Thief's Magic, Trudi Canavan
Aug. 2nd, 2015 11:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethSo far Sunday is going quite well, if sleepily. I ended up staying up until almost midnight last night to read, and by the end of the book that did not seem like a good time investment. And then I couldn't get to sleep and kept waking up. So, much grump.
Thief's Magic started unpromising and continued worse. Turns out there are two alternating points of view, who never meet, so you never actually get any idea why these are in the same book. And the book just ends. They haven't resolved anything much. Their world hasn't changed. The book just takes us on a tour and then it just ends. Boring.
First point of view guy exists initially in a world of no women. He has a book, which used to be a woman. At best she's a case of Trinity Syndrome, since she knows nearly everything and teaches him to become a badass and her being in peril motivates him throughout, but she can do absolutely nothing. On account of being a book. With no free will or ability to lie. So, objectified in a real literal sense. And these two are the main characters of his story. There's also a couple more women, but you never get a sense of them as personalities, they're just convenient skillsets who turn up and get him out of trouble. Their story seems much more interesting than the one we're following, but we know next to nothing of it.
Second point of view is a woman. Her entire story is about marriage and children and sexual violence. And magic, which is banned. In theory there's a lot of people of colour in this book, but in the first pov they're playing oppressed colonials and in this one they're religious extremist edition. And their angels are white.
White.
People who have never seen a white person in the flesh imagine spiritual perfection and it is white.
Second point of view girl goes to school with gossipy rich girls and is supposed to be looking for a husband among their brothers, but they think she's way too low class and reckon at best she'll get a violent drunk. She goes and falls in love with an artist, and runs away to be with him. The local priests are corrupt, because religion so obviously wrong and rotten :eyeroll:, and one of them follows her around and steals paintings of her and threatens her and does gross sex stuff. Eventually she throws him off a cliff, rather than ever reporting him because she reckons nobody would believe her. Not keen on that as a resolution.
There's two approaches to magic. The first pov, the bloke, uses magic for adventure and excitement, fighting and flying, world exploration. All that interesting stuff. The second point of view, the girl, goes looking for birth control, gets cursed barren and reluctantly learns magic to restore her own fertility. And in the last few pages discovers she can do huge magic and throws a guy off a cliff. On accident. When she'd decided to just kill herself.
It barely needs saying that the differences are huge and entirely gendered.
Also there's technically two romances in the story, one for each point of view, but where the girl story concentrates on the relationship and explains repeatedly and in detail the various reasons and benefits of the relationship, the bloke story just has him stand next to a girl and have another girl tell him first girl is in love with him. Which is a surprise to him. And to the reader, since while they have shared bits of story so far they've mostly involved, for instance, him hiding down the privy, or her trying not to upchuck or fall off the airship. Not a grand romance for the ages. More like, he's a mediocre bloke, girls must like him.
On both gender and race the book shows a breathtaking failure of imagination.
It seems to find caricatures of historically existing systems of oppression an interesting place to tour.
And by the end of the very thick book the protagonists have done bugger all about any of it. The two of them arguably escape, but that's it. They barely even question the systems, they certainly do nothing to change them, they mostly want to climb back in in their old roles.
It says book 1 on the cover, so probably the whole thing is just setup and a tour of the worlds and magic rules this time, but come on, it's a huge great book, something ought to happen.
It's very much not what I look for in a story.
And it's going back to the library, since thankfully I remember disliking this author on roughly these grounds before.
... my continued quest for books to read while waiting for the good authors to write is not going very well.
Thief's Magic started unpromising and continued worse. Turns out there are two alternating points of view, who never meet, so you never actually get any idea why these are in the same book. And the book just ends. They haven't resolved anything much. Their world hasn't changed. The book just takes us on a tour and then it just ends. Boring.
First point of view guy exists initially in a world of no women. He has a book, which used to be a woman. At best she's a case of Trinity Syndrome, since she knows nearly everything and teaches him to become a badass and her being in peril motivates him throughout, but she can do absolutely nothing. On account of being a book. With no free will or ability to lie. So, objectified in a real literal sense. And these two are the main characters of his story. There's also a couple more women, but you never get a sense of them as personalities, they're just convenient skillsets who turn up and get him out of trouble. Their story seems much more interesting than the one we're following, but we know next to nothing of it.
Second point of view is a woman. Her entire story is about marriage and children and sexual violence. And magic, which is banned. In theory there's a lot of people of colour in this book, but in the first pov they're playing oppressed colonials and in this one they're religious extremist edition. And their angels are white.
White.
People who have never seen a white person in the flesh imagine spiritual perfection and it is white.
Second point of view girl goes to school with gossipy rich girls and is supposed to be looking for a husband among their brothers, but they think she's way too low class and reckon at best she'll get a violent drunk. She goes and falls in love with an artist, and runs away to be with him. The local priests are corrupt, because religion so obviously wrong and rotten :eyeroll:, and one of them follows her around and steals paintings of her and threatens her and does gross sex stuff. Eventually she throws him off a cliff, rather than ever reporting him because she reckons nobody would believe her. Not keen on that as a resolution.
There's two approaches to magic. The first pov, the bloke, uses magic for adventure and excitement, fighting and flying, world exploration. All that interesting stuff. The second point of view, the girl, goes looking for birth control, gets cursed barren and reluctantly learns magic to restore her own fertility. And in the last few pages discovers she can do huge magic and throws a guy off a cliff. On accident. When she'd decided to just kill herself.
It barely needs saying that the differences are huge and entirely gendered.
Also there's technically two romances in the story, one for each point of view, but where the girl story concentrates on the relationship and explains repeatedly and in detail the various reasons and benefits of the relationship, the bloke story just has him stand next to a girl and have another girl tell him first girl is in love with him. Which is a surprise to him. And to the reader, since while they have shared bits of story so far they've mostly involved, for instance, him hiding down the privy, or her trying not to upchuck or fall off the airship. Not a grand romance for the ages. More like, he's a mediocre bloke, girls must like him.
On both gender and race the book shows a breathtaking failure of imagination.
It seems to find caricatures of historically existing systems of oppression an interesting place to tour.
And by the end of the very thick book the protagonists have done bugger all about any of it. The two of them arguably escape, but that's it. They barely even question the systems, they certainly do nothing to change them, they mostly want to climb back in in their old roles.
It says book 1 on the cover, so probably the whole thing is just setup and a tour of the worlds and magic rules this time, but come on, it's a huge great book, something ought to happen.
It's very much not what I look for in a story.
And it's going back to the library, since thankfully I remember disliking this author on roughly these grounds before.
... my continued quest for books to read while waiting for the good authors to write is not going very well.