Frostflower and Thorn/Frostflower and Windbourne by Phyllis Ann Karr

[meganbmoore]

In a world where all warriors are women and sorcerers and sorceresses lose their powers if they have sex 9a trope that does later get turned on its head quite well), the warrior Thorn finds herself pregnant and desperate to get rid of "the grub" before it interferes with her work.  Meanwhile, the sorceress Frostflower desperately craves a child, and has the ability to accelerate time on a body, allowing the length of an entire pregancy to pass in just a day.  The answer seems simple enough, but while Thorn is escorting Frostflower and the newborn, Starwind, to to the sorceri retreat Frostflower lives at, the two catch the unfortunate attention of a farmer-priest, one of the ruling class, with their unusual situation, and later separate due to a disagreement, with disastrous results.

This is an interesting world.  On the one hand, every fighter in this world is a woman, and the warriors are given the same rights and advantages over men and civilians as male warriors usually are over women and civilians, and it's indicated that sorceresses are more powerful than sorcerers.  In addition, almost every perspective is from that of a female.  (Actually it may be exclusively from various female perspectives.  There's one male character from each book who may have been the focus for a bit.)  On the other hand, the loss of sorcerous power is a much more obvious threat to women, and, in Frostflower and Thorn, at least, the people with the most social and legal power are men.  In addition, rape-public rape-and torture are not only legal practices, but accepted ones.  During one particularly harrowing section of the book, the protagonists are outraged not at the fact that certain terrible things are happening, but at who they're happening to, and they're accepted as the norm, and what's to be accepted in the situation.  It's a kind of immersion in a world that's difficult to pull off.

The tone of Frostflower and Windbourne is a bit different.  There's still acceptance, but more of a sense of it being wrong from the characters than in the world.  In addition, while priests were shown to have far more power and authority than priestesses in Frostflower and Thorn, one of the main conflicts of Frostflower and Windbourne is a power struggle between a priest and priestess.

While I have a few problems-while Thorn doesn't quite code as male, she is portrayed as giving up her femininity to be a strong warrior, and while the friendship between the women is well done, but also mostly follows the standard pattern for male "badass and aggressive warrior x thoughtful mage/scholar/priest" friendships in fantasy, and then, of course, the very sexualized-violently sexualized-approach to the rules of magic-these are all things very specific to when it came out.  (According to the copyright date, Frostflower and Thorn came out a month before I was born.)  While they're dated now (oh, you nature/noun/action-word and combination names...) I suspect they were pretty revolutionary when it first came out, or even 10-15 years ago (though, had I read them then, Frostflower and Thorn likely would have blended in with all the "A fantasy heroine must be raped or have the threat of rape harped on!" books I was tripping over then.

This probably sounds fairly critical, but I don't feel critical about the books as a whole.  While a few  (sometimes major) approaches to gender are the unfortunate norm, in most ways the books do their best to completely overturn them, with some interesting results, and it's very well characterized.  And in an odd way, I rather like that what fondness Thorn has for Starwind seems to come from the fact that Frostflower loves him, rather than having her "give up" the strictly non-maternal characterization she was given at the beginning.

Unfortunately, I can't seem to dig up info on any other novels by Karr.  (Mind you, I have the weakest googlefu known to the internets...)

Comments

[magicnoire.livejournal.com]

I have a lot of the early Sword & Sorceress anthologies edited by Marion Zimmer Bradley and if I recall correctly, there were short stories about Frostflower and Thorn included in them. I'm not sure at one point in the timeline they took place (I don't seem to recall a child) or if those short stories later gave rise to the novel or if those short stories were later incorporated into the novels (as Mercedes Lackey did with her Tarma & Kethry characters into her Valdemar books and Jennifer Roberson did with Keeley into her Shapechanger books). I read those anthologies a lot when I was younger so it might be interesting to look at them again.

(I do think the S&S anthologies might be past their prime at this point. Back when they first came out -- early 80s -- they were pretty revolutionary. But to keep the conversation alive, the stories of swordswomen & sorceresses would need to keep evolving past the rape & revenge tropes and oversexualized structural systems that characterized the fantasy stories of yesteryear. I'm not sure we're seeing that in that particular anthology series anymore, especially if the purpose of the line is to be revolutionary and innovative when it comes to female characters in fantasy fiction.)

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

I think fantasy is on the verge of being like movies, where you seemed to have a period of people actively making the roles bigger and more important, but it drifted into "you have women in the movie, isn't that enough?" I've noticed that the surge of women doing things independently and being the focus is starting to die off a bit (see: how much UF is all about which guy she'll be with).

[magicnoire.livejournal.com]

I kind of think the UF genre is stagnating and in a rut at the moment. Much like stupid farmboy finds the plot coupons who save the world, we have kick-ass* chick kicks butt and has sex.

* Kick-ass here often being the adjective used even when the character in question is not remotely close.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

I can think of a few suppsedly demure Damsels in Distress who could mop the floor with a lot of these "I'm such a big tough fighter chick" characters.

(And what's wrong with farmgirls, huh fantasy? Give them a chance to get the magic sword and learn they're the secret granddaughter of the king who was hidden away from the evil dragon who was prophesied to kill it! Or whatever!)

[usagi-alchemist.livejournal.com]

I'm actually in the process of writing a farmgirl like that. :D

[magicnoire.livejournal.com]

(Sorry! Farmgirls can only become heroes if their farm is burned to the ground, their family killed, and they get raped!)

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

BAH!

[chomiji]

Oh? What about Tiffany Aching?

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

I haven't read it yet myself, but isn't farmgirl-comes-of-age-and-discovers-huge-magical-destiny the whole schtick behind Elisabeth Moon's The Deed of Paksenarion (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0671721046/mumpyslibrary-20)?

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

Hmm,that does sound pretty good. The question is: does she have to get raped to have her adventures?

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

Well, I did give it a shot several years ago after loving Moon's Heris Serrano books (I know I've pimped those out here before, military SF with a female lead and strong focus on female characters, including many that are middle-aged or elderly...how often do you see that?), but bounced off because I wasn't in the mood for modern fantasy when I picked it out of the library, and had to take it back before I got around to feeling like finishing it. I don't remember there being any rape in what little of it I did get through, though -- she runs away from home because she's uninterested in the arranged marriage her father's trying to spring on her, and joins a mercenary company because she always wanted to be a warrior like her cousin. Looks like Baen has that whole first book online (http://www.webscription.net/10.1125/Baen/0671654160/0671654160.htm) if you want to give it a shot for free...

(Also, the friend who'd recced it to me had also recced, but with strong warnings about the content, Robin McKinley's Deerskin, so I really doubt Lela would have neglected to mention if this one was full of rape and trauma too...)

[southerndave.livejournal.com]

This is one author so obscure she doesn't even have an article in Wikipedia.. There are a lot of books under her name in Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/s/qid=1223379021/ref=sr_nr_seeall_12?ie=UTF8&rs=&keywords=phyllis%20ann%20karr&rh=i%3Aaps%2Ck%3Aphyllis%20ann%20karr%2Ci%3Astripbooks) (although I don't know if that link will work; I've given up trying to get a clean search link from Amazon... there's just so much session IDs and crap and associated stuff in the link it's probably not going to want to work).

The book titles do sound vaguely familiar though. I'm fairly sure I haven't actually read them, but I'm sure I've heard them somewhere before.

[chomiji]

Yes, a lot of things about these books don't hold water when examined really closely - especially with the cultural issues. But I liked the personalities, and the interactions often carried the story forward despite the rickety world-building. There are a large number of good female-female interactions in these stories. Frostflower's interactions with the priestess who was trying to get pregnant and who thought she would like having Frostflower as a co-wife were really sad and poignant, for example, and I like the elderly scholar-priestess at the end of the second book, too.

I think that in this era of story-writing, authors were trying to work past the idea that if someone is raped, then it's all over for her.

Thorn's growing fondness for Starwind sort of matches her feelings about Frostflower's dog Dowl ... they're both messy, annoying creatures who can be cute and fun sometimes. I've known both men and women who feel that way about babies!

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I recently re-read them also, and the cultural structures were driving me insane, because the world doesn't hold together when you're coming at it from that angle. XD

Thorn's growing fondness for Starwind sort of matches her feelings about Frostflower's dog Dowl

And I was having more-or-less the same thought about that before I read this comment. XD

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

I am forgiving with sucky worldbuilding with something this old.

Hmm...I left out how, while warriors, sorceri, and normal people had nature/action/noun/adjective-word-and-combination names, the parmer priests and their families had Generic Strung Together Sounds Names.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

The first book was a little too "all women are desperate for children unless they're unwomanly" for my tastes at times.

I think this was well into the "women's adventures start because they were raped" actually, the difference being that Frostflower forgave rather than grew bitter and vengeful.

[ryanitenebrae.livejournal.com]

Uh, I know she wrote a book based on Arthurian legend titled, "The Idylls of the Queen." I had a copy somewhere, but I'm not sure where it ended up.

[bzoppa.livejournal.com]

Fantastic Fiction is my resource. Sometimes it's off (the Douglas Preston/Lincoln Child pages are misleading for the Pendergast books) but mostly it's accurate. Seriously, it's a great site if you haven't used it.

Phyllis Ann Karr (http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/k/phyllis-ann-karr/)

Like magicnoire, I read the Sword & Sorceress books when I was 13-15-ish years old. I think I got one of the books but couldn't get through it. I'm a little surprised you're reading them, I'd think they'd be incredibly dated and you'd find huge issue with them... but it's nice to intersperse other books.

Right now I'm read The Mists of Avalon and I don't hate it like I thought I would. Which is good, I suppose, as the book's nearly 900 pages long.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

They are very dated, but I can look at when something came out and judge it accordingly.

Thanks for the link.