Graceling by Kristin Cashore
I don’t expect much from YA fantasy, just a solid plot and a cute romance with some likeable characters. Bonus if the worldbuilding is good. This one almost delivered on my modest expectations, but fell apart at the end.
The conceit of this book is that some people are born with heterochromia which also means that they are granted some unique skill or “Grace.” Katsa is a princess (niece of a king), and she’s Graced with fighting. She’s fast, strong, feels very little pain and is nearly indestructible. In this kingdom, anyone who is Graced becomes the property of the king, either as a courtier or a slave, it’s not clear which. Katsa has become a button man for her uncle, a job she hates. To countermand her self-loathing at being the king’s thug, she takes on side projects through a non-profit she’s organized called “The Council.” It’s implied that this resistance movement has taken on a life of its own, but with a world that’s so undeveloped it felt empty of people, this is hard to visualize. When the book opens, Katsa’s engaged in a mission for the Council to rescue an old man who got kidnapped. The man is the grandfather of princes and the father of a queen, so that makes him a prince. Katsa is trying to figure out why grandpa prince was kidnapped and who did it.
This brings me to my first problem with this book: everyone’s a prince or princess. There are seven kingdoms and the author hits you with their names and the names of the kingdoms. There were a lot of names to keep straight, but I tried to remember them to help figure out the mystery so that the plot would make sense later. I needn’t have bothered. Katsa’s two best friends are her cousin a prince and the other the son of some other prince or lordling. Then she meets another man named Po, and he’s a prince too. And yet, non-princes seemed in short supply. Katsa has a maid who has a name, but most of the time, other people are not even mentioned. They don’t see dozens of serfs toiling in the fields, or crowds of townspeople jostling in the streets, or servants bustling around preparing for feasts. It was this weird dichotomy where the author hit me with all the names of the kings and princes and kingdoms and queens, and yet the world seemed barren of people these queens and kings rule over. It felt like a movie that had no money to hire extras.
But the main plot revolves around Katsa and Po. Katsa constantly struggles with her identity as a princess and her identity as the king’s assassin. When she meets Po, a Graceling who is nearly as gifted at fighting as she is, her self-loathing loses some traction. Of course he’s cute, and she’s cute, and they’re both young so there’s this budding romance between the two of them. The fight scenes started out exciting and got pretty old, but the romance was fun. Honestly, the cute romance almost saved this book. Po convinces Katsa to free herself from her uncle’s influence, which should have been more satisfying if she’d regained her sense of self piece by piece, but it came on so fast that it was like it had simply never occurred to Katsa that as the most badass person in seven kingdoms she could do whatever she wanted. It’s not like money is a real issue. This world wasn’t realistic enough that the question of “how are we going to afford things” even came up. Katsa hunts rabbits and cooks them over a fire, as badass fantasy people always seem to, and when they need gold or a pretty dress or something, one simply appears. Po’s people had some interesting societal quirks but they weren’t integral to the story and they didn’t feel well-thought out and taken to their logical extreme, just some fun exoticism layered over a familiar, oft-used set.
As the story goes on, Po and Katsa come closer and closer to figuring out who the bad guy is, even though it’s pretty obvious to most readers. Katsa flexes her muscles a lot and it got really old to have scene after scene about how unstoppable she is, how she solves everyone’s problems. Po’s Grace starts to get stronger and stronger for no apparent reason, which kind of bugged me because it didn’t seem to fit in with how the Graces were described at the beginning of the book. When Po and Katsa figure out who the bad guy is, they know they’re up against someone very dangerous. Po and Katsa save the girl Bitterblue (bonus points for awesome names) though Po’s injured and we don’t know if he’ll make it. This adventure made up for the rather slow middle where Katsa and Po spend a few chapters making goo-goo eyes at each other and talking about their Graces. Katsa saves Bitterblue and then takes her to Po’s castle where she’s surprised by a rather obvious turn of events and the reader is slammed by a heap of names to remember. She saves the day and if the book had ended within a few pages of Katsa saving the day I would have given it another star and called it a pretty good book, a perfectly adequate and satisfying example of YA fantasy, albeit not meriting the heaps and heaps of praise printed in blurbs on its cover.
Alas, the author mucked up a perfectly good book by having the rest of the book kind of unravel. Katsa and the heap of names find Po again and he’s changed in a way that makes no sense either for the plot or from the worldbuilding. Katsa and the heap of names spend some time travelling back and forth and chatting with new characters to deflate the excitement built up by the plot. For 55 pages the heap of names just kind of talk and mill around for no reason, which gave me time, as a reader, to make a few realizations. For one, the bad guy had no motive as far as I could tell for kidnapping grandpa prince, which was the act that led Katsa and Po to find him. This was never explained. There’s so little plot to begin with that the main plot should have been wrapped up tight. I mean, come on. With a 55 page meandering denouement and then a prologue last chapter we had plenty of time to learn why Mr. Bad Guy even did the thing he got caught for. That’s a big problem.
Another problem: We’re told that no one can withstand the bad guy’s power, and yet Bitterblue and her mother somehow did. People can either withstand or not withstand him as is convenient. We are told what the Graces are and how they behave and then they start to behave differently. Maybe if the author had ended it sooner, I (like most readers) would have been distracted by the sexy powerful young people fighting and falling in love and not thought about the giant gaping hole in the plot and the hazy worldbuilding and the fact that it’s set in a not-very-well-developed McFantasyland. If I had read this in 1989 or if this were my first YA fantasy ever I might have found it fresh and exciting. But I’ve read too many good, well-written YA fantasy books and the flaws at the ending dragged what could have been perfectly adequate back into the realm of mediocrity.
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