This book is a trainwreck and yet I love it so much?
The plot doesn't make sense! There's far too much nudge-nudge wink-wink nonsense going on, either This book is a trainwreck and yet I love it so much?
The plot doesn't make sense! There's far too much nudge-nudge wink-wink nonsense going on, either in terms of 'I'm bored let's make Ethan uncomfortable' or 'another oblique reference to the main series'. All of the homophobic slurs and such feel painfully out of date on board a goddamn space station, especially since the other half of the time everyone just shrugs and continues being vaguely uninterested in other people's sexuality. Somewhere just past midway we spiralled into the realms of 'really fucking weird' and the ending is one enormous clusterfuck of WHAT
I received an ARC of this book on the expectation of an honest review. Unfortunately sometimes an honest review is not a good review, and I can in allI received an ARC of this book on the expectation of an honest review. Unfortunately sometimes an honest review is not a good review, and I can in all honesty say that I could not recommend this book to anyone.
The main reasons for my poor review are as follows: I found Starborn to be badly written, badly plotted, badly characterised, ineffectual and poorly imagined as a novel, and I was extremely angry about the way the book handled 1. the threat of sexual violence against female characters, 2. the only canon queer character and 3. the only canon disabled character. As a whole, the novel is hugely sketchy on consent in any situation, and falls into many terrible fantasy tropes I haven't seen widespread use of since the 1990's.
I'm extremely disappointed that Tor not only published this but is promoting it as one of their big debuts of this year.
The rest of this review will explain certain points of the plot (such as it is) and although I'm not going to give a blow-by-blow of everything that happens, as such the entire thing is going under a spoiler tag.
The prose is clumsy to poor but I would have accepted it as a first novel effort if what was being described was in any way engaging. The only time the writing elicited any kind of emotional reaction - other than frustration - from me was at two brief moment when the action spiralled suddenly into Unbelievably Creepy. More on that later.
The world building is not wholly un-salvageable, just thinner than I like and inconsistent in it's delivery. Using what is essentially a history essay full of made-up words and convoluted sentence structures as your prologue is a bold move that straight-up did not work for me in any way, shape or form. I also wasn't able to suss out any kind of pattern or cultural identity in any of the made-up words, so I never transitioned into believing these were actually the names of places or people. Some of the decisions made spoke either of a massive lack of research (the horses ride all night and then all the next day with only a short break, and the main character notes that they don't seem particularly tired, and then a little later on the characters can only ride very slowly towards their destination because the horses will get tired - or rather because they needed to move slower so a plot point could catch up with them) or... I honestly don't know? Winner of the most bizarrely incoherent piece of world building is a toss-up between the airships (of course airships) that can only travel along set routes because they're chained to rails between the different landing stages, for... reasons? (This one probably doesn't win because I can almost see how that would be a cool idea if more had been done with it, although absolutely no mention was made of how come this aggressively medieval-low-fantasy world has airships) or the fact that the main character doesn't know what bacon is. Yes, we get a whole scene - in a book which largely doesn't mention the actual day-to-day business of life - where the main character watches someone magically cooking bacon, and then they eat the bacon, all the while aggressively not using the word bacon.
Because airships are fine but what is this mysterious thinly sliced pork. I was completely mystified by the fact that this character, who had grown up in a rural tavern, apparently did not know what bacon was to the point that I didn't pay any attention to the magic. Which was probably just as well given how it wasn't time for the plot to talk about the magic yet.
Which brings me on to the plot. Largely, the plot lacked focus and drive. It wasn't a bad plot - certainly by two thirds of the way through, at the point at which I genuinely hated myself for continuing to read this book, the plot started to do some things I could recognise as somewhat interesting and unexpected (I think I was supposed to realise they had been foreshadowed, but they really hadn't. This book can't pull off foreshadowing) but it just - happened. Mechanically. Things happened because the plot outline said 'now this thing happens', not because it felt like a natural progression of the story. In all honesty, this should have meant that the book had decent enough pacing and hit the major plot beats - if the plot had been formulaic, I could have dealt with it. But it was badly paced and meandering to the point of aimless. This is how come we have two mysterious characters turning up, speaking cryptically to the main character, and then leaving abruptly in immediate succession - and I do mean immediate succession, there's only a few pages and absolutely no plot movement between the conversation with Kait in the tavern and the conversation with Medavle (how on earth are you supposed to pronounce that anyhow) outside, and then they both disappear entirely for a third of the book before reappearing on the other side of the world. A side-effect of this mechanically driven plot is that characters appear in certain places because they need to deliver a particular piece of information to the reader, not because it makes any sense for them to be there - the biggest example of this is how Jhren (yeah, not sure how to pronounce that one either), the main character's childhood best friend (we know this because she told us so, repeatedly) turns up in the nearest town just as she decides to run away, expressly it seems for the purpose of telling her that he's marrying someone else and there's nothing left for her. That was the most obvious of the clumsy deus-ex-machina devices in this book, but it certainly wasn't the only one.
In case this wasn't already clear, the weakest part of Starborn - which is not a strong book - was the characters. None of them seemed to have any kind of distinguishing voice - I could not tell their dialogue apart. They didn't appear to have any motivations or drive. They were marionettes, being shoved around to make the plot happen according to the outline on paper. I found I cared just enough about Bregenne to hate the way she was treated by the plot (more on that later) but that was about it. I would have disliked the main character, Kyndra, if I'd actually been able to think about her as a person rather than a writing mechanism - all this plot has to happen to someone! - because the decisions she made were entirely nonsensical. Not asking questions until three chapters after something happens because that piece of information can't be revealed just yet. Not realising plot points that were entirely obvious until it was time for her to act on that information. Telling her entire life story and trusting implicitly someone who just assaulted her! (More on THAT later too)
So, that is why Starborn is bad. Now, this is why it's awful and made me furious, which - fair warning - does not involve actual rape but is going to get pretty goddamn squicky:
Firstly, let's talk about what happens to Kyndra. She's been brought to the super-secret invisible magic mountain and is awaiting a test to see whether or not she's got magical powers (I'm being slightly flippant - slightly). Kyndra is studying in the library when three students enter - one is the young girl she met a chapter or so ago who she 'just instinctively knew she could trust' (that's not a direct quote but it might as well be) and her two male friends.
Both young men proceed to mock and belittle Kyndra (who is clearly upset and angry, one of the few times Kyndra actually displays a genuine emotion) and then one of them forcefully immobilises and silences her through magic, climbs on top of her and kisses her on the mouth.
Remember how I mentioned that the writing in this book becomes alarmingly competent at only the creepiest moments? This is one of them. It's deeply, viscerally upsetting. Kyndra is entirely powerless and the man's intentions are very clearly to humiliate and hurt her.
That's not what made me angry. What made me angry was that the very next time they meet, Kyndra tells the two men her entire life story. And becomes their friend. And nobody suffers any repercussions for this at all.
It's entirely like the book is saying "Yes you basically sexually assaulted this girl but we know you're essentially a good person so that's fine". And it's not. It's really not.
The other moment of 'unsettlingly creepy and upsetting and also when did the writing become competent in this novel' involves the only canon queer character, Janus. Get it? Janus, the two faced god?
Janus is a minor villain. He's pretty, he's not very competent and mostly ineffectual, he's sneaky and slippery and a liar, his entire job in the plot is to pretend to be the main character's friend and then betray her, and he's madly in lust with an older more powerful man who's using his attraction to manipulate Janus into doing whatever he wants. Their conversation is the aforementioned creepy creepy but semi-competently written scene, in which for three pages the novel becomes insanely queasy simpering sexual tension.
If you're thinking that Janus sounds sort of familiar, then congratulations! You also read all the awful fantasy novels of the 1990's that I did growing up. For literally a decade (and it was a pretty formative decade) this was the only queer representation I saw in fantasy - the soft and effeminate gay male villain - and that is not a place I ever want to go back to. It's not a place we have to go back to! We're better than this! Who read this and thought 'yes okay it's 2015 and this is a reasonable representation of queer people'
Anyhow, this moves me on to Bregenne, who as I mentioned previously was my favourite character (to a vastly reduced quantity of 'favourite'. Least indifferent, perhaps). Bregenne should have been great - she's an older woman, a powerful mentor figure (who quite frankly should not be casually disrespected throughout the entire novel by her peers in the way that she is, but that kind of background radiation pales in comparison to what I'm about to talk about) and she's disabled for most of the novel. She's completely blind, but has adapted her magic powers to allow her to sense her surrounding in some situations. It has limitations, but generally speaking she's a really good representation of a disabled person who is powerful and has adventures. I am 100% here for a book about disabled women being powerful and having adventures.
When Bregenne, Kyndra and Bregenne's younger male work partner (who is of course madly in love with her, a relationship I was dissatisfied with the execution of but pretty much happy with it's general trajectory right up until the final chapter when everything went horribly horribly wrong) return to the super-secret magic mountain where the magic people live, one of the first things that happens is that we establish one of the minor male characters is creepily obsessed with Bregenne.
He corners Bregenne in her bedroom, while she's in her nightdress, and proceeds to embrace and fondle her while saying generally creepy and unpleasant things like "You want this really". Because Bregenne is a semi-competently written awesome character, Bregenne blasts him in the face with magic and orders him out of her bedroom. Because Bregenne also suffers from being in a horrible narrative, Bregenne then spends the next few paragraphs fretting about how she shouldn't have worn such revealing clothes. Needless to say, the man in question never gets punished.
While unpleasant, that scene is nowhere near as upsetting as the one with Kyndra, and although I was overall unhappy with how it was handled, it pales in comparison to what happens to her at the end of the book. In the final chapter, Bregenne's younger, male work partner, who is supposed to be madly in love with her, forcibly heals her eyes without her permission, while she screams for him to stop, and this is portrayed as a loving act.
Let me repeat that; the only disabled character in the narrative gets 'fixed' by a younger man, without her consent, because he loves her. Because clearly, he knows better than Bregenne what is the right thing to do with her body. Because clearly, a disabled woman can't be trusted to make her own decisions about her disability, of course she wants to be 'fixed', this can't possibly need negotiating. I cannot convey how unbelievably furious this casual ableism made me. Like it wasn't bad enough that the only character that was in some way compelling was grossly mistreated by the plot at every opportunity, but had to be denied agency of her own body specifically because she was disabled.
In case you didn't have enough of a bad taste in your mouth, in the final chapter it's also revealed that - brace yourself - Kyndra was conceived because Medavle, a character she also seems to trust for some reason despite the fact that he categorically does terrible things rather than just being quite annoying and a bit of an asshole like every other male authority figure in this book, manipulated the mind of a character who is tactfully described by the book as a madman. When this character appears in the book, his mind is so badly damaged that he's unable to speak, is sometimes violent, and is kept - emphasis on the word 'kept' - in a room with no sharp edges. In case this wasn't weirdly sketchy and upsetting enough, Medavle uses his influence - it's a plot point that would take too long to explain - to convince this character that what he REALLY wants to do is escape from his confines and go have sex with a woman, with the intention of impregnating her.
Because that all sounds completely fine and consensually for everyone involved (Don't worry! Medavle was keeping an eye on him so he wouldn't hurt anyone! I genuinely don't know if that statement - practically a quote - makes it better or worse!)
I feel like most of these points would have been fine if they'd been properly handled - if there had been some satisfying resolution against Bregenne's attacker, if Kyndra had not decided to become besties with the man who assaulted her, if Janus had been a half decent villain instead of a horrible vintage stereotype or you know, not the only queer character, if Kyndra had responded with the kind of revulsion I felt to the news about her parentage instead of going off into the sunset with the man who orchestrated it while the book plays out a 'romantic' postscript between her parents - but even with a proper, consensually discussion I would still have been moderately unhappy about Bregenne's eyes being healed.
As it stands, I think everyone involved in the production and publication of this novel owes me an explanation as to why they think this kind of misogyny, ableism and homophobia warrants publication. (hide spoiler)]...more
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