'Bitterblue' reread
I started reading 'Winterkeep' last night, so I'm posting this now, although I'm sure I could come up with a leaner, more polished edit.
I found myself slightly more conflicted about this book than I expected. Rereading a book about remembering and not remembering, wanting to remember and wanting to forget, and what’s best when those are traumatic memories or unreliable memories gains an extra layer when your own partial memory of the story comes into play as a reader. As with ‘Fire’, I remembered relationships most vividly.
I also had to keep reminding myself of Bitterblue’s situation here. Some eight years after the events of ‘Graceling’, she’s been the Queen of Monsea since childhood, coming into the role after the death of her father. Leck was sadistic and Graced with the ability to make people believe what he said, he killed her mother and did great wrong in Monsea. Her well-meaning uncle, King Ror, appointed Leck’s former advisers as hers, because they would know the most about the running of the country and were known to be as much Leck’s victims as anyone. Ground down by paperwork and aware of their emotional fragility, Bitterblue wants to be a righteous queen. Now a young waoman at the start of the book, Bitterblue senses that she needs to learn about her kingdom to learn what she can do to help.
There is absolutely no point in screaming at her about the many things that seem wrong, wrong, WRONG about the situation. It’s the life she’s lived for years. She’s trying to do right, now that she’s left childhood. She fails, she’s naïve, but she struggles on, and those struggles are with many forces, from many fronts. Yes, she has Katsa and Po, sporadically, as well as other members of the Council, but most of them aren’t Monsean. Guarded, her advisers are supposed to be her link to her subjects.
It’s framed as a mystery. Bitterblue’s attempts to solve it comes into increasing conflict with the policy of ‘forward thinkingness’ that was agreed on at the beginning of her reign. There is a literal maze in her castle, built by Leck, but the castle is like a maze too, literally and figuratively. The artworks that fill the castle - sculptures, landscaping and wall hangings - were left by Leck. Bitterblue’s collection of her mother’s belongings are more than keepsakes too, as Bitterblue grows to understand. Books become increasingly important, as Bitterblue learns her father destroyed several of them during his reign, while he teaching her to read personally. So, she revisits the books that he gave her to read to understand his thinking, while learning more about the books he suppressed. And then there are ciphers, which Bitterblue uses for her communications, having used mathematics as a way of clearing her mind of Leck’s influence. I was deeply uninterested in them, just wanting the translation. Certainly, spoiler, when it was revealed that both Ashen and Leck used their own separate ciphers, I harrumphed.
At the same time, I recognise that making this a book of puzzles, of locked doors and literal keys, as well as keys to ciphers and so on, all clues that explain and unravel memories and understanding, the author is slowly leading her heroine and readers to the ugly truth. If Bitterblue discovered it more directly, it would be unbearable. As it is, it takes its toll.
It’s clear from the opening first person section of Bitterblue’s childhood memories (tying the beginning of the book to its end) that she is a victim, although her mother and then Katsa saved her from the worst of Leck. But because she is queen, as his daughter, she must learn most of the truth about Leck’s other victims, the dead, the alive, the half-living and mentally unbalanced. Truths that one suspected in ‘Graceling’ are revealed, from confirmation of the nature of Raffin and Bann’s relationship (Bitterblue really is nosy); Po reaching a point where he feels he must share his secrets to more people; as well as the far more harrowing truths about Leck’s reign. And it is very sensitively done. Although ‘ugh, why so much Leck?’ has been a constant grumble from me throughout my reread of this trilogy, I do appreciate that ‘Bitterblue’ examines the complex consequences of ‘Graceling’ in the impact on Monsea and its people, and to a lesser extent of Po’s injury and secrets, and of Katsa’s actions.
Bitterblue allies herself with the truthseekers, not the suppressers, although it’s handled with far more nuance than that. This makes her a target, she is wounded, a friend is seriously wounded, another in danger of being hanged. People are killed, some die by suicide and, finally, what happened to the disappeared during Leck’s reign is revealed.
Overall, Bitterblue makes for a sympathetic heroine: she’s still small, unlike Katsa, unlile Fire. She isnot gifted like a Gracelin or a monster, although she is clearly remarkable and capable of taking on her responsibilities. No longer a child, sometimes she’s totally a teenager - when she presses hot buttons to get back at her advisers, in the whole sneaking about the city at night in a disguise (I was amused that her guard and Helda, not just Po, totally knew what she was doing.) Most of all in the whole Sapphire thing. The reader recognises the UST before the heroine, and he’s almost another Lienid Graceling boy you can’t take your eyes off in the mould of Po. For the record, I’m looking forward to the eventual Bitterblue/Giddon in the next book, once Bitterblue gets Saf entirely out of her system. (‘Fire’, after all, showed that a first love doesn’t have to be a forever love.) I’m especially looking forward to Helda shipping them too.
As it is, Giddon is redeemed from the arrogant prat who was so wrong for Katsa, having had years to reconsider while working for the Council. He is one of the many friends who help Bitterblue as she deals with her problems, and though he, like most of them, leaves, he is there for her when it comes to understanding Katsa and Po’s dramatic coupledom, and she is able to reciprocate, able to understand better than most when Randa targets Giddon personally for his loyalty to the Council, who have finally got into the business of dethroning bad kings.
For Bitterblue is compassionate, in the main, although I was less moved by the revelation that Fire gives her of herself as the castle, potent though the metaphor is, because Bellamew’s statue of Bitterblue as a child had made the same point and was RIGHT THERE. Anyway, I remembered to distrust one servant, and I’m sure memory was why I could intuit another Graceling’s relationship to Bitterblue before it was revealed.
There’s a lot going on, it’s a chunky book, separated again into many parts, given the titles of those distracting clues for Bitterblue.
On top of everything she learns about her kingdom and her family, Bitterblue’s knowledge of the world is expanded, first when Katsa shows her a remarkable rat pelt from the East and then towards the end, when Fire and a Dellian-Pikkian party come to Monsea. Here, the reader, if they’ve read the series in order, has an advantage on Bitterblue. We recognise the monsters honoured in Leck’s artwork, we know where his inspirations come from, and that what Bitterblue thought were his most fantastic lies were truths. We also know, with far more certainty, of Leck’s Monsean, if not noble, let alone royal, origins, while Bitterblue has imposter syndrome to deal with on top of everything else, especially when her crown is stolen because she let her heart briefly turn her stupid.
But Fire is able to understand Bitterblue’s concerns about her father’s wrongdoings and its impact on her people and their fragile minds better than most, although Bitterblue and Po’s relationship is also touching, and Bitterblue’s abiity to make connections is one of the things that will make her the great queen that she hopes to become, for all that she berates herself for not being able to get to know people or learn about her castle as well as Middluns’ Giddon can.
It’s also interesting that Helda, who was not young when she served Katsa, has come to be Bitterblue’s housekeeper…and spymaster. There’s also more thought given to the implications of the Council’s work, as they start one revolution and seek to instigate another against one of the bad kings. Bitterblue’s awareness that she ought not follow her father and be a bad queen is brought into sharp relief by this. Although the dream of being Sparks, the baker girl with a living mother is potent, one aways knows that her relationship with thief with a conscience Saf is doomed, because she’s a queen to her core.
Oh, something I forgot to mention in my review of ‘Fire,’ although it jumped out at me then, but even more so now when it becomes clear that the Dellians speak another language to the seven kingdoms’, is the use of our months in these lands. The passage of time - summer turns to winter over the course of this book - is important, but it’s deeply weird to see our months used, when the only discernible pattern for naming is that Lienid names seem to be more descriptive and based on nature. For place names, Middluns, Sunder etc are corruptions of familiar words. There’s very consciously no religion here, even though there is talk of death rites and social customs and mores, but that’s not surprising if Cashore was inspired by abuse scandals in the Catholic church. So, I don’t know why she didn’t use ‘the first month’ or some alternative for the month names
The books’s complexity reflects the growing complexity of the world. Bitterblue is an even more complicated character than Katsa, on a slightly different path to Fire (although it’s satisfying to learn what happened to the characters in 'Fire' since the events of that book.) In turn, that lends hope as to what Bitterblue can do if her plans come to fruition - and it feels churlish to wonder if the Ministry of Truth and Stories sounds Orwellian, or to note that despite the stronger equality messaging, my sense was that Bitterblue was in a lot of configurations with more male characters: it’s her and her four male (older) advisers; despite Katsa and Helda, there are usually more male Council leaders; when Bitterblue goes out and about Bitterblue City in disguise, she mainly encounters men, and strikes up a relationship with Teddy and Saf, she only knows their sisters through them, and they play a much lesser role; all the Monsean Guard are men (which may change in future); and Bitterblue is the only ruling Queen.
I found ‘Jane Unimited’ a bit unsatisfying, so I’m curious to see where Cashore goes next wth Bitterbule and these lands (at least one of which is no longer a kingdom) in ‘Winterkeep’.
This entry was originally posted at https://shallowness.dreamwidth.org/470232.html.
I found myself slightly more conflicted about this book than I expected. Rereading a book about remembering and not remembering, wanting to remember and wanting to forget, and what’s best when those are traumatic memories or unreliable memories gains an extra layer when your own partial memory of the story comes into play as a reader. As with ‘Fire’, I remembered relationships most vividly.
I also had to keep reminding myself of Bitterblue’s situation here. Some eight years after the events of ‘Graceling’, she’s been the Queen of Monsea since childhood, coming into the role after the death of her father. Leck was sadistic and Graced with the ability to make people believe what he said, he killed her mother and did great wrong in Monsea. Her well-meaning uncle, King Ror, appointed Leck’s former advisers as hers, because they would know the most about the running of the country and were known to be as much Leck’s victims as anyone. Ground down by paperwork and aware of their emotional fragility, Bitterblue wants to be a righteous queen. Now a young waoman at the start of the book, Bitterblue senses that she needs to learn about her kingdom to learn what she can do to help.
There is absolutely no point in screaming at her about the many things that seem wrong, wrong, WRONG about the situation. It’s the life she’s lived for years. She’s trying to do right, now that she’s left childhood. She fails, she’s naïve, but she struggles on, and those struggles are with many forces, from many fronts. Yes, she has Katsa and Po, sporadically, as well as other members of the Council, but most of them aren’t Monsean. Guarded, her advisers are supposed to be her link to her subjects.
It’s framed as a mystery. Bitterblue’s attempts to solve it comes into increasing conflict with the policy of ‘forward thinkingness’ that was agreed on at the beginning of her reign. There is a literal maze in her castle, built by Leck, but the castle is like a maze too, literally and figuratively. The artworks that fill the castle - sculptures, landscaping and wall hangings - were left by Leck. Bitterblue’s collection of her mother’s belongings are more than keepsakes too, as Bitterblue grows to understand. Books become increasingly important, as Bitterblue learns her father destroyed several of them during his reign, while he teaching her to read personally. So, she revisits the books that he gave her to read to understand his thinking, while learning more about the books he suppressed. And then there are ciphers, which Bitterblue uses for her communications, having used mathematics as a way of clearing her mind of Leck’s influence. I was deeply uninterested in them, just wanting the translation. Certainly, spoiler, when it was revealed that both Ashen and Leck used their own separate ciphers, I harrumphed.
At the same time, I recognise that making this a book of puzzles, of locked doors and literal keys, as well as keys to ciphers and so on, all clues that explain and unravel memories and understanding, the author is slowly leading her heroine and readers to the ugly truth. If Bitterblue discovered it more directly, it would be unbearable. As it is, it takes its toll.
It’s clear from the opening first person section of Bitterblue’s childhood memories (tying the beginning of the book to its end) that she is a victim, although her mother and then Katsa saved her from the worst of Leck. But because she is queen, as his daughter, she must learn most of the truth about Leck’s other victims, the dead, the alive, the half-living and mentally unbalanced. Truths that one suspected in ‘Graceling’ are revealed, from confirmation of the nature of Raffin and Bann’s relationship (Bitterblue really is nosy); Po reaching a point where he feels he must share his secrets to more people; as well as the far more harrowing truths about Leck’s reign. And it is very sensitively done. Although ‘ugh, why so much Leck?’ has been a constant grumble from me throughout my reread of this trilogy, I do appreciate that ‘Bitterblue’ examines the complex consequences of ‘Graceling’ in the impact on Monsea and its people, and to a lesser extent of Po’s injury and secrets, and of Katsa’s actions.
Bitterblue allies herself with the truthseekers, not the suppressers, although it’s handled with far more nuance than that. This makes her a target, she is wounded, a friend is seriously wounded, another in danger of being hanged. People are killed, some die by suicide and, finally, what happened to the disappeared during Leck’s reign is revealed.
Overall, Bitterblue makes for a sympathetic heroine: she’s still small, unlike Katsa, unlile Fire. She isnot gifted like a Gracelin or a monster, although she is clearly remarkable and capable of taking on her responsibilities. No longer a child, sometimes she’s totally a teenager - when she presses hot buttons to get back at her advisers, in the whole sneaking about the city at night in a disguise (I was amused that her guard and Helda, not just Po, totally knew what she was doing.) Most of all in the whole Sapphire thing. The reader recognises the UST before the heroine, and he’s almost another Lienid Graceling boy you can’t take your eyes off in the mould of Po. For the record, I’m looking forward to the eventual Bitterblue/Giddon in the next book, once Bitterblue gets Saf entirely out of her system. (‘Fire’, after all, showed that a first love doesn’t have to be a forever love.) I’m especially looking forward to Helda shipping them too.
As it is, Giddon is redeemed from the arrogant prat who was so wrong for Katsa, having had years to reconsider while working for the Council. He is one of the many friends who help Bitterblue as she deals with her problems, and though he, like most of them, leaves, he is there for her when it comes to understanding Katsa and Po’s dramatic coupledom, and she is able to reciprocate, able to understand better than most when Randa targets Giddon personally for his loyalty to the Council, who have finally got into the business of dethroning bad kings.
For Bitterblue is compassionate, in the main, although I was less moved by the revelation that Fire gives her of herself as the castle, potent though the metaphor is, because Bellamew’s statue of Bitterblue as a child had made the same point and was RIGHT THERE. Anyway, I remembered to distrust one servant, and I’m sure memory was why I could intuit another Graceling’s relationship to Bitterblue before it was revealed.
There’s a lot going on, it’s a chunky book, separated again into many parts, given the titles of those distracting clues for Bitterblue.
On top of everything she learns about her kingdom and her family, Bitterblue’s knowledge of the world is expanded, first when Katsa shows her a remarkable rat pelt from the East and then towards the end, when Fire and a Dellian-Pikkian party come to Monsea. Here, the reader, if they’ve read the series in order, has an advantage on Bitterblue. We recognise the monsters honoured in Leck’s artwork, we know where his inspirations come from, and that what Bitterblue thought were his most fantastic lies were truths. We also know, with far more certainty, of Leck’s Monsean, if not noble, let alone royal, origins, while Bitterblue has imposter syndrome to deal with on top of everything else, especially when her crown is stolen because she let her heart briefly turn her stupid.
But Fire is able to understand Bitterblue’s concerns about her father’s wrongdoings and its impact on her people and their fragile minds better than most, although Bitterblue and Po’s relationship is also touching, and Bitterblue’s abiity to make connections is one of the things that will make her the great queen that she hopes to become, for all that she berates herself for not being able to get to know people or learn about her castle as well as Middluns’ Giddon can.
It’s also interesting that Helda, who was not young when she served Katsa, has come to be Bitterblue’s housekeeper…and spymaster. There’s also more thought given to the implications of the Council’s work, as they start one revolution and seek to instigate another against one of the bad kings. Bitterblue’s awareness that she ought not follow her father and be a bad queen is brought into sharp relief by this. Although the dream of being Sparks, the baker girl with a living mother is potent, one aways knows that her relationship with thief with a conscience Saf is doomed, because she’s a queen to her core.
Oh, something I forgot to mention in my review of ‘Fire,’ although it jumped out at me then, but even more so now when it becomes clear that the Dellians speak another language to the seven kingdoms’, is the use of our months in these lands. The passage of time - summer turns to winter over the course of this book - is important, but it’s deeply weird to see our months used, when the only discernible pattern for naming is that Lienid names seem to be more descriptive and based on nature. For place names, Middluns, Sunder etc are corruptions of familiar words. There’s very consciously no religion here, even though there is talk of death rites and social customs and mores, but that’s not surprising if Cashore was inspired by abuse scandals in the Catholic church. So, I don’t know why she didn’t use ‘the first month’ or some alternative for the month names
The books’s complexity reflects the growing complexity of the world. Bitterblue is an even more complicated character than Katsa, on a slightly different path to Fire (although it’s satisfying to learn what happened to the characters in 'Fire' since the events of that book.) In turn, that lends hope as to what Bitterblue can do if her plans come to fruition - and it feels churlish to wonder if the Ministry of Truth and Stories sounds Orwellian, or to note that despite the stronger equality messaging, my sense was that Bitterblue was in a lot of configurations with more male characters: it’s her and her four male (older) advisers; despite Katsa and Helda, there are usually more male Council leaders; when Bitterblue goes out and about Bitterblue City in disguise, she mainly encounters men, and strikes up a relationship with Teddy and Saf, she only knows their sisters through them, and they play a much lesser role; all the Monsean Guard are men (which may change in future); and Bitterblue is the only ruling Queen.
I found ‘Jane Unimited’ a bit unsatisfying, so I’m curious to see where Cashore goes next wth Bitterbule and these lands (at least one of which is no longer a kingdom) in ‘Winterkeep’.
This entry was originally posted at https://shallowness.dreamwidth.org/470232.html.