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I've known for ages that I wanted to either read or watch the anime version of (or both) Nahoko Uehashi's Moribito: Guardian of the Spirit. I mean, I didn't know anything about it other than that it starred an awesome thirtysomething lady professional bodyguard, but sometimes I am an extremely easy sell. By virtue of being both available from the library and readable on the subway, the book won out first!
The book follows Balsa, aforementioned awesome thirtysomething lady professional bodyguard, who saves an adolescent prince from drowning one afternoon while she's just kind of hanging out being awesome. Then she basically gets strongarmed by his mom into sneaking him out of the palace and promising to protect him when it turns out that a.) he has accidentally become the host of a spirit egg that sooner or later is going to hatch into some kind of mysterious spirit and b.) therefore various people in the palace want him assassinated. Since this job will probably end with both of them being killed, Balsa does not think this is a great reward for being awesome! But she agrees anyway, and the rest of the book follows her attempts to both keep the prince alive, and figure out what's going on with the spirit egg, which may be super-important to save the country if anybody could actually figure out what the relevant information was from the last time this happened two hundred years ago.
There are a lot of excellent things about this book! First of all, Balsa herself is pretty fabulous, and if stoic middle-aged warrior ladies with quiet backstory angst are relevant to your interests, NOT THAT I AM LOOKING AT ANYONE ON MY FLIST OR ANYTHING, this may be a story for you. Gender-reversal-wise, I also enormously enjoy the fact that Balsa has an awesome cranky ladymentor and a gentle healer semihemidemiboyfriend who pines after her while she jaunts around adventuring . . . and also that the poor preteen boy gets stuck with what is basically an alien pregnancy plot. (I am sorry, but after Cordelia's five million demonic/evil/alien pregnancies on Angel, I feel a little glow of retaliatory smugness every time that plotline goes to a guy.) The author is also an anthropologist, and there's a lot of really interesting stuff going on with the two cultures represented in the kingdom - one of which colonized the other - and official and unofficial versions of history and legends that get passed down. The translation is kind of clunky, but no worse than others I've read; I would have liked some more depth into the characters in some places, but overall I enjoyed it enormously and will totally be reading the sequels (and also probably seeing the anime at some point.)
Okay, here is something I am confused by, not in the book specifically, but in the reactions I've seen. Almost everything I've read has talked about Balsa's vow to save eight people, and how she and Tanda can't be together until that's resolved and so forth, but the impression I got from when Balsa talked about it is that the vow is basically a moot point; by this point she's pretty much admitted that there's no real way to come out ahead in Saving People Maths. Which is a point I love, by the way. I mean, I love that Hotheaded Teenaged Balsa came up with the vow, but I also love how the older Balsa explicitly deconstructs it, because redemption doesn't work that way and nothing is that simple.
The book follows Balsa, aforementioned awesome thirtysomething lady professional bodyguard, who saves an adolescent prince from drowning one afternoon while she's just kind of hanging out being awesome. Then she basically gets strongarmed by his mom into sneaking him out of the palace and promising to protect him when it turns out that a.) he has accidentally become the host of a spirit egg that sooner or later is going to hatch into some kind of mysterious spirit and b.) therefore various people in the palace want him assassinated. Since this job will probably end with both of them being killed, Balsa does not think this is a great reward for being awesome! But she agrees anyway, and the rest of the book follows her attempts to both keep the prince alive, and figure out what's going on with the spirit egg, which may be super-important to save the country if anybody could actually figure out what the relevant information was from the last time this happened two hundred years ago.
There are a lot of excellent things about this book! First of all, Balsa herself is pretty fabulous, and if stoic middle-aged warrior ladies with quiet backstory angst are relevant to your interests, NOT THAT I AM LOOKING AT ANYONE ON MY FLIST OR ANYTHING, this may be a story for you. Gender-reversal-wise, I also enormously enjoy the fact that Balsa has an awesome cranky ladymentor and a gentle healer semihemidemiboyfriend who pines after her while she jaunts around adventuring . . . and also that the poor preteen boy gets stuck with what is basically an alien pregnancy plot. (I am sorry, but after Cordelia's five million demonic/evil/alien pregnancies on Angel, I feel a little glow of retaliatory smugness every time that plotline goes to a guy.) The author is also an anthropologist, and there's a lot of really interesting stuff going on with the two cultures represented in the kingdom - one of which colonized the other - and official and unofficial versions of history and legends that get passed down. The translation is kind of clunky, but no worse than others I've read; I would have liked some more depth into the characters in some places, but overall I enjoyed it enormously and will totally be reading the sequels (and also probably seeing the anime at some point.)
Okay, here is something I am confused by, not in the book specifically, but in the reactions I've seen. Almost everything I've read has talked about Balsa's vow to save eight people, and how she and Tanda can't be together until that's resolved and so forth, but the impression I got from when Balsa talked about it is that the vow is basically a moot point; by this point she's pretty much admitted that there's no real way to come out ahead in Saving People Maths. Which is a point I love, by the way. I mean, I love that Hotheaded Teenaged Balsa came up with the vow, but I also love how the older Balsa explicitly deconstructs it, because redemption doesn't work that way and nothing is that simple.