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missroseroseIf you follow sci-fi/fantasy fandom at all, you've probably come across Kameron Hurley's excellent essay We Have Always Fought. It's worth reading in its entirety, but one of the points it touches upon is the importance of narrative in human culture-making; specifically, how a majority narrative about a group will skew your views of that group, even when you're aware of that bias and actively work against it.
I bring this up because the strongest impression this story made upon me was how it was a perfect example of precisely that phenomenon. The main character, Maya, is a biracial female doctor, suffragette, and social justice worker in Victorian England, working to set up her own practice and attain the respect of her colleagues, and to learn to use her own magical powers. During the somewhat extended first act of the novel, she manages (even within her restricted role) to achieve quite a lot, all under her own agency.
And yet, once the story gets going, the entirety of it conspires to put her in the passive, damsel-in-distress role. Her servants, her love interest, even her magical animals all treat her like a child, regularly discussing the dangers that face her with each other and only occasionally giving her (often incomplete) information about it. She does nothing proactive about her evil aunt's plots, depending entirely on her defensive spells - and, when her evil aunt finally hits upon a means of kidnapping her, has to be rescued by the aforementioned love interest. (Somewhat similarly, despite multiple multi-paragraph asides on the ridiculousness of the concept of the "deserving poor", and how most poor people were forced into desperate situations by economic circumstance, when faced with an actual poor pickpocket in need of healing magic, our heroine seems to need to justify it with another multi-paragraph aside on how she just knows this particular girl "has a good heart" and thus deserves to have her life saved. I mean, come on, a little consistency here?)
Even aside from the mixed messages, the narrative has some serious problems. As alluded to before, the setting-up phase of the novel takes up nearly the entire first third of the book, but the ending barely exists - we get the requisite true-love's-kiss, then a jump to an epistolary epilogue that tells us how all the plot conflicts have magically (in the "without explanation" sense) resolved themselves, with very little believable explanation as to how. Maya's aunt's final solution for reaching Maya through her defenses is laughably simple, to the point where I was frankly having a hard time believing she wouldn't have thought of it earlier. And on and on - lots of little problems with flow and credibility.
What's most frustrating is that, even with these issues, there's a lot of potential here, some of which is even utilized. Maya is a fantastic character, and when she's allowed to solve problems does a fine job at it. The worldbuilding is solid, and her love interest likable (it's not his fault he has to play Prince Charming). With another couple passes at editing, this could've been an solidly fun story, and possibly the start of a series. But while I enjoyed it okay while I was listening to it, in retrospect the flaws stand out far more than the story, and so I can't really say I recommend it, even to fans of the genre. C-
I bring this up because the strongest impression this story made upon me was how it was a perfect example of precisely that phenomenon. The main character, Maya, is a biracial female doctor, suffragette, and social justice worker in Victorian England, working to set up her own practice and attain the respect of her colleagues, and to learn to use her own magical powers. During the somewhat extended first act of the novel, she manages (even within her restricted role) to achieve quite a lot, all under her own agency.
And yet, once the story gets going, the entirety of it conspires to put her in the passive, damsel-in-distress role. Her servants, her love interest, even her magical animals all treat her like a child, regularly discussing the dangers that face her with each other and only occasionally giving her (often incomplete) information about it. She does nothing proactive about her evil aunt's plots, depending entirely on her defensive spells - and, when her evil aunt finally hits upon a means of kidnapping her, has to be rescued by the aforementioned love interest. (Somewhat similarly, despite multiple multi-paragraph asides on the ridiculousness of the concept of the "deserving poor", and how most poor people were forced into desperate situations by economic circumstance, when faced with an actual poor pickpocket in need of healing magic, our heroine seems to need to justify it with another multi-paragraph aside on how she just knows this particular girl "has a good heart" and thus deserves to have her life saved. I mean, come on, a little consistency here?)
Even aside from the mixed messages, the narrative has some serious problems. As alluded to before, the setting-up phase of the novel takes up nearly the entire first third of the book, but the ending barely exists - we get the requisite true-love's-kiss, then a jump to an epistolary epilogue that tells us how all the plot conflicts have magically (in the "without explanation" sense) resolved themselves, with very little believable explanation as to how. Maya's aunt's final solution for reaching Maya through her defenses is laughably simple, to the point where I was frankly having a hard time believing she wouldn't have thought of it earlier. And on and on - lots of little problems with flow and credibility.
What's most frustrating is that, even with these issues, there's a lot of potential here, some of which is even utilized. Maya is a fantastic character, and when she's allowed to solve problems does a fine job at it. The worldbuilding is solid, and her love interest likable (it's not his fault he has to play Prince Charming). With another couple passes at editing, this could've been an solidly fun story, and possibly the start of a series. But while I enjoyed it okay while I was listening to it, in retrospect the flaws stand out far more than the story, and so I can't really say I recommend it, even to fans of the genre. C-
