Of Swords and Parasols

In Cashore’s pseudo-medieval world, there are people with mismatched eyes called Gracelings. Each Graceling has a special gift, a Grace, that makes them excel at a certain thing. Though most Graces are things like cooking or detecting changes in the weather or an affinity for languages or animals-things normal people have, but taken to an extreme-there are rare Graces such as mind reading or suggestion that sometimes manifest. Our heroine, Katsa, has the Grace of killing.

Katsa’s Grace manifested itself when she unintentionally killed a man she felt threatened by at the dinner table as a child. As this was her uncle’s dinner table and her uncle is the king of Randa, it was quite the spectacle, and resulted in the king raising her to be his assassin, torturer, and executioner, often giving her explicit instructions about how an offender should suffer before dying. As all Gracelings in Randa belong to the king, Katsa has no choice to obey, despite how much she hates it. In rebellion, she starts an secret organization devoted to helping people, along with her scholarly cousin, Raffin. On one of these missions, she rescues an elderly prince (he’s the son of the former King of Lienid and the father of the current one) of a neighboring kingdom from yet another king (there are seven kingdoms). This causes her to cross paths with Po, a Graceling from Lienid, where Gracelings aren’t slaves, who was searching for the prince. Through Po, she starts to question why she should stay confined in a life she hates that no one can hold her to.

I love that Katsa is icy and untrusting and isolated and has few social skills, and that it’s the open and friendly guy (though, in his way, he’s just as isolated as she is) that draws her out of his shell, and I like the revelations about their graces. I also like that Katsa doesn’t want to get married or have kids and doesn’t change her mind just because she finds a suitable sperm donor. While the actual world is a rather basic pseudo-medieval one, Cashore’s ideas and characters manage to make it fresh. Unfortunately, the strength of the concept is greater than the strength of the writing. The prose is rather flat and uninspired, and the naming is also rather random. Not enough to bring down the book as a whole, but enough to bog it down at times (particularly the middle) and to keep the characters from shining as brightly as they might otherwise. It also suffers from a villain who is almost comedic in his villainy. You know how the easiest shortcut ever to establishing a character as evil is to have the character kick puppies? This is more along the lines of kicking the puppies and then cutting them up while they whimper*. The purpose of his villainy is no more original, and doesn’t seem to warrant as big a plot as it has.

All that said, this is a first book, and these problems are no worse than many a first book has, and the ideas of the characters and plot are strong enough to overcome problems in the actual execution. While there’s room for further adventures, Graceling wraps up Katsa’s story nicely, and it looks like Cashore plans to write about other people in the setting, instead of just following Katsa’s adventures. Looking at Cashore’s website, it seems that the next book is set 30 years earlier and covers the villain’s origins. While that doesn’t particularly interest me, it doesn’t seem to be the main focus of the book. The third book, however, is apparently set several years later and is about my favorite character, who shows up later in Graceling and is something of a spoiler, and so I anticipate it greatly.

*Disclaimer: No, there are no scenes of anything like this. Just in case you were worried.