![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
The words that gave us all away
Mar. 16th, 2019 05:06 pmThirty Day Book Meme Day 16: Can't believe more people haven't read
It seems as if there's a bit of a Kate Elliott theme emerging at the moment in my posts for this meme: my answer to today's question is another Kate Elliott series, her Crossroads. I've always thought Elliott was a criminally overlooked epic fantasy writer (she's an absolute genius at worldbuilding, giving a great deal of thought not only to epic fantasy staples of kingdoms, armies and royal intrigue, but also to how societies would feed and supply themselves, how households and marriages would work, and what invasion and societal collapse would look like on the ground), but even among those who have read her books, this series almost never comes up in discussion.
It is, on the surface, fairly standard epic fantasy fare: an exiled prince, banished from his homeland and inheritance under threat of death, builds up an army and rides to the rescue of a kingdom in collapse, women with few options make political marriages, people ride giant eagles. However, where it differs is in its subversion of these well-worn tropes. Instead of portraying its dispossessed man as the saviour of the world — or a kingdom — and thus its rightful ruler, what Elliott is doing is showing how monstrous and dictatorial that would look like from the ground. Because she spends the first two books in the series showing the delicate work her heroine, Mai, undertakes as the wife of a mercenary leader who has moved into a country in collapse — forging alliances through diplomacy, trade, and marriages between local women and her husband's mercenaries — and because we view most of the story through Mai's eyes, we think her husband is entirely in accord, coming as a migrant, not a coloniser. The slow sense that something is wrong — culminating in a spectacular betrayal, both of Mai and of the reader's assumptions — is so cleverly and so intricately done, and, in my opinion, makes the Crossroads trilogy Elliott's best work. Sadly, I seem to be the only person who thinks that.
( The other days )
It seems as if there's a bit of a Kate Elliott theme emerging at the moment in my posts for this meme: my answer to today's question is another Kate Elliott series, her Crossroads. I've always thought Elliott was a criminally overlooked epic fantasy writer (she's an absolute genius at worldbuilding, giving a great deal of thought not only to epic fantasy staples of kingdoms, armies and royal intrigue, but also to how societies would feed and supply themselves, how households and marriages would work, and what invasion and societal collapse would look like on the ground), but even among those who have read her books, this series almost never comes up in discussion.
It is, on the surface, fairly standard epic fantasy fare: an exiled prince, banished from his homeland and inheritance under threat of death, builds up an army and rides to the rescue of a kingdom in collapse, women with few options make political marriages, people ride giant eagles. However, where it differs is in its subversion of these well-worn tropes. Instead of portraying its dispossessed man as the saviour of the world — or a kingdom — and thus its rightful ruler, what Elliott is doing is showing how monstrous and dictatorial that would look like from the ground. Because she spends the first two books in the series showing the delicate work her heroine, Mai, undertakes as the wife of a mercenary leader who has moved into a country in collapse — forging alliances through diplomacy, trade, and marriages between local women and her husband's mercenaries — and because we view most of the story through Mai's eyes, we think her husband is entirely in accord, coming as a migrant, not a coloniser. The slow sense that something is wrong — culminating in a spectacular betrayal, both of Mai and of the reader's assumptions — is so cleverly and so intricately done, and, in my opinion, makes the Crossroads trilogy Elliott's best work. Sadly, I seem to be the only person who thinks that.
( The other days )