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Queen of the TEarling -Erika Johansen


Darth Richard II

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So I almost picked this up at B&N the other day, but ended up just sort of poking at it instead. Now, looking at reviews, I'm glad I didn't.



Has anyone read this? From what I;ve been seeing this looks almost like the new Eragon/Sword of Truth. Upcoming super hyped fantasy novel from a new author who got an insane advance(7 figures? Jesus) that seems to be hugely popular with the right crowd but seems to be getting ripped to shreds by the actual fantasy community. Also, and this is all just from reviews I;ve read, I have NOT read it yet, so grain of salt, it's one of those books that is advertised as having a "strong female character/etc" but is actually very misogynistic in tone. The main character is constantly worrying about her looks, omg look at the hot guards, etc. Anyway, long rant, I'm just wondering if anyone here has read it yet and if the really negatve reviews are on base at all.



Also, I hate ting's described as "The female Game of Thrones". Game of Thrones is the female Game of Thrones.




Annnd I can't type. If any mod can fix that typo in the topic that would be super awesome great and I will give you a cookie.


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  • 1 month later...

Okay, just finished. Honestly? I'd be lying if I claimed I didn't enjoy the book. More than I expected to. It is well-supplied with problems, absolutely. But I found that it has a really strong narrative drive and a focus on doing the right thing that's fun to read in a wish-fulfillment kinda way.



Basic outline [minor spoilers]: So the kingdom this book is set in is at the mercy of the much more powerful neighbouring country, which is ruled by a sorcerous queen of great power and equally overwhelming dickishness. She is just the worst. Like uses sex slaves [this is explained to us at some length multiple times] and kills children kind of worst. She forces the rulers of the kingdom the book is set in, who are also the worst, to send her nation monthly shipments of slaves. Young queen-in-waiting / resident chosen one [she's an orphan, too!] has been living in exile in a cottage in the woods, growing up with a good solid education in political and social justice. She comes back out of exile, discovers that all these unremittingly terrible people have transformed her kingdom into a slave farm in thrall to the neighbouring evil country, and she fucking cleans house.



The book pursues this didactic but positive narrative line in an energetic way that I found quite fun much of the time. Kelsea [the queen / chosen one / orphan] is an appealing character to follow, burdened by some teenage angst but also with a strong sense of purpose and moral certainty that ensures that, while she's often placed in a position by the narrative in which she's reacting to the world around her, she's reacting very vigorously and actively. Her story is a feel-good story, in which she wins respect and rights wrongs, but you know what? I like those, and this kind of coming-of-age political fantasy is good at them. I think the book does overstep in its campaign to show us that Kelsea is the greatest, however, including multiple instances in which other characters wax lyrical on how intricate her thought processes are and how obvious it is when you watch her that she's performing feats of mental gymnastics. The book's resident magic thingamajig is also tied up with the occasionally over-the-top presentation of Kelsea's character. In this story the magic thingamajig takes the form of a jewel that the queen wears round her neck which guides her / provides her with magical assistance when the plot requires it [this leads to a lot of sentences that look like some variation of: "Her jewel glowed / burned," ... so ... yeah, that's a thing that is in the book that you will be hearing a lot.] I'm sure that sequels will explain how this magic thinger works and that it'll be super interesting, but in this first book, all uncharitable review sniping aside, it really does feel like the thing does whatever Johansen needs it to do to propel Kelsea's story forward efficiently. Does it need to grant her the gift of far sight? Kabam! Does it need to grant her the power to kill dudes by thinking about it? Done! It's like a one stop deus-ex-machina shop, and I think the book leans on it just often enough for it to be a real problem.



The story's politics are ... odd. On the one hand it's a narrative that's hugely invested in advocating social justice and human rights. The benefits of democracy are extolled on several occasions. Almost one-hundred percent of the characters we see in positions of power are useless as sacks of feathers at best and cowardly self-serving and/or actively evil shitbags at worst. And yet the book's refrain is that the Tearling [the country the story's set in] "needs a queen." A "true queen," apparently. And Kelsea is that "true queen." It's politically-confused simplistic horseshit designed to further the book's feel-good narrative about Kelsea kicking the corrupt out of power and getting shit done, is what it is, and while I guess it works that doesn't mean it isn't horseshit that weakens the book's thesis about monarchist power by rendering it inconsistent.



The "Game of Thrones for women" tag is fucking bullshit, not just because it's a ludicrous statement in general, though I certainly agree that it is, but because its relevance to this particular novel is um yeah no. I think Kelsea does have some genuine "strength" -- to use the word we love to apply -- to her as a character in terms of her willingness to take power and use it for what she perceives to be good. However, I have issues. First, Kelsea has to prove herself to a lot of people, and the overwhelming majority of those people are men, and they approach her in a really evaluative way. She places a great deal of stock in proving herself to a lot of these people, and while that makes sense for a scared person coming into an unstable position of great power the degree to which the whole dynamic shades into a bunch of dudes evaluating a young woman becomes super creepy quite quickly. This problem is exacerbated by the degree to which the cast is weighted towards men. It's not quite as bad as early reviews had led me to think, but honestly it's pretty close. A lot of the important support cast is filled out by the Queen's Guard, and they're all dudes, really competent dudes. Almost the entire power structure is likewise dudes. There are several female characters, but they're mostly bit parts, and they're mostly either objectified [the corrupt previous ruler of the Tearling keeps a collared sex slave, for instance] or placed in positions of minimal power. That being said, two of these bit parts have "I will be so goddamn important in the sequel" written all over them in neon ink, so I can see a trajectory in which this problem really does self-correct in future installments, at least to a degree, and I'm not just saying that to give the book the benefit of the doubt. The antagonist, the evilest queen, is also a problem, because she has the worst case of "rampant unchecked female sexuality oh my god she's doing things while naked! danger! danger! danger!" I have seen in a while. Some of the "omg my looks" material DR mentions above -- including the hints of how it plays into the evilest queen's motivation, which is the oldest most depressing trick in the book for a female villain -- is indeed quite icky. There's also some shade thrown at women who focus on fashion, which furthers the impression -- perhaps fair, perhaps not -- that the book, while it is very very unreservedly sympathetic towards the problems of sexism that women face daily, also falls into a few discursive "omg women amirite?" traps that in fact further these sexist structures. To be fair, there are also some few moments of fairly hardheaded reflection on the different ways other people look at you if you're not conventionally attractive versus if you are that I think do achieve some real poignancy and might be quite relevant to a teenage reader in particular.



TL:DR: The book mixes the everyday business of governing with heroics and stirring rightin' wrongs and takin' care of business stuff in ways I found it tough not to love a little, but, as my screed here begins to explore, I do certainly agree that it has issues. I don't understand the seven-figure advance, but that's not in any sense an attack on Johansen's work: I certainly understand why an editor and a publisher were stoked about this material, and, beyond luck and a good agent, I can never figure out why one solid, fun book gets the seven-figure deal and one of the biggest marketing pushes for a new fantasy we've seen in years while another equally good, equally fun book languishes. After a very rough start I enjoyed it. But I'm not sure I could go around recommending it to people. It's often didactic and thudding, particularly in its depictions of the villains and the terrible things they get up to that let us know they're evil just in case we hadn't figured it out -- it does remind me a bit of Goodkind in that way, though I think it rises far above SoT in most other respects, not that that's a praiseworthy bar. The world building's wobbly and the gender politics, while they have some touches of sensitivity in their treatment of women's position in a sexist world, are quite seriously conservative. And the narrative makes liberal use of the deus-ex-machine button. The book gets by on an impressive sense of narrative momentum and positivity. Not "recommended" by little old me, I don't think, but if you did read it and dig it I could totally sympathize with why, and honestly I'll probably try the next one.


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Well, I might have been persuaded by this halfhearted review to try it, but I just can't stomach the idea of a heroine in a secondary fantasy world named "Kelsea." Kelsea is a typical name for a teenager in a modern American high school, for heaven's sake. It would work in an "urban fantasy", but in a secondary world "high fantasy" it's just laughably out of place.


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The only difference between this and any other YA fantasy is that it's injected with a bunch of tired, stereotypical tripe that gives it...more of an "old school" fantasy feel. A bit Eddings/Brooks-like, and probably some influence from the crossover/dying earth stuff from before Shannara/Covenant made fantasy its own thing - Amber and such. That could be a positive to someone. It could even have been unambiguously positive, if well executed. It was not.

Llama sums it up pretty well. I love the modern crop of "strong female character" YA fantasy! I'll enjoy just about anything in that genre. So I did enjoy this book, but only just barely. There are others more worth your time.

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Yessir, it's the Obama one. I remember that distinctly from the initial press release.



Yeah, sorry, I neglected to mention that about this being a far future dying Earth thing -- it's on another landmass that showed up at some point, how is still unclear as of the end of the first one unless I missed something. There's also a Thomas and a Tyler, and America and Britain are mentioned numerous times, among other things. Plus I'm pretty sure the evil nation is in part culturally French, based on one line of dialogue. I couldn't work out a way to fit it into my rant because quite honestly based on this first one I can't see how it effects the book much. It is neither here nor there, not executed badly necessarily for a background worldbuilding detail but in no way remarkable.



Nice catch on the Brooks / Eddings connection, emberling. I agree completely. In addition to the general tropiness calling back to 80s fantasy, a lot of the interaction between Kelsea and her Queen's Guards dudes in particular feels very Eddings to me, like the character business between the Knights of the Church in the Elenium books.



I can't figure out whether this is meant to be pitched ya at all. I don't think it is. Ya is becoming more forgiving in terms of the whole oh-no-the-tender-eyes-and-ears-of-our-young thing, I know, but the book also contains some language I would still be surprised to find in a ya, including multiple motherfuckers and the c-word at least once. Mostly spoken either by our villains, to illustrate their crudity and wretchedness, or by our Queen's Guards, to illustrate their rugged soldierlyness.



My review is definitely half-hearted; that absolutely sums up my feelings. But I am conflicted, perhaps slightly more so than emberling: It is in many ways bad. It is tropey. The writing is often just getting the job done. The villains are clunky. Many of the characters are shallow. But it's got a mean narrative drive. And for sure, this just makes it easier to skate past the holes, which then rear their heads once you've finished the book. But I think there's at least potential here. I can't recommend the book in a world in which, as Emberling points out, there's so much else that's better that's been done in this exact field. But there is something here.


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:dunno: I don't really know what is and isn't YA anymore. Ebooks aren't segregated. It read to me like a wash of Eddingsian diction and superficial grimdark on top of the basic Girl of Fire and Thorns/Graceling/etc framework. And I just don't expect to see female-led bildungsroman in the adult fantasy section anymore.

(Note: swearing does not mean much re: YA status. Tithe has enough fucks to power a fuck-fueled rocket to the fucking fuckmoon, and it came out twelve years ago.)

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I too would be very interested to know how the book is doing, not that there's any way we can really figure that out. Amazon is shitty for this kind of information to the point that it's basically a non-source, I know, believe me, but I do think that checking the number of amazon reviews might suggest very generally whether the book has been taken up by a community. Tearling has 202 as of this writing and it came out in early July I think, which is amazing, but my rough impression is that's definitely not in the top ranks of ya engagement -- it's pretty awesome for a fantasy aimed at adults. So my totally making-shit-up-based-on-limited-evidence uneducated guess would be that it's doing awesome by the standards of most fantasy releases, and that any publisher that had bought the book for a more normal-but-still-good deal for a fantasy series, however much that is these days, would be on their knees thanking God, but that it is not perhaps shifting the units hoped for in this case of the seven-figure advance and the movie development deal.



Edit: Occurred to me after posting that Goodreads would be at least a little better as a metric for this very inexact test of community [i don't go there often, so didn't think of it.] Tearling has 3474 ratings two months into its life, but I've got no idea how good that is. Half a King, another sorta-kinda ya-ish "crossover," came out around the same time and has 4015 ratings, but it's Joe Abercrombie's seventh novel and has the benefit of a legion of Abercrombites so the comparison doesn't really hold. Should Tearling's huge marketing push be propelling it further? No idea. Someone's gone to the trouble of making Tearling a wiki page, but it's not super-detailed in a way that screams to me that it's a fannish army's labour of love. It just doesn't feel to me like the book -- though it's doing wonderfully commercially -- is building up a devoted legion that will, in crass terms, propel the series to truly mad money, but that's purely anecdotal and not worth anything; I probably just don't frequent the right places on the webs.



On its ya-ness: Yeah, shrug, dunno. Amazon is pushing some stuff that definitely looks to me to be marketed as ya to people who go to Tearling's page, but it's also packaging it with two of the Harkness books, which are not ya. The publisher is Harper; do they have a specific ya line? It seems to be being marketed in a way that slips fluidly back and forth across the artificial line -- maybe because its girl-becomes-powerful-monarch-and-fights-evil arc is just so associated with ya these days, and is not identified with something that happens in fantasy for the adult market, which is creepy. But basically I am not educated on this topic and I have no idea what they're doing here, and the way the book is being positioned on online retailers doesn't make it immediately clear I don't think.



On swearing: That's interesting, thanks. I did not know that about Tithe -- it has been on my list for a long time, as I like Black and I like celtic / faerie stuff, but I haven't gotten to it yet. When the book started dropping fucks I definitely didn't immediately assume it couldn't be ya, but I admit I was kind of surprised to see motherfucker and "cunt" in something being marketed as ya in, it seems, at least some contexts. [black's most recent ya novel, The Coldest Girl in Coldtown, is notably fuck-free; I just checked quickly.]


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Harper has several YA lines: HarperTeen, Balzer+Bray, Katherine Tegen, Greenwillow. But their adult fantasy usually goes under Voyager, sometimes Wm Morrow if it's mainstreamish (Gaiman). Most of what's in my collection under the bare Harper imprint is YA by established adult authors (Gaiman, Kelley Armstrong, Kim Harrison). So intentional crossover seems most likely.

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