3+/5. As this book starts, Sciona Freynan, an extremely talented and driven mage who cares about magic and really nothing else, is going to take the exams to become a Highmage, one of the few elite magicians who is responsible for powering the magic city of Tiran. She's the only girl of her generation to even be asked to take the tests, because she lives in a deeply sexist society, which she knows and hates. Fortunately, she also knows she can ace the exams. However, the sexism of the other mages means that, even as a Highmage, she gets a janitor as a lab assistant, Thomil, who is from an immigrant group called the Kwen that are refugees from a magical Blight that has killed their lands and people; the Kwen are widely regarded to be subhuman. (That is to say, this society is deeply racist as well as deeply sexist!)
I was first recced this book during a conversation I had with someone in RL who said that she felt that
Some Desperate Glory was kind of your run-of-the-mill YA dystopia and recommended this one instead. I also read
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rachelmanija's
take on it, which was a helpful counterpoint to my RL convo. I ended up feeling about it maybe in the middle of the two reactions? I did end up liking it, but I also... thought it was much, much more of your run-of-the-mill YA dystopia than SDG.
Now... I have read a fair amount of YA dystopia for various reasons, and some of it can get incredibly and eye-rollingly anvilicious, where the heroine (it's always a heroine) talks like tumblr posts and the villains kick puppies for fun. This was actually in some sense not that way on the surface, in the sense that Sciona is herself reasonably realistically racist, and there is at least one of the Highmages who is presented as a reasonably nice and not-as-sexist person. However, by the end there is a sufficient divide between the Kwen (who are basically perfect) and Sciona (who is flawed) and pretty much everyone else (super racist) that I was feeling somewhat anvil-icized, even though at the same time I do think that it was much better on this front than the average YA dystopia.
There is a plot twist in the middle which I did not guess (although I did feel rather like I should have, and perhaps would have if I'd really sat down and thought about it) and which I greatly enjoyed. I suspect that one's enjoyment of this book may be predicated on whether one guesses it or not. That part was pretty great, but then I felt that much of the second half of the book was sort of a slog as Sciona then figures out what to do about the plot twist, but it got better once she had her plan in hand. I also did not guess her plan / the ending. I did not think that the book would go there, but it did and I admired it for having the courage of its convictions, and I admired the depiction of Sciona for being extremely consistent all through. I respect that Wang didn't try to make out like Sciona was better or more perfect than she actually was. Though the book, in my opinion, does suffer when compared to SDG, which doesn't just go for character consistency but for really hard change which takes an entire book to work through.
Spoilery thoughts
So yeah, I didn't guess that Sciona was going to burn the entire Magistry and government down! Literally! While she was herself poisoned!
But... it also seemed like maximum chaos for both Tiran and the Kwen, and a bunch of people, both Tiranish and Kwen, have already died and a lot more are probably gonna die, and it really isn't super clear that what is going to come out of all the chaos will be anything better than what was there before, except possibly it might be forced to be less dystopian because all the people running the dystopian technology have been destroyed. On the other hand, I did rather admire how Sciona's flaws of (a) not really caring about other humans and (b) not having any idea how other humans would react to things, because, well, see (a), were really consistent here.
And I loved how she does embrace all her flaws at the end: She had always belonged here with insatiable men, her brothers in greed and ego. Sciona's only distinction among these mages was that she was a more honest monster than any of them. Yeah, that's... pretty accurate! And like I said before, I respect that.
I must say I prefer books where the resolution at least makes stabs towards breaking the cycle of more and more violence, instead of accelerating the cycle (well, Thomil did make one effort towards that, which was nice; Sciona sure did not), but I do enjoy reading one of the latter every once in a while.
A couple of other spoilery issues I had:
- I totally did not buy that Sciona would have a different reaction to the plot twist (that all of their magic was causing the Blight) than every other Tiranish we see in the entire city (except maybe poor dumb Mordra, and it's not even entirely clear what his reaction is). I mean, to be fair, her negative reaction wasn't instant either (and that was well done), but she's grown up in Tiran her whole life, she's not devout but she's reasonably religious, she's been told her whole life that Kwen are inferior (and even says things to that effect), she just doesn't care about other people in general; it's not at all clear to me why she should be the one person to think differently than the others. The book explanation that no one else cares, I think, is that everyone else is horrible and racist, except I guess one offscreen guy who was so overcome that he committed suicide when he found out the truth before the book even started. Idk, I think there should have been more Tiranish who shared her reaction, or at least some who spanned more of a space of reactions. But I guess that would have been more complicated.
- What do people in Tiran eat? Aren't there, like, farms and things outside the city? Wouldn't the Blight affect those? Do they not trade with anyone? Use wood? It really seems to me that the ecological issues of the Blight would have a definite impact on Tiran by now.
I also thought the magic system was hilariously awesome. The mages use a typewriter -- they call it a spellograph -- to type up spells with very precise coordinates and variables (there's a great bit where Sciona is explaining to Thomil what a variable is, without using that exact term of course). So there are parts like this:
She assigned the name POWER. Next, she wrote an action sub-spell called FIRE, inside which she assigned the carbon ball the name DEVICE. (I'm not even gonna get into the if and only if CONDITIONS of this spell, because it's quoted in
rachelmanija's review.) I mean, yes, cool! I'm totally on board with algorithmic magic! Then I showed it to D and he was immediately like, "Wow, they use COBOL to do magic in this world!" (He does feel opposed to this on principle... mostly because it's COBOL.)
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