2020 fantasy. In Gilded Age America, there's no such thing as witches:
they were burned, and all that sort of thing was stamped out. But
there will be witches again.
There's a lot of similarity to The Ten Thousand Doors of
January: the setting, obviously, but also the grinding oppression of
a system which simply says that you don't matter, and nobody will
care about what's done to you, either because they're party to it or
because they've got their own problems and know that taking a share of
yours too may just drive them under. Which is a thing that needs to be
told again, but not necessarily a thing I want to read just now.
So this is a good fable of social rebellion, but for me it's too much
that and too little a solid story. Magic needs "the will, the words
and the way", i.e. specific enchantments to do specific things… except
when it doesn't. It's repeated several times that the Eastwood
sisters, our protagonists, aren't particularly special people or the
Chosen Ones or anything like that… but there's never any thought about
why, if that's the case, it took so long for someone to do the things
they do.
The stuff that happens is great: there's some sense here of the need
for both a reasonable public-facing group and a terrorist
organisation if you want to promote social change. (Though the
reasonable group gets forgotten later on, as its members either become
terrorists or fade out of the story, which suggests that this may have
been accidental.) But everybody's playing at My First Revolution
rather than learning from what's happened before (and yes, I know,
it's 18something, but they could at least look at France and America);
they're selfish and stupid and make obvious mistakes, and if their
opposition were competent as well as simply powerful they wouldn't
stand a chance. The characters are plausible (though they disbelieve
each other terribly easily) but never sympathetic. And every time they
think they're getting somewhere, things get worse.
And one particular plot element from January that irked me because
it seemed to devalue a great deal of the social angle is here too.
If you don't know a lot about real social change and civil
disobedience, and don't mind a fantasy version of it that only works
because it is a fantasy, then that's fine. But I'm sorry to say that
this book irked me and I found myself very much out of sympathy with
it. I'm all for stories of women discovering or creating their power;
I just wish they were more interesting women, the power weren't a
convenient short cut that doesn't work in the real world, and the
narrative were a bit less stodgy and repetitious for the benefit of
the hard-of-thinking.
- Posted by Ashley R Pollard at
11:18am on
29 December 2020
roger, I would be interested in you unpacking your criticism here, as it hints at a lot of interesting observations that I would like to hear.
I would understand that you may be disinclined to do so.
- Posted by RogerBW at
12:14pm on
29 December 2020
Not sure quite what you're asking for. More specifically?
- Posted by Ashley R Pollard at
12:24pm on
02 January 2021
The third paragraph second sentence and the fourth paragraph playing my first revolution and the dichotomy of a reasonable group and activists and terrorists and how the former fade away in the story.
These are information dense paragraphs and I wanted to be sure I understood your points as the arguments seem to have stuff I may be missing information on to parse correctly.
- Posted by RogerBW at
02:02pm on
02 January 2021
Well, one of the protagonists joins the New Salem Women's Association (agitators for female suffrage), but quickly tires of their mannered approach (and their exclusion of non-white women) so goes off to start what is in effect a revolutionary/terrorist organisation. And I thought "good, so now we can see how this works: the suffragist terrorists make the suffragist normal people look more reasonable and mainstream". But we don't; the NSWA is constantly presented as weak and ineffective, it catches the official reactions to the terrorist group's propaganda of the deed (remaking statues, sneaking into a hospital and magically healing people), and it then fades out of the story (except for one or two of its members who join the terrorists). At the same time the terrorists have absolutely no propaganda of the word; as far as the townspeople are concerned they're not demanding anything, reasonable or not – they're doing unpredictable and scary magical things, and thus playing right into the hands of the guy who before any of this has started has been running on a platform of protecting people from scary magic.
Which leads into the other point, which is that – all right, only one of these people is particularly book-learned. But nobody ever thinks "hey, there have been underground political movements before, maybe we should learn from the successes or at least the failures". They're inventing it all as though they were the first oppressed people ever to try to do something about it, as if there were nothing history might have to teach them. (Or, in the case of the protagonists, taking advantage of the things the non-white people have already set up.) Oh yeah, there's union agitation over in Chicago, but that's a source of fellow-feeling, not technique or tradecraft.
- Posted by Ashley R Pollard at
12:49pm on
03 January 2021
Thank you for spending the time to answer my question. Most appreciated.
It's one of the traits I really appreciated about you is your ability to analyse and breakdown the links in the chain of cause and effect etc.
Thank you.
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