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sophia_sol) wrote2020-05-22 09:28 pm
sophia_sol) wrote2020-05-22 09:28 pm
The Privilege of the Sword, by Ellen Kushner
This is a book about SWORDS and DRAMATIC BISEXUALS.
This book came out at a time in my life when I was plenty old enough to understand what I was reading, but young enough to still be pretty naive and easily shockable. Anyway I found this book pretty shocking at the time! (The main character also finds the things that happen pretty shocking. #relatable)
These days I find it less shocking, and although I don't love everything it's doing, it's still fun.
The Privilege of the Sword is the 15-years-later sequel to an earlier book with a different protagonist, and it shows. Alec was the protagonist of the earlier book, and Alec's niece Katherine is the protagonist of this one. And this book definitely assumes that you are coming in already understanding Alec and caring about him, which I don't, which makes all the sections focused on him and his priorities a boring distraction from the main thrust of the book. Like, you could cut so much of Alec and his crowd and lose nothing that's important to the things that this specific book is doing. I think having this book be a sequel is actually a disservice to the book. (Fans of Swordspoint might feel differently. But I've never read Swordspoint.)
Anyway the actual protagonist! Katherine's 15 years old, naive and fresh to the city when she comes to live with her uncle Alec at his whim and learn how to swordfight. And she is extremely much a dramatic and intense teenager, who meets a girl at a ball and instantly wants to be best friends, and rereads her favourite book so often she has all the dialogue memorized (and then has a crush on the actress who plays the lead in the stage adaptation), and wants to stab people who do bad things, and whose main hobby with her best friend is to spy on someone else's private affairs.
She's very believably teenaged, and I enjoyed watching her growth over the course of the book (while still remaining extremely teenaged). The end is not very......conclusive of a lot of things. Some stuff felt kind of out of sudden and out of nowhere, though it might have felt less out of nowhere if I paid more attention in the bits of the book focusing on Alec? So the end didn't really feel satisfying to me, but eh, I had fun reading the book regardless.
I also would have enjoyed it more, I think, if more of it were about Katherine learning to be a swordswoman, because those bits were the best bits - and if you cut out more of Alec like I suggested, there'd be plenty of room for more focus on that!
And I did appreciate that the book was making efforts towards having Themes, about the role of women and who's allowed (and able!) to provide for women's safety, but this theme ended up kind of ignored in the ending sequence instead of being reinforced, which kind of undermined it a bit.
So. Not a work of deathless literature, but an enjoyable enough way to spend an afternoon.
(Content note: rape of a secondary character is an extensive plot point.)
This book came out at a time in my life when I was plenty old enough to understand what I was reading, but young enough to still be pretty naive and easily shockable. Anyway I found this book pretty shocking at the time! (The main character also finds the things that happen pretty shocking. #relatable)
These days I find it less shocking, and although I don't love everything it's doing, it's still fun.
The Privilege of the Sword is the 15-years-later sequel to an earlier book with a different protagonist, and it shows. Alec was the protagonist of the earlier book, and Alec's niece Katherine is the protagonist of this one. And this book definitely assumes that you are coming in already understanding Alec and caring about him, which I don't, which makes all the sections focused on him and his priorities a boring distraction from the main thrust of the book. Like, you could cut so much of Alec and his crowd and lose nothing that's important to the things that this specific book is doing. I think having this book be a sequel is actually a disservice to the book. (Fans of Swordspoint might feel differently. But I've never read Swordspoint.)
Anyway the actual protagonist! Katherine's 15 years old, naive and fresh to the city when she comes to live with her uncle Alec at his whim and learn how to swordfight. And she is extremely much a dramatic and intense teenager, who meets a girl at a ball and instantly wants to be best friends, and rereads her favourite book so often she has all the dialogue memorized (and then has a crush on the actress who plays the lead in the stage adaptation), and wants to stab people who do bad things, and whose main hobby with her best friend is to spy on someone else's private affairs.
She's very believably teenaged, and I enjoyed watching her growth over the course of the book (while still remaining extremely teenaged). The end is not very......conclusive of a lot of things. Some stuff felt kind of out of sudden and out of nowhere, though it might have felt less out of nowhere if I paid more attention in the bits of the book focusing on Alec? So the end didn't really feel satisfying to me, but eh, I had fun reading the book regardless.
I also would have enjoyed it more, I think, if more of it were about Katherine learning to be a swordswoman, because those bits were the best bits - and if you cut out more of Alec like I suggested, there'd be plenty of room for more focus on that!
And I did appreciate that the book was making efforts towards having Themes, about the role of women and who's allowed (and able!) to provide for women's safety, but this theme ended up kind of ignored in the ending sequence instead of being reinforced, which kind of undermined it a bit.
So. Not a work of deathless literature, but an enjoyable enough way to spend an afternoon.
(Content note: rape of a secondary character is an extensive plot point.)
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(when teenage!me read The Privilege of the Sword for the first time, I think I managed to miss like 75% of the queer stuff (iirc I also did this with the entirety of Kissing the Witch, which shouldn't have been possible))
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I was very good at not noticing queer content when I was a teen too, and I think probably a lot of it in this book went over my head. But the scene where Katherine accidentally spies on and masturbates to the Black Rose with another woman, I found that hard to miss and extremely memorable!
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