A Fan's Playground

Set in the modern-day amongst the Kazakh people who live in Mongolia, this is a middle-grade novel about a preteen girl named Aisulu who becomes an eagle hunter.

A beautifully written book with a lot of heart. I particularly loved the themes of being chosen as family, and what you will do for the people you love, and being accepted for who you are. The relationship between Aisulu and her brother, and Aisulu and her uncle and aunt, are particularly wonderful.

It's also the sort of book where questions of whether or not something is appropriation come up, as this is a book written by a white person about a culture not her own. It seems to me that Erin Bow did her due diligence, between her research, her summer living with a Kazakh family in Mongolia, and her multiple Kazakh sensitivity readers. But when I googled for other opinions, I found that the review in Kirkus at least dismisses the book as pure appropriation, based on the fact that the book presents Aisulu's community as being biased against girls being eagle hunters.

Which meant that then I felt I needed to do a bunch more research.

But the only resources I can find online discussing the subject in English are written by non-Kazakhs as well. I did manage to find brief quotes from two real life modern female Kazakh eagle hunters, Makpal Abdrazakova and Aisholpan Nurgaiv. Makpal said that she largely experienced encouragement in her desire to be an eagle hunter, and Aisholpan said that at first she faced opposition because of her gender but then was accepted. (Note that the movie about Aisholpan apparently makes exaggerated statements about the uniqueness of Aisholpan's being an eagle hunter, and the degree of opposition she faced, so I'm only drawing on what Aisholpan herself has said in interviews.)

So it seems from what little evidence I can find that the experiences Aisulu has in this book are plausible, as she finds opposition but also support from various people.

I am not Kazakh so I don't get the final say on whether this book is appropriation or not. But Erin Bow got a lot of direct Kazakh input into her book, so I think I'll trust to those people's input over that of an anonymous Kirkus reviewer.

And this truly is an excellently written book, definitely worth the read.

WELL this is a book that gave me a lot of feelings. I read the first half the book, had to set it down because I didn't have the time to finish it in one sitting, and then it took a while to convince myself to pick it back up again to finish it because it was so HARROWING and I didn't know if I could take it.

And it did indeed continue to be harrowing, and I cried a bunch at the end, but it was also really really good.

It's a book about dealing with grief and also about dealing with being seen as strange/other/outcast/dangerous. Set in an alternate world, it's the story of a girl named Plain Kate who is a woodcarver but not guild-sanctioned, whose father died recently, and who is considered to be probably a witch by other people who see her as dangerous as a result.

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OH GOSH!!! It's hard to know what to say about this book. It was SO GOOD.

( in which I find a lot of things to say anyway )