This is a terribly written book.

Just on the most basic mechanical level, this was not edited. I don’t know why or how, but it’s true. It’s a rough draft, full of pages that are just tedious Katsa did this, and she did this, and she did this lists and incredibly childish sentence construction. There are large chunks of the book that either should have been rewritten so they were actual scenes or cut out entirely.

And god, that ending. All those chapters were only necessary because the author decided to pointlessly make Metaleyes “blind” and then pointlessly fix it while telling the reader every last detail. The book should have had a short wrapup after she killed Leck and then ended. Instead it goes on and on as the author assumes you need to hear every bit of how their lives were totally perfect. I could not care less that Ragamuffin goes to Bitterblue’s coronation.

Oh, and the way a book with a female heroine and a female damsel in distress revolved around guys was irritating. Male characters are the only ones Katsa interacts with as equals, for all the feminist bits thrown around. Most annoying is that there’s valid reasons why she’d be mostly among men and Katsa should know this, but doesn’t ever mention it.

Still, there’s interesting things here.

Let’s look at just the magic first.

I like the potential variety of both the graces and the eyes. Let’s see: red orange yellow green blue purple grey black white gives us nine basic colors. That’s a total of thirty-six basic combinations, upping to seventy-two with the left/right distinction. And closer examination would allow for people to tell the difference between several different shades, so you could have light blue, dark blue, bright blue, faded blue, blue-grey… This level would allow for mistaken identity or impersonation.

Is it possible for two gracelings to have the same eye colors by chance? It might be interesting if there are always a fixed number of gracelings total, whatever the max eye combinations are.

I think graces should always be unique – you can have similar graces, but never the same. If not, then graces should always be relatively broad on a number of limited possibilities, so that graced people are a known quantity. The midway version we have here just seems muddled, and it’s confusing how you can have multiple people good at swordfighting if graces are completely random and cover anything.

A grace is already superhuman, so you can’t improve it by training, and it only covers things people can already do, so no telepathy. A smart graceling will try to improve related areas. For example, a graceling who’s able to perfectly read people is not going to be graced at convincing people, but they can use their talent give them a boost while learning to be convincing and will probably end up being very good at it, not only because they’re supernaturally good at a related thing but because they never need to spend any time learning that part of it. But they don’t start with any extra ability to be convincing, and if they naturally suck at it, they’ll never be all that good.

Because being perfect in one area frees you up a bit, and because gracelings usually get very good training from the king to make them more useful, people tend to believe gracelings are generally superior, a sort of upgraded person. Just like a regular person will be decent in a bunch of areas and have some particular talent, a graceling assumed good in a lot of areas and exceptionally talented in one area. Since gracelings are part of propping up the local rulers, this sort of belief is encouraged. Useless gracelings are just kept out of sight (or possibly, if there’s always a set number of gracelings, a particularly ruthless person might kill them and hope for someone better next time around).

All gracelings get a good childhood education, since their graces seem to not show up until they’re pushing puberty so you don’t know quite what they’ll be good for. So they’re basically honorary nobility, with the difference that they’re not expected to marry (quite the opposite, in fact). This gives the king a secondary upper class that’s loyal only to him and has no competing responsibilities to their lands or relatives or offspring.

Parents want their kids to be gracelings, because it’s generally a big step up from the sort of life they’d lead otherwise, and they’re given a large monetary reward for it. (Some kings may be willing to buy the gracelings of other kingdoms for significantly higher figures, which could lead to tension.)

Anyway, this gets us a population of people who are defined as being outsiders. They don’t even have much in common with each other, since there’s very few of them and anyway, the primary focus of the average graceling is going to be their particular specialty. They’re respected in the sort of way that’s got plenty of fear in it. And they’re all identifiable, far more than anyone in a pre-photograph era ever would be otherwise.

The story would focus on clever uses of graces and trying to work with a grace based on the person’s personality (ie, if you’re supernaturally talented at killing, you can aim a blow with exactly the force needed to kill, then pull your blow so it doesn’t) and disguising the grace so that it’s not so identifiable. For example, if one person’s good with any bladed weapon, and the other can only use a particular type of sword, the first might impersonate the second by using the signature sword type. Gracelings could also pretend to have limitations they don’t have – maybe they prefer a particular sword but can use any weapon, and encourage the belief their grace only applies to the one so people will think they’re helpless without it. Gracelings with similar eye colors can be mistaken for each other and the one supernaturally good at bluffing could easily convince people that they’re actually the one supernaturally good at killing people barehanded.

If Leck exists at all, his grace is supernatural likability. If Leck exists at his ovepowered level, it would be likability that travels by speech. That’s why it seems to only have a passing resemblance to what he says. What’s really happening is that as soon as you hear his voice you think he’s the most wonderful trustworthy guy imaginable, so you immediately forget anything that contradicts it and will believe anything he happens to say.

As to the level of powers in the story…

It’s straight up magic, let’s not pretend it follows rules.

Metaleyes is nerfed. He can sense energy, that’s it. That energy-sensing can let him identify people at distance and intentions at close range. No also reading direct thoughts, that never mattered throughout the story. If it’s possible I’d actually like to scale him back all the way to just being super good at reading people, but his sensing powers are part of how they weave around Leck’s army and why it’s impossible to fit the idea of gracelings into the plot we actually have here.

Katsa’s power is fighting or killing. Everything else she’s good at is because she’s just that determined. (Also, she’s either not related to the king and is just some random kid, or she is related but there’s no rule about the special-eyed kids getting raised at court. Both is redundant. Also, if she’s related absolutely no crap about how she’s a princess now.)

Leck’s power is authority. Everyone in his zone of influence assumes that he has a good reason for whatever he does, and will also believe whatever he tells them. That secondary part is infectious and can be spread by people repeating it, but it won’t have any related effects.

Next, consider the plots.

I’m convinced this is a string of novellas crudely stitched together. First the book’s plot is Pandaman being evil and Katsa not knowing she can tell him to fuck off. Then it’s relationship drama. Then it’s Leck intrigue and failsurvival with Bitterblue. These things aren’t connected and they don’t add anything to each other the way multiple plots should. Instead, for a period they’re all the book cares about, then they’re resolved, then the next plot is introduced.

If this was being designed to be a full book, you’d have Katsa leaving Pandaman’s court without her realization that she’s awesome and can do whatever the fuck she feels like. Instead, she leaves because she’s convinced he does control her and this is the only way she thinks she can stop hurting people. Leck, then, is someone who actually is the impossible to defy monster she believed her own king to be – in opposing Leck, she realizes she can do the same at home, rather than spending her life in hiding. Her issues with mindreading relate directly to her two major internal problems – she feels she’s a horrible person, and so anyone who knows what she’s thinking will hate her more than they already do, and also feels terribly threatened by it because she associates it with people being able to control her, since the only way she could ever oppose the king was when he didn’t know she was doing it.

The romance issues are that she can’t believe someone would like her knowing how horrible she is and there must be something wrong with him if he doesn’t mind, and she fears being used because she doesn’t think she can make decisions of her own. In this, the whole bit about her having to trust him in Leck’s kingdom is a major point of tension, with Katsa uncomfortably agreeing in the end because she assumes she’ll have to obey someone and better him than Leck. When they actually see how horrible Leck is, Katsa becomes terrified of him getting her and loses that resistance – it never occurs to her she could resist on her own.

Then, after Metaleyes has to stay and hide, Katsa does run across a soldier but manages to get away (either literally outrunning him or knocking him out – it’ll be important she doesn’t suddenly decide killing’s fine when dealing with mindcontrolled soldiers), gets across the pass, then has to make her way through areas that are infected with Leck’s power, so she has to constantly fight against the feeling she’s wrong about everything and how she should return to Leck. After she finds the Lienid ship, there’s a confrontation where soldiers recognize her and try to talk her back, a much more direct attempt than before, and she resists that as well, just long enough to escape. (Maybe this is why it’s important she has the ring, she can use it to get them to leave with no questions asked.) In other words, Katsa ends up having to make decisions on her own judgement (and that in reality she’s always done this, she just didn’t realize) instead of obeying one single person or following along with what everyone believes is right (obeying the king had been both of those things – the court didn’t see anything wrong with what he was telling her to do, so Katsa assumed her own judgement was faulty). Of course, it’s not perfect, since in the end she does kill Leck while muddled, so she can’t be sure that she isn’t, underneath, a murderer – but she’s learned enough that she knows that even she really is bloodthirsty like her uncle claimed, she’s still capable of being responsible for guarding against that on her own.

There. Three plots unified. Leck is now, in longstanding fantasy tradition, the exaggerated super version of the problems with putting your trust in bad people and following along with the crowd instead of your own judgement. Katsa’s backstory/opening third of the book are the setup for the next two sections rather than just containing some foreshadowing about Leck, and because her home is important and she didn’t waltz out of there without a problem, so ending by saying she’s going back but won’t let the king tell her what to do actually has meaning.

(I’d actually like if it could be done without Bitterblue, as cute as it is. The heroine motivated by love of a small defenseless child is somewhat of a tired trope, and it ended up being like only Bitterblue mattered. Katsa trying to escape because she doesn’t want to be used by Leck to hurt people and she needs to warn people against Leck would be a more socially minded plot.

(That does remove one of Katsa’s few female relationships, but let’s face it, they all sucked. The four female characters she interacts with are a servant doing whatever she says, a little girl she’s protecting, a captain who’s made her servant by the ring, and a queen who’s largely there to talk about her relationship with a guy and then disappear. I’d rather the book acknowledge Katsa’s cut off from women and make it an issue than throw in a few scraps to pretend it’s not happening.)

Still.

While I can’t believe something so amateurishly constructed was published, I must admit that the primary failings of the book otherwise are just an allergy to research (I’ll put the horse harming in this category as well). The book is against child abuse, has a heroine cheerfully having sex out of marriage without anyone making a big deal of it, there’s abortion plants everywhere, and it manages to say women are at risk of rape and should learn to protect themselves without any implication that if they do get raped it’s their fault for being dumb and trusting people. Also, it had a love interest who isn’t manipulative, doesn’t try to control the heroine, and is proud of her abilities instead of being insulted she’s better at things than he is. There’s a lot of minor missteps (Katsa trains with torturers!) but on balance, people could do worse than to read this, as we’ve seen.

God did it need an editor, though.

Anyway. We’ll be finishing out this month with a few chapters of WWZ and carapace reviews, then on to Matched.