Review - Graceling, by Kirsten Cashore

There's a trap waiting for the unwary author. It's that of wanting to make their lead character someone likeable and worthy of respect. The reason it's a trap, is because it can lead to 'projecting' a strong and powerful lead character, who just gets on with things and saves the day. It's an even deeper hole to fall in in a fantasy setting (perhaps even more so than Sci-fi) because you've control of the rules of your world. You can make your lead character supremely powerful.

That's not always a problem, but you're making your life harder by doing so - because you can no longer tell a story of adversity and discovery and growth, without really layering the 'adversity' on thick. Which ... well, you still have control of the world, so you can just invent that adversity, but then you start getting dangerously close to breaking that suspense of disbelief implicit upon the reader.
Get two characters, and have one shout MY POWER IS 9000. And another shout MY POWER IS OVER 9000!. Yeah. Great.
So no one's really interested in Superman's fairly average day. Superman flying up a tree to rescue a kitten isn't a story, it's background flavour.

Unfortunately, I think that's the trap that this book falls into. The setting is one where some characters are 'Graced' with ability beyond normal, to supernatural levels. The Graceling of the title. This delivered a measure promise, as you can develop themes of unfairness, discrimination, explore the nature of what it means to be a person - when does one cross the line of 'being human' when blessed/cursed by magic?

Sadly, it doesn't deliver. The lead character - Katsa - is a bit of a Mary Sue. Doesn't make a mistake, has a Grace that means most of the challenges she faces ... well, aren't really. The love interest almost does the same thing.

It's actually quite a reasonable story, or would be if it weren't for the lead characters intrinsic awesomeness - so the antagonist ends up being inflated in terms of power level, to present a threat, and it just sort of strays into the realm where there's no real feeling of accomplishment with the plot resolution, because it wasn't - the power levels were too high, and one person just managed to get lucky. More or less, anyway.

And by the same token, there's not really much of a growth as a character, because she's already powerful, and moral, and the only real change is ... almost trivial as a result.

The eternal problem when writing your own universe - keeping it self consistent, and resisting the temptation to iteratively 'trump' the epic powerlevel.

Despite all that, I won't call it a bad book - I didn't take long to read it, and it was something of a light bite, but it's not badly written by any means.
It's just more the kind of book I'd leave on the shelf in the bathroom - ok to read 10 pages at a time whilst on the loo, and not the end of the world if you get caught short one day.

All the fun of the fantasy

Fantasies are fun. I sometimes think about being able to fly. How it might feel to be able to push off from the ground, feel the air support me like water, and be able to take flight, and swoop and soar effortlessly above the trees.
But despite that, I'm not going to throw myself off a building.

Or sometimes I look at someone, and fantasize about being able to explode their head with the power of my mind. OK, maybe I have actually tried that one, but trust me, it works about as well as trying to fly would.
Actually, what is kind of fun, is to get a kiwi fruit, or an egg and put it in the microwave. Picture someone you really dislike in there, and glare at it, willing to explode, chortling in glee when it actually does. You can even draw little faces on the eggs too. But be prepared to have to clean your microwave afterwards.

Anyway, fantasies are fun - escapism, entertainment, whatever. But it's when you start to stop thinking of them as fantasies that they can become harmful - leaping from a bridge, to find out the hard way that actually, you can't fly.

But if you think about it, we're presented with a fantasy on a daily basis - in adverts, magazines, papers, TV programs, films - we're given the fantasy of the pretty physique. Think if you will, when was the last time you saw someone 'average' looking in a lead role? When was the last time you saw someone 'a bit tubby' as anything other than a comedy sidekick?
That simply doesn't reflect what you see as you walk down the street.

That's ok, as long as it stays as much a fantasy as being able to fly is. I mean, it'd take quite a lot of surgery to get me to look like Angelina Jolie.

But it's quite a good trick if you think about it - take a straw poll around the office about what's 'pretty' and you'll get a fairly consistent opinion. The reason it's a trick, is because for the last hundred years or so, we've been _told_ what 'pretty' is supposed to look like. We've been presented with these fantasies, over and over as if they were fact. As if 'real' is everyone looking like glamour models.

But it's good marketing - I mean, if you didn't have something unattainable to aspire to, then you wouldn't buy their stuff. The hair care products know their thing is ... basically just shampoo, but they'll _imply_ that by using their ultra max sooper dooper thingy doodad with real science mixed in, you'll become that unattainable beautiful figure.

If you take the same straw poll around the office though, and ask the question of what is 'sexy' or what is 'beautiful' you'll get some quite different answers. The reason's actually quite simple - sexy is about personality. It's about confidence. It's about ... a whole load of things that don't actually have a lot to do with how you look.

Beauty is even more difficult to 'market'. It's very literally in the eye of the beholder - "Beauty is a characteristic of a person, animal, place, object, or idea that provides a perceptual experience of pleasure, meaning, or satisfaction".
Pretty much by definition, therefore, it's impossible to have an objective measure of beauty, as something that is beautiful is something that you love. And in loving something - or someone - you cannot help but find beauty.

In English, that's where we start to trip up - we've only really got one word for 'love' and ... well, it means different things depending on how and where we use it.
Loving a brother has a different meaning from loving a friend, or loving a partner, or loving a leader, or loving a place, or loving a song, or loving an idea.
But they're still facets of the same thing. The sense of attraction and attachment that makes us feel good. The sense of something more, that drives us to accept and forgive something for what it is.

You can go to a pub, have a pleasant evening surrounded by friends and acquaintances. The difference is that a friend is a person who will forgive you your bad days. An acquaintance is someone who doesn't really see a need to do so.

But love doesn't sell cars. Love doesn't sell hair care products. Love doesn't let you be unhappy with something - love has so much bound up in it, that it's impossible to really define, but part of what it has is a sense of acceptance - you cannot love something, and ask it to become something else. You cannot love someone conditionally.
And you cannot love who you are conditionally either.

So if you think about it, you'll never see an advert for love or for beauty. But you'll see plenty for 'pretty' - and if they can convince you that 'pretty' is all that there is, then you'll be the one left chasing the unattainable, and forever discontent (and giving money to the companies trying to sell you the dream)