giving up on GRACELING and why I'm done with YA

I got through 38 pages of Graceling before calling it quits. This isn’t because it’s an offensive book in any way. It’s because the writing, in two words, is intolerably shit.

Now you may tell me that it’s an excellent, pro-feminist book; you may tell me Katsa is a fantastic character with believable whatever. And you know, I believe you, really I do. I believe it’s a pro-feminist book, reviews of it have suggested it is so. I’m sure you enjoyed it and have perfectly valid reasons to love it. I recognize that a girl-positive novel is important, especially a YA one.

But to me personally and individually it isn’t enough; Feminism 101 is all well and good, but I’m not obliged to love it when it’s done up in mediocrity and generic setting by an author who as far as I can tell has no grasp on narrative structure or characterization whatsoever, and who harbors not a single original thought in her pages. If I’d felt such an obligation, I would have finished Malinda Lo’s Huntress, and if nothing else “East Asian lesbians who do stuff” is a far more interesting premise than “straight white girl who can kill with bare hands zzzz.” I’m just not that desperate. I’ve read Carter and Valente and Sedia, and just freshly I’ve come away from Helen Oyeyemi. Not only do these authors handle feminism at a more nuanced, more mature level, they can actually write–and whatever you may think of Cashore’s prose, you’ll probably agree that she doesn’t stand a chance next to Helen Oyeyemi or Nalo Hopkinson. It’s not that because Oyeyemi and Hopkinson exist Cashore doesn’t need to, it’s just that I’ve read better than Graceling. I’ve just read better, and on a personal level I find no reason to settle for something so direly third-rate when I’ve far from exhausted the first-rate stuff.

So this isn’t going to be a review. I’m just going to share my annotations on the book.

But if she left him, he would find the others she’d felled and raise the alarm. She struck him once, hard, on the back of the head, and he slumped and let out a puff of air. She caught him and lowered him to the ground, as gently as she could, and then dropped a pill into his mouth. She took a moment to run her fingers along the lump forming on his skull. She hoped his head was strong.

She had killed once by accident, a memory she held close to her consciousness. It was how her Grace had announced its nature, a decade ago.

My note: “Terrible break into flashback.” So begins my conviction that Kristin Cashore knows fuck-all about pacing. This is the first scene in the book, where Katsa is knocking guards out; having dropped an elderly guard–for whom her heart bleeds; more on that later–she pauses to reminisce about being eight and discovering her “Grace.” When the flashback is done, she’s confronted by another Graceling and they fight.

This leads into a break between action that lasts 930 words. I would guess about four pages in paperback. It’s like a run-on sentence that pauses midway through and changes its subject; by the time you are done with it you no longer remember what it was about, and have to go back to reread and parse the sentence. Not that there’s a hard-and-fast rule about breaking up an action sequence with a flashback, it’s just that Cashore’s take on it is so tragically incompetent; the flashback is an expository vomit. It’s not fun. It doesn’t establish Katsa’s voice (she has none–none of the characters, as far as I read, possesses anything remotely resembling a distinct voice). It simply sets down a bunch of factoids that read like they were ripped out of a prologue Cashore was told to drop by an editor who informed her YA audiences have no attention span and can only be interested if a book starts with an action scene, Hollywood-style.

Her uncle Randa, King of the Middluns

Katsa’s uncle, Randa, King of the Middluns

My note: “Fuck, we got that the first time.” This is why I hate YA writing. The watered-down lowest-common-denominator pandering to readers with no reading comprehension. The need to explain everything. The 24/7 anvil-dropping.

THEY REACHED Randa City before the sun did, but only just.

My note: “Do they change capital names every king or is he immortal??” The first, but far from the last, clue that Kristin Cashore doesn’t really think her settings through.

“The Lady Katsa, is it?”
“Yes, Lord Prince.”
“I’ve heard you have one eye green as the Middluns grasses, and the other eye blue as the sky.”
“Yes, Lord Prince.”

My note: “Blah blah blah Aryan eyes so pretty who gives a shit.”

KATSA RAN past houses and work shacks, shops and inns. The city was waking, and the streets smelled of baking bread. She ran past the milkman, half asleep on his cart, his horse sighing before him.

My note: “Her other grace is superhuman running?”

When the trees began, Katsa slowed.

My note: “This actually makes no sense.” It really doesn’t. I know what the author is trying to say, but the problem is that trees don’t move unless they’re actually meant to be ents, so by juxtaposing Katsa’s drop in speed with stationary trees you… get nonsense. And the idea that the author can’t really write.

Randa wanted a bloody, anguished spectacle, and he expected her to furnish it. Katsa set out with Oll and a convoy of soldiers. When the soldiers caught the underlord, they dragged him to the square of the nearest village, where a scattering of startled people watched, slack jawed. Katsa instructed the soldiers to make the man kneel. In one motion she snapped his neck. There was no blood; there was no more than an instant’s pain.

My note: “But where does she get her sense of morality??” I begin to suspect that Katsa rolled Chaotic Good but when the DM told her she has to be a king’s assassin she threw a shitfit. There doesn’t seem to exist a viable explanation as to where she obtained her bleeding-heart squeaky-clean sense of ethics, since she’s taken in by eight and trained from then. The dribblingly dull exposition vomit of 930 words doesn’t suggest that she had a mentor who tutored her in the ways of right and wrong. The idea that a sense of morality can form in a vacuum didn’t fly when I read those shitty Drizzt Do’Urden books. It sure isn’t going to fly now.

Katsa couldn’t say where the notion had come from, but once it pushed its way into her mind, it would not leave. What might she be capable of – if she acted of her own volition and outside Randa’s domain? It was something she thought about, something to distract herself as she broke fingers for Randa and twisted men’s arms from their sockets. And the more she considered the question, the more urgent it became, until she thought she would blaze up and burn from the frustration of not doing it.

My note: “Where does it come from indeed. Fucking lazy writer.” To this end, building an organization that would subvert her uncle’s tyranny or whatever, she enlists his spymaster. You know. His trusted spymaster.

He was used to bringing his information to Randa so Randa could decide what action to take. But he saw her side of it eventually, slowly, once he understood that Katsa was determined to do this thing with or without him, and once he convinced himself that it would do the king no harm not to know every move his spymaster made.

…who we are given no reason to believe would want to contradict his king. Has Randa wronged him? No clue. Is he fed up with Randa’s ruthlessness? Dunno. As far as I can tell, this Oll dude just decides to kinda-sorta tag along because he has nothing better to do. A fine motivation to join a high-treason underground resistance if ever there was one.

There was an atmosphere of adventure at the meetings, of dangerous freedom. It felt like play, too wonderful, Katsa thought sometimes, to be real. Except that it was real. They didn’t just talk about subversion; they planned it and carried it out.

You know this might be believable if it occurred as part of Katsa’s character development midway through the book, like how she tires of all this killing or if there’s some sort of catalyst that changes the way she thinks. But there isn’t. It’s just convenient. It’s just kind of shittily, lazily written. It’s almost as if she and Oll both rolled Chaotic Good and decided they would stick to this alignment come hell or high water. There doesn’t seem to be any other humanly comprehensible reason as to why they’re acting the way they are.

Inevitably over time they attracted allies outside the court. The virtuous among Randa’s borderlords, who were tired of sitting around while neighboring villages were plundered. Lords from the other kingdoms, and their spies. And bit by bit, the people – innkeepers, blacksmiths, farmers. Everyone was tired of the fool kings. Everyone was willing to take some small risk to lessen the damage of their ambition and disorder and lawlessness.

…and acting according to their D&D alignment, I would guess, is just the way everyone in this book rolls. The borderlords aren’t acting out of avarice or selfishness or even from having been wronged by Randa in some way, no. They’re throwing their lot in with Katsa’s treasonous underground resistance because, well golly, they’re decent people okay? In fact they are virtuous. Everyone else, why, they are virtuous too. Nobody tries to sell out anybody for a chance at earning a king’s favor or getting more lands. No internal conflict. Perfect harmony. Join hands and sing kumbaya! It’s a weird playground morality that would come across badly even in Baby’s First D&D Campaign. It’s so unreal and rather juvenile.

And, after 38 pages, I have no idea who any of these people are or why I should give even one fuck. Katsa despite being the protagonist doesn’t have a personality that I can discern, and seems to be nice only because the author lacks the guts to write a heroine with less than perfect morals. Giddon is… actually I have no idea who he is, what he does, or what his motivations are. Much the same goes for Oll. Nobody has a personality, their dialogue tells me nothing, their interactions are dead and I can’t exert myself to give one single solitary shit. Of note, chapter two begins with this massive info-dump that goes on for 821 words in an attempt to explain the plot. What plot there is.

It was a land of seven kingdoms. Seven kingdoms, and seven thoroughly unpredictable kings. [...] The Lienid people didn’t have enemies. They shipped their gold to whoever had the goods to trade for it; they grew their own fruit and bred their own game; they kept to themselves on their island, an ocean removed from the other six kingdoms. They were different. They had a distinctive dark-haired look and distinctive customs, and they liked their isolation. King Ror of Lienid was the least troublesome of the seven kings. He made no treaties with the others, but he made no war, and he ruled his own people fairly.

[...]

In truth, Randa usually took care not to involve himself with the other kingdoms. His kingdom sat between Estill and Wester on one axis and between Nander and Sunder on the other. It was a position too tenuous for alliances.

The kings of Wester, Nander, and Estill – they were the source of most of the trouble.

And on and on it goes in this vein, all dull, all bland, all turgid, all absolutely stunningly uninteresting and without a SINGLE SOLITARY DROP OF ORIGINALITY. All written in this flat, banal style that suggests a reading level of ten-year-olds, if that. The author seems to go out of her way to avoid compound sentences and words longer than, like, three fucking syllables. It’s awful. It’s intolerably awful. There’s nothing redeeming in the prose, the dialogue, the characterization, the setting. Nothing.

Sorry, Kristin Cashore; I tried. It’s not me. You just aren’t good enough.

Posted by acrackedmoon on March 21, 2012

http://requireshate.wordpress.com/2012/03/21/giving-up-on-graceling-and-why-im-done-with-ya/