Okay. The Privilege of the Sword is a Twenty Years After sort of sequel to Swordspoint, which as can be seen I read immediately before (since the two were actually released very close to 20 years apart realtime, I'm sure that from a longtime fan's point of view I am an unconscionable cheat for not getting around to it until I wouldn't need to wait at all for Privilege afterward). Katherine, the protagonist, is summoned to the unnamed capital city by her uncle, the Mad Duke Tremontaine; she daydreams about a very traditional young lady's introduction to society, but the Duke, being Mad, proposes to dress her in trousers and train her in swordsmanship, heretofore an exclusively masculine occupation. I liked Swordspoint a lot -- it was clever, well-executed, and charmingly atypical -- but Privilege won me over totally, so much and so viscerally so that I've been kind of at a loss as to how to write about it.
So here's a review that's a little more skewed to the stuff I can talk about analytically than was my actual reading experience. A lot of what made it wonderful for me, I think, was the way that it played off of and expanded on the first book; especially, the changes that Katherine effects just by being there. Where everyone in Swordspoint was to varying degrees brutal, politically sophisticated, and mentally unbalanced, Katherine is naive, straightforward, and naturally decent; her voice is sufficient to shift the genre from bloody and decadent fantasy of manners to coming of age YA, albeit without the safety mechanisms that ordinarily function in that genre to keep sex and violence out of the view of the story proper. And she is a hero, upset by injustice and strongly motivated to correct it, in the way that nobody in Swordspoint can be said to be (though some of them have personal codes). As well as its making her likeable to me, in a way that more morally cautious protagonists are only ever merely interesting, it's also fascinating to watch the way that her enemies, and her uncle's, continually make missteps in predicting what they will do because they have failed to consider this difference in motivations. Her heroism, and his madness, mean that neither can be counted upon to prioritize in ways that others in their aristocratic social world take for granted.
Her presence also allows the book to function as a feminist rebuttal, and isn't it wonderful to see an author writing that sort of answer to her own work? Partway through reading Swordspoint it occurred to me that, although this was a book with a lot of sex in it (though few if any sex scenes) and not a lot of heteronormativity, since it's an important worldbuilding detail that it's not considered surprising or outre for men to have male lovers, I hadn't seen any acknowledgement of the possibility that women might sleep with one another. On consideration, I decided that this was probably due to two factors: first, that all of the POV characters (with one brief exception that I can recall) were male, and so they probably weren't in a position to see that this was going on; second, that all the sex in the book outside of the main couple is political, as much about power and social advantage as it is about attraction, and these things are concentrated almost exclusively in the hands of the men. (There is one politically potent woman in the book, but even she wields her influence through the men she sleeps with, maintaining a respectable veneer of disinterest in politics.)
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Okay. The Privilege of the Sword is a Twenty Years After sort of sequel to Swordspoint, which as can be seen I read immediately before (since the two were actually released very close to 20 years apart realtime, I'm sure that from a longtime fan's point of view I am an unconscionable cheat for not getting around to it until I wouldn't need to wait at all for Privilege afterward). Katherine, the protagonist, is summoned to the unnamed capital city by her uncle, the Mad Duke Tremontaine; she daydreams about a very traditional young lady's introduction to society, but the Duke, being Mad, proposes to dress her in trousers and train her in swordsmanship, heretofore an exclusively masculine occupation. I liked Swordspoint a lot -- it was clever, well-executed, and charmingly atypical -- but Privilege won me over totally, so much and so viscerally so that I've been kind of at a loss as to how to write about it.
So here's a review that's a little more skewed to the stuff I can talk about analytically than was my actual reading experience. A lot of what made it wonderful for me, I think, was the way that it played off of and expanded on the first book; especially, the changes that Katherine effects just by being there. Where everyone in Swordspoint was to varying degrees brutal, politically sophisticated, and mentally unbalanced, Katherine is naive, straightforward, and naturally decent; her voice is sufficient to shift the genre from bloody and decadent fantasy of manners to coming of age YA, albeit without the safety mechanisms that ordinarily function in that genre to keep sex and violence out of the view of the story proper. And she is a hero, upset by injustice and strongly motivated to correct it, in the way that nobody in Swordspoint can be said to be (though some of them have personal codes). As well as its making her likeable to me, in a way that more morally cautious protagonists are only ever merely interesting, it's also fascinating to watch the way that her enemies, and her uncle's, continually make missteps in predicting what they will do because they have failed to consider this difference in motivations. Her heroism, and his madness, mean that neither can be counted upon to prioritize in ways that others in their aristocratic social world take for granted.
Her presence also allows the book to function as a feminist rebuttal, and isn't it wonderful to see an author writing that sort of answer to her own work? Partway through reading Swordspoint it occurred to me that, although this was a book with a lot of sex in it (though few if any sex scenes) and not a lot of heteronormativity, since it's an important worldbuilding detail that it's not considered surprising or outre for men to have male lovers, I hadn't seen any acknowledgement of the possibility that women might sleep with one another. On consideration, I decided that this was probably due to two factors: first, that all of the POV characters (with one brief exception that I can recall) were male, and so they probably weren't in a position to see that this was going on; second, that all the sex in the book outside of the main couple is political, as much about power and social advantage as it is about attraction, and these things are concentrated almost exclusively in the hands of the men. (There is one politically potent woman in the book, but even she wields her influence through the men she sleeps with, maintaining a respectable veneer of disinterest in politics.)
[Continued in reply]