So, Graceling.

I’ve read scattered spoilers and discussion about the book that seem to amount to either Graceling being feminist and patriarchy-showing or terrible and patriarchy reinforcing. I’m inclined to hope that if something is actually getting debated on those merits it’s going to be at least better than the average book where no one even pays attention to such issues, but that’s what I thought when I was hearing discussion about The Bone-Doll’s Twin that made it sound like the only issue was whether or not designated female rulers were really any better than designated male ones, and wow did the series turn out to have many, many terrible issues.

Then again, at least that’s interesting. Let’s find out if Graceling manages to live up to any of its reputations.

IN THESE DUNGEONS the darkness was complete, but Katsa had a map in her mind.

Our opening. I’m going to have to do my best not to slip up and call her Katniss. Not-Katniss is making her way through the dungeons by touch and seems to be doing a good job of it.

There was a stone step, damp and slippery with moss

Moss uses photosynthesis, which means it may grow in very dim area, but never complete darkness. That said, it’s possible that Katsa is being a touch hyperbolic about complete darkness and there’s openings around that would let in sunlight, but that right now it’s night and the light is negligible. Or, I suppose, that people travel this area with torches all the time, but moss tends not to like being stepped on much.

Anyway, it’d make more sense for this to be algae, as that requires the least light, is tougher to kill and far more prone to be slippery. I don’t know why everyone always uses the slippery moss cliche, I’ve climbed around on a lot of rocks and moss really isn’t particularly bad.

Katsa spares a moment’s worry for the two people who are going to be following the same path in a little while. They’ll be carrying torches but she’s not sure they’ll notice the moss and avoid slipping on it.

Apparently, she’s gone ahead to take out the guards. And take them out she does!

She almost tripped over her first four victims, who were sitting on the floor across from each other, their backs against the wall, legs splayed, the air stinking with whatever strong drink they’d brought down here to pass the time of their watch. Katsa kicked and struck at temples and necks, and the four men lay slumped together on the floor before amazement had even registered in their eyes.

Though the fact they’re apparently all drunk does make it a bit less impressive. So, I guess this dungeon is not run by someone with a good grasp of how to run things, because you kind of want to avoid drunk guards.

There’s one left.

Katsa walked toward him, certain that the torch at her back hid her face, and particularly her eyes, from his sight. She measured his size, the way he moved, the steadiness of the arm that held the sword toward her.
“Stop there. It’s clear enough what you are.”

We don’t yet get an explanation for what she is or why her eyes matter. I am fond of temporary suspense.

She takes him out as easily as the rest, then heads for the cell to check out its occupant.

a person too tired or too cold to care about the fighting going on.

Eh, the point at which you’re ignoring someone fighting with your guards, you’re well passed mere tiredness or coldness. If I saw someone reacting like this, my first worry would be that rescue had come too late and they were already well on their way to dying. The guy’s white-haired as well, and old people don’t handle being kept in cold damp cells all that great.

Apparently he’s a Lienid, which is who they were looking for.

The door is locked, so she whistles, then starts putting pills in the unconscious guards’ mouths. The two guys she mentioned earlier show up and one gets started on the lock.

Then she leaves, because each group of guards reports in to another group, so she has to take out every guard in the entire castle or else they’ll realize what’s up. For this, she’s got the pills, which were supplied to her by Prince Raffin. Why is a prince making pills? I don’t know, but his name reminds me of ragamuffin.

But anyway, she does so.

They would all say, when they woke to their headaches and their shame, that the culprit had been a Graceling boy, Graced with fighting, acting alone. They would assume she was a boy, because in her plain trousers and hood she looked like one, and because when people were attacked it never occurred to anyone that it might have been a girl.

This is a very common thing and it annoys me.

You have some fantasy where there are standard gender roles, but there’s some magic superpower accessible to people of either gender and those people can operate outside the usual structure. And yet, people will still apply the gender role assumptions to them. I mean, yes, you might get a degree of bias, but if 50% of the people with supernatural stabby skills are XX, you’d think that would sink in eventually, so that while people would still assume someone fighting was male, once they’d narrowed it down to someone supernaturally fighting, the fact it could be a girl would occur to them.

Admittedly, that’s assuming it’s random. Perhaps Gracelings aren’t given chance powers and most of the fighters are male. But in that case it’d be piling extra specialness on top of an already quite special character.

No one would think of her. Whatever the Graceling Lady Katsa might be, she was not a criminal who
lurked around dark courtyards at midnight, disguised.

And this really doesn’t make sense. People gossip about lords and ladies all the time, and unless Graces are pretty common, I’d think that people would be more likely to always assume that the person with supernatural fighting skills was behind any mysterious fight, even when she wasn’t.

I can sort of see this if she’s doing it within her own kingdom, though. In that case people would assume she wouldn’t need to do things this way.

It doesn’t seem like it, though:

Her uncle Randa, King of the Middluns, had seen her off just that morning, the whole city watching, with Captain Oll and Giddon, Randa’s underlord, escorting her. Only a day of very hard riding in the wrong direction could have brought her south to King Murgon’s court.

So, a member of the royal family who’s a super fighter is getting involved in an attack on a different royal house. The misdirection/alibi attempt is a good one, but I hardly think no one would even wonder if Katsa was involved just because she’s a member of the social class that gets involved in warfare and politics all the damn time.

Katsa explains that the original plan, when the “secret council” was plotting, had been to kill the guards, but she’d argued she’d be able to knock them out fast enough and then outright refused to do otherwise.

Of course, she’s so far taken out every last one of them with a temple shot, which is the kind of knockout blow most likely to be fatal. Head injuries are always dangerous, the temple is a weak point in the skull, and the reason it knocks someone out is because you’re causing the brain to smash into the braincase hard enough to cause a concussion. It’s a lot better than cutting their throats, but statistically, at least one of the guards either is or will be dead.

The only thing the book has right about this is that it’s aware knockouts don’t keep people unconscious long and instead is using drugs for that half. So, that’s good at least.

Oll had smiled and clapped the young lord on the back. “Just think, Lord Giddon, it’ll make it more fun for us. The perfect robbery, past all of Murgon’s guards, and nobody hurt? It’s a good game.”

This kind of thing is very at odds with Katsa’s no-nonsense practicality, as well as the seriousness of the cell. It’s the sort of stupid bullshit nobles can get up to precisely because they’re insulated bastards and even if they get caught they can rest assured their bloodline will spare them from any real consequences.

Thing is, if the guy they’re rescuing is another noble, things aren’t working that way. The old guy’s being held in terrible conditions that would probably have ended up killing him soon. He’s definitely not getting special treatment or even the baseline care you give a prisoner you plan to ransom. And this implies that the kingdoms haven’t adopted a shared code of behavior to protect nobility from their own idiocy, and therefore the nobles shouldn’t be acting like stupid children. Fooling around and showing off only work if they have some reason to believe failure won’t lead to death.

Katsa thinks that she’s not going to ever kill unless she has to because she’s already done so much killing. Her uncle sends her out whenever there’s trouble on the border, and she also kills for the council when there’s no other option. From the sounds of things, her uncle isn’t on the council.

She finds another guard who’s old and weak.

A tremor shook the hands that rested on the hilt of his blade.
She didn’t think much of a king who didn’t retire his guards in comfort when they’d gotten too old to hold a sword steady.

Eh, I mean, I sort of see what she’s getting at here, but maybe the guy didn’t want to retire and sit around uselessly? It’s not like he’s being sent into single combat. Guards can also be there to keep watch and shout alarms.

She knocks him out and hopes it didn’t do too much damage, and then we flashback to her first kill.

Originally, no one knew what her power was. When she was eight, some distant relative showed up at court.

She hadn’t liked him-his heavy perfume, the way he leered at the girls who served him, the way his leer followed them around the room, the way he touched them when he thought no one was watching.

The writing of this book is incredibly dull. But anyway, you can guess where this is going! He starts directing that attention toward her…

then his hand had slid toward her leg, and her hand had flown out and smashed him in the face. So hard and so fast that she’d pushed the bones of his nose into his brain.

And then everyone was terrified of her. Because it’s one thing to be graced with something harmlessly helpful, but killing, that’s a bad one.

Another king would have banished her, or killed her, even if she was his sister’s child. But Randa was clever. He could see that in time his niece might serve a practical purpose. He sent her to her chambers and kept her there for weeks as punishment, but that was all.

I think this might be meant to be Katsa’s skewed perspective, given that my understanding of the book is it’s about her learning her grace doesn’t make her evil, and it does seem kind of ridiculous that Katsa’s acting like it’s a big deal for someone to realize her grace could be useful. Plus, you’ll notice the book has set things up so we’re on Katsa’s side with the whole killing thing.

She explains that no one actually likes graced people (…why?) but that now it’s even worse.

“Watch for the blue-eyed green-eyed one,” they would whisper to guests. “She killed her cousin, with one strike. Because he complimented her eyes.” Even Randa kept out of her way. A murderous dog might be useful to a king, but he didn’t want it sleeping at his feet.

Because it doesn’t occur to anyone to ask her what happened. This is building toward a victim sue. I don’t care how shitty their views on women and child molestation are, they’d want to know why she killed the guy if for no better reason than to avoid setting her off again.

The only one who asks at all is the prince, and that conversation only gets as far as Katsa saying she didn’t mean to do it, she’d just been scared. The prince suggests she learn to control it.

“You could ask Oll. The king’s spies know how to hurt without killing. It’s how they get information.”

This world is looking pretty crapsack. I’m not sure if I should criticize the advice itself, as Ragamuffin is only eleven, but it doesn’t seem like learning to torture people is going to do much for her and the more obvious route would be just learning normal fighting.

Oll is cautious but helpful.

She would practice on dummies that she made out of sacks, sewn together and filled with grain. She would practice on the prisoners that Oll brought to her, men whose deaths were already decreed.

He’s also a horrible, horrible person.

Those two lines appear to be concurrent. It’s not that she’s first practicing on dummies, then moving up to sparring with people where if she accidentally kills them there’s no loss. Instead, the prisoners are her training dummies as well, and unless her grace is specifically fast kills (and at this point no one knows anything of how it works), she’s probably going to be mangling them at times. And indeed it sounds like she does:

She learned the angle, position, and intensity of a killing blow versus a maiming blow. She learned how to disarm a man and how to break his leg, and how to twist his arm so severely that he would stop struggling and beg for release.

I mean, I can understand that she’d need to learn about hurting people, but on a moral level, she should learn as much as she can from punching sacks before moving up to things that feel pain.

She was so fast and focused, so creative, she could find a way to beat a man senseless with both arms tied to her sides. Such was her Grace.
In time her control improved, and she began to practice with Randa’s soldiers-eight or ten at a time, and in full suits of armor. Her practices were a spectacle: grown men grunting and clattering around clumsily, an unarmed child whirling and diving among them, knocking them down with a knee or a hand that they didn’t see coming until they were already on the floor.

From the sounds of it, her grace actually isn’t about killing at all, it’s just super fighting.

This is disappointing, because it’s not actually much of a curse in that case. I can see how having the ability to kill people isn’t that great, and I’d much rather see someone trying to work within the limits of that (such as pulling her blows so that a fatal strike isn’t) and having to learn from scratch all other forms of fighting. And that’d make her harping on control actually seem valid, because every blow she makes with her grace starts off a deadly one that has to then be checked.

Instead, she’s just an awesome fighter, which means she’s not actually struggling against her nature to avoid killing, and if anything, is better equipped to solve problems without bloodshed than a normal person who can’t just knock everyone out with one blow.

Her thoughts rambled, but she wasn’t daydreaming. Her senses were sharp. She caught the fall of every leaf in the garden, the rustle of every branch.

She’s coming off as extremely sueish, really. Her Grace appears to be that she’s great at everything fighting related, including sneaking around and observing her surroundings. I suppose this kind of thing might be legitimately learned, but from the book’s description so far, the only thing she’s ever actually worked at is just learning how much force to put behind a blow, the rest is built off her natural talent.

Speaking of talents, a guy jumps her and puts a knife to her throat, then she manages to get free in the next second. Seems he’s another fighting-graceling, and he managed to grope her, so he knows she’s a girl.

He says he’s heard of a lady with her skills. He doesn’t seem to be taking any of this seriously, while she’s trying to decide if she can afford to leave him alive. And he’s another Lienid, for some reason. She can’t figure out what he’s doing there.

She couldn’t kill one Lienid while rescuing another.

I don’t see her reasoning here. It’s not clear if Lienid is a kingdom or family, but she’s willing to entertain the idea that he’s a traitor, so it’s not like she’s concerned about killing an innocent person or something. I can understand it seeming a bit counterproductive, but on a practical level, it really doesn’t matter.

The guy somehow just knows she’s nice, and decides he trusts her and to let her go after all. She immediately knocks him out.

She turned his face to the torchlight. He was younger than she’d thought, not much older than she, nineteen or twenty at most. A trickle of blood ran down his forehead, past his ear. The neck of his shirt was open, and the torchlight played along the line of his collarbone.

Love interest? Love interest.

On the brighter side, Katsa seemed certain she could win the fight against him. So, do graces have degrees of skill? If I were setting something up like this I wouldn’t do it like that, but instead just have everyone have a slightly different grace. So, say, someone with a broad fighting grace would do better at fighting than a killing grace, but the killing one would win a fight to the death.

Or it might just be that Katsa has training while he may be relying only on innate skill. But I feel if you’re introducing a world where people are sometimes blessed with impossible skill, it’s underwhelming to say training does much of anything more.

Anyway.

So, they manage to get out. The old guy is shivering horribly even though it’s the middle of summer, which is starting to sound like hypothermia, in which case he’s probably going to die since all they’re doing is bundling him up and then sticking him on a horse.

Katsa worries that Love Interest might give her away – sure, he said he trusted her, but she did immediately knock him out for doing so. Then she confirms that the king doesn’t know about this or presumably any of her council-related doings. Then she just says whatever, time to focus on getting “the grandfather” back.

That’s really sloppy writing, because I’m pretty sure we haven’t had any explanation of who the old guy is. Glancing ahead, next chapter Katsa will clarify that the guy is the king of Lienid’s father.

And that’s all for the first chapter.

The only positive thing I can say for the writing is that it’s not grating in its badness. And I like the idea of a character who’s unstoppable in a fight, but otherwise Katsa’s looking like a sue.