J.S. Fields

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September 29, 2020

Review: Across the Green Grass Fields by Seanan McGuire

Genre: fantasy: portal fantasy

Pairings: none

Queer Representation: intersex girl

Warnings: none

Review

Full disclosure – this isn’t an impartial review because I worked as a sensitivity reader on this book. But the Wayward Children series is one of my all-time favorites, and I wanted to take some time to discuss parts of the book that really moved me, especially as they relate to intersex conditions. The main character and I shared a diagnosis at the time of this book’s writing (mine has since been changed from AIS to ‘we-don’t-know-what-the-fuck-you-are-but-definitely-it’s-an-intersex-thing’ syndrome).

Regan is a quintessential girl, especially when it comes to horses. Her best friend is also a quintessential girl, and the school queen bee. Unfortunately, Regan does not realize how tenuous her position in Laurel’s circle is until she makes the mistake of trusting her ‘best friend’ with her fresh new secret – she’s XY Androgen Insensitive.

“You’re not a boy,” said Maureen soothingly. “If you feel like you’re a girl, then you’re a girl. You’ve always been our daughter. You’re just also part of a small percentage of the population who are considered intersex, meaning your body  has its own ways of regulating things like hormone production. Some intersex people are more clearly a blend of what doctors would consider male and female attributes; that wasn’t the case with you. There was no surgical intervention or modification after you were born–not that your father and I would have approved that if the doctors had wanted to do it. You are exactly as you were meant to be.” 

(bold emphasis added by me)

(I want to add here, that it’s great to see a definition of intersex that encompasses not just those with deeply externally visible differences. Our understanding of intersex conditions has come so far in the past decade, now working to include PCOS as well, and it’s important to remember that it can be changes to your internal structures as well as hormones, that make the unique cocktail that is Disorders of Sexual Development (DSD), or intersex.)

Though her parents are fully supportive, best-friend Laurel absolutely loses it. She declares Regan a disgusting boy, kicks her out of the social circle, and blabs about it all over school. Regan, having wanted nothing more than to just be normal her whole life, runs into the nearby forest, where she finds her door.

This door takes Regan and the reader to the Hooflands – where all the beings are some form of horse-type creature (with some exceptions, mostly drawn from the canon of G1 1980s-era My Little Pony). She is first entranced by the unicorns, but soon gets picked up by a herd of centaurs, who think her most unusual feature is her ability to climb trees easily and swim:

“When a human shows up in the Hooflands, it means something bad’s about to happen. You’re tricky little things. Well suited to tight spaces, and thumbs. Having thumbs is sort of like having a magical sword no one can take away from you. It’s destiny!” Pansy held up her hands and wiggled her own thumbs exaggeratedly. “Centaurs have thumbs, but we can’t fit in a lot of places humans can, and we don’t swim very well.”

Thus, Regan finds the normal life she always wanted with the (unicorn ranching) centaurs. Mildly hanging over her head is the knowledge that humans only come to the Hooflands when a Great Deed is needed, and that at some point she will go the way of the other humans – to the Great Deed, and then vanish.

Aside from the Hooflands clearly being where I’d go regardless of being intersx (hello, My Little Pony obsession!), the book’s entire structure treats intersex conditions in the way I think most intersex people treat them–a part of who we are, but not WHAT we are. This isn’t a book about a girl overcoming being intersex, or coming to terms with being intersex. It’s about a girl who happens to be intersex, and gets to have an awesome adventure where she learns everything she is, is enough. She doesn’t need to be a hero. She isn’t anything special. She’s just Regan. And that’s okay.

It also allows the reader, through Regan, to remember the desire for the simplicity of childhood as our peers moved into the complex social dynamics of junior high/middle school, and high school. It walks that fine line between innocence and self-awareness, which is nowhere more apparent than here:

“No one’s going to snatch me in the food court,” said Regan, the uneasy awareness that children had been snatched in food courts before flooding in on the heels of her words. But that was in another world, one filled with bullying, backstabbing humans, not in this brighter, cleaner world of horse-people and honest answers. She would be fine here.

Inadvertently, Regan and I share this aspect in common too (unbeknownst I think to Seanan when she originally wrote this). I was abducted from a mall arcade in the sixth grade, though I was the exact age Regan is in this book. Which is probably another reason I found such a great home in the Hooflands, along with Regan and the centaurs. And I do appreciate the Tyrek cameo, since Escape from Midnight Castle scared the living daylight out of me as a kid:

Seen this close, he was terrifying, a mountain of a man walking through a world built to a much smaller scale, Each of hooves was larger than her entire face. He swung his muzzle around to face her, expression bovine and unreadable, and snorted.

Though I did find the following section the most chilling in the entire book, possible because I tied it to the discussion of food court abductions, as above:

None of them looked away until Regan had reached the place where the road began to bend out of sight. Bit by bit, she disappeared. One of the goals made a disbelieving wailing sound. She didn’t come back.

She didn’t come back.

For me, this was the perfect book. Perhaps because I’ve read the entire series and never felt at home with any of the doors, partly because I think I didn’t realize how much I needed to see an intersex child having an adventure completely independent of her chromosomal arrangement. This book is beautiful, and melancholy, and fractal, and I think it will be not only a lifeline to those who share Regan’s diagnosis, but to anyone who has ever felt like their biology kept them somehow apart.

You can see if a door will let you into the Hooflands by preordering here. Note – extensive knowledge of MLP not required, but useful.

 

Filed Under: book review Tagged With: fantasy, intersex, portal fantasy

March 3, 2019

Review: An Accident of Stars by Foz Meadows

Genre: fantasy – portal fantasy

Pairings: f/f

Queer Representation: pansexual, cis lesbian, cis gay, aromantic, agender, trans

Warnings: none

Review

Saffron Coulter, a mild-mannered but angry sixteen year old girl from Earth, has had enough. Between the sexual harassment from the boys at her school to the uncaring faculty, Saffron’s biggest wish is that someone would just stand up to all the BS. Someone other than her, that is.

During a particularly nasty encounter with a schoolboy, Saffron is saved by the unknown Gwen, a woman with a mysterious past. Saffron ends up following Gwen to a more secluded area of the school–mostly to thank her–when a portal opens. And Saffron, being done with boys and high school and Earth, hops right in.

What follows is a twisting, engaging if not sometimes confusing, adventure through Kena–a magic using world teetering on the brink of war. Gwen, the worldwalker Saffron followed through the portal, must bring her up to speed on a very complex social hierarchy and several religions lest Saffron get herself killed through simply existing. As happens in these types of books, Saffron soon becomes ensconced in the war and ends up a key player in the final battles.

Format

I have mixed feelings about this book. The beginning is strong, and Saffron a sympathetic protagonist. Her motivations for going through the portal make a lot of sense and her first day or so on Kena has a lot of strong action. The setting is delivered well, the secondary characters are charming and delightful and cruel, and enough tropes are employed to help the reader feel comfortable in the world before they have a lot of information.

Where I struggled was with the swapping third to omniscient voice and the number of characters who got to wield either or both.

In some places, the POV switch is indicated by a line gap. In some the head hopping happens simply between normal paragraphs. There never seemed to be a reason for why narration changed, and it didn’t seem to follow the character with the most agency or interesting happenings, either. Due to the sheer volume of characters that were allowed a POV, I soon lost interest in a sizable section of the world.

The amount of time spent in Saffron’s head is excellent, and helped pull my interest back in every time she was on page. However, the extensive worldbuilding and political mechanics were beyond the scope of one book or at least, beyond the scope of Saffron’s understanding and therefore also beyond the reader’s.

Because I was so invested in Saffron and Zech (a younger girl who ends up in a sort of mind-meld with Saffron) I persisted through the book. The back third was mostly delightful, and the action, especially when the group hit the queen council and Zech and Saffron had to go through trials, was by far the best part. The final battle as well was very well done and the book had a fantastic, melancholy-but-still-happy ending.

It is saying something, however, that I skimmed pages and pages of this book, and almost the entire princess storyline (after her introduction, when it was clear she would only be annoying) and still felt like I didn’t miss anything. The ending made perfect sense and the final battle was still very compelling. As AN ACCIDENT OF STARS skims close to high fantasy, I wonder if it wasn’t shooting for world-as-character levels of description, and just fell a bit short.

Some excellent parts

I enjoyed that Saffron is Australian, which isn’t a POV I get to see a lot of in mainstream fiction. The racism of the teachers and Saffron’s own internal racism are addressed on page, and that was wonderful. I’m not sure I’ve ever read a fantasy that called out the implicit bias of its characters so directly:

“Not seeing Viya as a queen because she’s not white is racist,” she whispered into the pillow. “I’m being racist.”

British racism was also touched upon:

She didn’t say, ‘the police wouldn’t look for me when I vanished, because they didn’t think a missing black woman mattered.’ She didn’t say, ‘my parents convinced themselves I’d run off with a boy I was too ashamed to bring home, and when I came back, the second thing they asked was if I’d had an abortion.’

The trans rep was also fantastic, which isn’t surprising since the author is genderqueer. The ‘alikrevaya’ (trans) are seen as a natural variance and allowed to declare themselves however they wish. The worldbuilding of a culture of trans acceptance was so seamless that it actually took me a few pages to realize what the author was talking about. Also, they have sex-affirmation magic. Fantastic.

“It means she was born with her body and spirit in conflict, so the priests of Kara used the sevikmet to reshape her.”

“Bodies are bodies, and hearts are hearts. The priestess hood admits women only, though flesh plays no role in such determinations;”

Overall, AN ACCIDENT OF STARS is strong portal fantasy with solid queer rep and a sweet f/f line. The action scenes in particular stand out, although the book would have benefitted from some tighter 3rd limited.

To go through your own portal to Kena, buy the book here in print and here in ebook.

~~

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Filed Under: book review Tagged With: agender, aromantic, fantasy, gay, lesbian, nonbinary, pansexual, portal fantasy, reviews, sci fi, trans

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