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language: English
country: Grenada
year: 2011
form: novel
genre(s): fantasy
dates read: 15.8.23-16.8.23
Tobias Buckell’s The Executioness responds to a question posed (according to Paolo Bacigalupi’s introduction) by Maureen McHugh: why are there no middle-aged women cast as heroes?
this is a good question! and I love that Tana’s arc over the course of the novel is about embracing her status as folk hero whose reputation is spreading out of control and out of proportion. I love less that the best way he could think of to have a middle-aged woman as the protagonist was to have her be venturing off to save her kidnapped children so she can (presumably) return to the appropriately feminine role of caregiver instead of her new position as “the Executioness”, who singlehandedly defeated four forty four hundred Paikan raiders. thinking back on it, I’m not sure the novel passes the Bechdel test, although there are a few instances where Tana talks to other women (like the time she’s accused of being a man because she’s learning to fight, which in addition to the misogynist and transphobic element of the harrassment also still involves her invoking her children as proof of her womanhood).
it all felt a bit rushed. the world premise is promising: magic somehow triggers the uncontrolled growth of thorned brambles that are slowly covering the world, whose thorns cause those they pierce to be overcome by a deep sleep (from which they often don’t wake up) and which can only be destroyed with axes and fire. magic is, in most places, a capital offense, but people continue to use it and the thorns continue to grow. Tana’s children are kidnapped by religious zealot raiders from the distant city of Paika; armed with her murdered father’s axe and executioner’s hood, she sets out to rescue them.
all of this is good, but nothing gets quite enough space — in particular, the world felt unformed; we get vague allusions to the time before the thorns, but not enough to actually put together a coherent sense of world history. the characterization is also a bit flat, and this is accentuated by the clunky dialogue, like this:
Now, these women at your walls: you’ve ripped their lives from them. They have nothing to live for but revenge. Their daughters, their sons, and their husbands are gone. Their farms are burned, their means of living are nothing but rubble. They are the walking dead, and are animated for one thing only, and that is revenge.
the duplication of “nothing to live for but revenge” / “animated for one thing only, […] revenge” isn’t, like, awful, but it’s also not great. generally this just felt less well edited than Crystal Rain.
so, I don’t know. it was good, but not mind-blowingly good.
moods: dark