#also spoilery thoughts on spinning silver and uprooted

[gillianthecat]

I just read Naomi Novik’s final book in her Scholomance trilogy, The Golden Enclaves. This was the first book I’ve read in I don’t know how many months, possibly since last winter. Historically I’ve been a huge reader, usually a binge reader. I’m in an odd lull from it now, and pretty much only watching things. A flip from the previous two years when I lived on fanfic and romance novels and could barely watch a thing.

Overall I liked it, and the whole series! My appreciation of this book was more intellectual than emotion, but I’m not sure if that’s the book or just my current state of mind. I have many thoughts about it, which I may eventually write something about. Particularly about the way she writes romance, and the role it plays in her stories, across her original fic and fanfic. And also about how she mapped the magical world onto the mundane.*

Mostly I’m posting this as a time stamp of when I read it, since I found going back through my blog useful when trying to reconstruct my watching life. And also as a note to self about what I was thinking of.

(This reading was triggered by the post someone reblogged about how there is a recurring character in Supernatural fanfic named Naomi Novak.)

*on the enclave politics of the magical world: I kind of wish she’d made it either less of a match for the cities and international politics of the real world, or more so, and leaned into the political allegory. As it was, it felt too much like relying on stereotypes as a shortcut.

on romance: I found Orion completely uninteresting as a love interest, although fascinating as a concept and a narrative foil. His boring personality was partly the point of the character—what happens when someone really is the hero, and only lives to slaughter monsters?—but it also made it hard to understand why El loved him, or to feel emotionally invested in her grief for him and her performing impossible feats just to save him. Intellectually I understood them, and they make for great storytelling, but I personally didn’t care much about his fate. And then at the end I realized that he performed the same role as the flat generic female love interests in so many stories about male heroes. Where they exist to be saved but aren’t fully fleshed out on their own. (thequeenofsastiel, I won’t tag you in case you haven’t read these books, but it’s making me think of our conversations about women in media.) Someone to motivate the protagonist, to be rescued. (I do also have many vague thoughts about all the interesting things she was doing with Orion and El (and both their mothers) that wasn’t romance, but I have a headache and don’t want to write anymore.)

Which made me look back to the other two novels of hers that I read, Spinning Silver and Uprooted, and in those the male love interests of the young female protagonist are similarly sidelined and… not necessarily one-dimensional exactly, but underexplored. They’re both significantly older than the protagonist, and the story of the romance is really a sideline or an afterthought. I know many people were bothered by the age gap in Uprooted, but as I recall it didn’t bother me because it felt like the story was about the protagonist growing up and coming into her power, becoming someone who was an equal of the old man wizard at the end. Like in so many stories where the hero gets the girl, the "romance" isn’t about him, it’s symbolic of the journey she went on… not a reward exactly, but also more about her than him. In Spinning Silver the romance is even less fleshed out—she goes into the woods with the fairy king (or whatever he was, I read it long ago) and they come out married. My reaction to that was mostly huh? It more or less made sense for the story, but she gives so little explanation of why and how they fell in love that it felt jarring.

If these three books were all I’d read of hers I’d assume she simply wasn’t interested in romance. The fact that 2/3 of the love interests are so much older and given so little page time reminds of that story (not sure if it’s true or apocryphal) about Louisa May Alcott being told she had to put a romance in Little Women and, in irritable defiance, making Jo fall in love with a boring old man. But much of her fanfic is romance, and when she puts it in I can usually feel the love and attraction between the characters, understand why they want each other. Which makes me curious about why it’s so different in the three published novels I’ve read. Is she less interested in het relationships? (I’ve read very little of her mf fan fiction so far.) Does it get in the way of the stories she wants to tell about young women? Is it something about the way she’s using YA genre conventions?

It does feel a little weird talking about her work on Tumblr where I know she has an account (which I even follow) but presumably she isn’t doing name searches out here.