm. Cashore digs into what it means that all of the characters, every last one of them, is deeply, deeply damaged, in all sorts of ways by this truly massive trauma that they all share. This is a trauma that some in the story deal with through self harm, substance abuse, suicide, and even murder of the people who will not let them forget. Cashore also talks about, without recrimination the ways in which Leck made his victims complicit in his crimes and the ways he made them hurt other people.
This is something deeply and powerfully insightful that Chashore realizes. With my own abuser, who would become my first stalker, the things that left the deepest wounds were not the things she did to me, but the things she convinced me to do to others. While as a ten-year-old, my crimes at her behest were small, things she told me to say to other people to make them feel small, in order to drive them away so that I couldn't rely on them, and while afterwards, these people forgave me more thoroughly than I forgave myself, it shows a side of yourself to you that you never want to see. It makes you feel small, and weak, but also vile, evil, and foul, like you want to crawl out of your own skin and become someone else. It becomes too much to deal with, not only the pain, but the guilt, and just not thinking about it, forgetting it, looks like the only way to function. Of course, this is deceptive. You can’t forget, and the more you try, the more it just comes back in all the worst ways.
This is in the end, the central conflict of the story, between the victims of Leck’s, who desperately want to forget, and to forget the culpability he forced upon them, and the ones who just as desperately need to remember, need to talk about it, need to hear other people talk about it, to reassure themselves that this horrible thing that happened to them did in fact happen, to affirm that what scares them, and haunts their dreams is real. The need for many to seek reparations, or to steal back what Leck made them create is much more about that than it is about any sort of justice, or any way the money taken can help heal the wounds of what else Leck took.
Bitterblue is a magnificent and powerful novel that deals with, as so few fantasy novels do, the simple fact that when the monster is dead, the hard times, and the healing have only just begun.
Bitterblue is a solid, thrilling, third installment in the Graceling universe, one which leaves many questions still to be answered. I hope Cashore continues the series!
Kristin Cashore can be found online at her blog, This is My Secret.
