The Queen's Thief and Invisible Ficathon
So I’ve been having trouble trying to write a review of The Queen’s Thief series by Megan Whalen Turner, despite the fact I’ve just devoured all four books in a joyous rush. The problem is every book in the series has a game-changing spoiler for the one before, so! Even describing the premise of the books is a spoiler! Even the character detail I like best manages to spoil the first two books! I was telling 
happydork about them the other day and I think I said, “So, Gen is one of my favourite [spoiler] protagonists,” only I didn’t say ‘spoiler’ (spoilers) and metaphorically kicked myself. Yeah. Okay, so let’s be vague! They are enormously enjoyable YA fantasy books, kind of like Diana Wynne Jones but with less of the overwhelming whiteness of being, and have an interesting approach in that they’re fantasy without having magic. The first one, The Thief, is definitely YA, then from the very first chapter of the next one, they take a much darker and more complex turn, though that said I would have loved them as a teenager, I think. Anyway! The protagonist, Gen, is so much fun, his friends and relations possibly even more so, and the books say a lot of interesting things about faith and identity, while also having battles and heists and hijinks. Also, [spoiler] [spoiler]ing [spoiler] is amazing. So now you know.
Anyway, so, basically the only non-spoilery thing I like about the books is that while the author clearly has a taste for the Greek myths, she’s created her own pantheon of gods, goddesses and myths, with their own stories, in which Gen is well-versed. (He is named after one of the gods, which leads to some interesting resonances.) He occasionally recounts the myths, and true to any mythology I ever heard of, he and his friend-and-antagonist the king’s magus then go to battle about how the story is supposed to go. (What I also like is that this is why he and the magus are both antagonists and friends: they may be diametrically opposed in terms of everything they hold holy, but they agree at least that the myths are important, and should be told right. Well, quite.) And
jadelennox was running
invisible_ficathon, a gift exchange for fictional canons, so I wrote one of Gen’s myths: On names; or why it rains at a hanging. (No spoilers! Somehow.)
I also recommend the Invisible Ficathon in general, actually. What I like about it is that is that the point of it isn’t really the stories - I suppose some people really were dying for fic written of “canons” that are in some cases just a few words long - but the ficathon as a whole, which is a collective piece of performance art. I love the carefully-constructed requests for Galaxy Quest and Ghost Soup Infidel Blue fic, that sound just right: full of fannish love and reference and even fannish entitlement (! If you don’t write this exact story I will HATE YOU FOREVER!) and you probably would be excused for not realizing that they’re… completely made up. There are missing scenes for episodes that don’t exist, badfic parodies of badfic that doesn’t exist. And as well all the tropes of multi-season sci-fi show fandom, there’s sweet Quidditch RPF (which is to say, magical Quidditch; I’ve realized recently I know more than one person who actually does play Quidditch, for the London Unspeakables), a fic that fictionalises everything around it (what, you mean the AO3 isn’t a journal of kidlit book reviews?) and, amazingly, a fic that purports to be fanfiction of a proto-Indo-European myth, the hero and the serpent. Fanfic that foregrounds the role of women, at that. Isn’t fandom wonderful.
raven is also at Dreamwidth: there is or are
comment(s). Comment there or here.
happydork about them the other day and I think I said, “So, Gen is one of my favourite [spoiler] protagonists,” only I didn’t say ‘spoiler’ (spoilers) and metaphorically kicked myself. Yeah. Okay, so let’s be vague! They are enormously enjoyable YA fantasy books, kind of like Diana Wynne Jones but with less of the overwhelming whiteness of being, and have an interesting approach in that they’re fantasy without having magic. The first one, The Thief, is definitely YA, then from the very first chapter of the next one, they take a much darker and more complex turn, though that said I would have loved them as a teenager, I think. Anyway! The protagonist, Gen, is so much fun, his friends and relations possibly even more so, and the books say a lot of interesting things about faith and identity, while also having battles and heists and hijinks. Also, [spoiler] [spoiler]ing [spoiler] is amazing. So now you know.
Anyway, so, basically the only non-spoilery thing I like about the books is that while the author clearly has a taste for the Greek myths, she’s created her own pantheon of gods, goddesses and myths, with their own stories, in which Gen is well-versed. (He is named after one of the gods, which leads to some interesting resonances.) He occasionally recounts the myths, and true to any mythology I ever heard of, he and his friend-and-antagonist the king’s magus then go to battle about how the story is supposed to go. (What I also like is that this is why he and the magus are both antagonists and friends: they may be diametrically opposed in terms of everything they hold holy, but they agree at least that the myths are important, and should be told right. Well, quite.) And
jadelennox was running
invisible_ficathon, a gift exchange for fictional canons, so I wrote one of Gen’s myths: On names; or why it rains at a hanging. (No spoilers! Somehow.)
I also recommend the Invisible Ficathon in general, actually. What I like about it is that is that the point of it isn’t really the stories - I suppose some people really were dying for fic written of “canons” that are in some cases just a few words long - but the ficathon as a whole, which is a collective piece of performance art. I love the carefully-constructed requests for Galaxy Quest and Ghost Soup Infidel Blue fic, that sound just right: full of fannish love and reference and even fannish entitlement (! If you don’t write this exact story I will HATE YOU FOREVER!) and you probably would be excused for not realizing that they’re… completely made up. There are missing scenes for episodes that don’t exist, badfic parodies of badfic that doesn’t exist. And as well all the tropes of multi-season sci-fi show fandom, there’s sweet Quidditch RPF (which is to say, magical Quidditch; I’ve realized recently I know more than one person who actually does play Quidditch, for the London Unspeakables), a fic that fictionalises everything around it (what, you mean the AO3 isn’t a journal of kidlit book reviews?) and, amazingly, a fic that purports to be fanfiction of a proto-Indo-European myth, the hero and the serpent. Fanfic that foregrounds the role of women, at that. Isn’t fandom wonderful.
raven is also at Dreamwidth: there is or are
comment(s). Comment there or here.