RatCreature's Reading List

So last weekend I zoomed through The Maker's Mask and The Hawkwood War, by Ankaret Wells. It's a fairly frenetic and pretty addictive self-published duology -- one of those that's set in the far future on a cut-off colony planet that's mythologized their leftover bits of science into a sort of magic, so half the fun is trying to reverse-engineer the worldbuilding from what you see into where it might have come from.

The other half the fun is all the complex family politics. The protagonist, Tzenni, is the engineering-focused middle daughter of the Boccamera family; her headstrong tomboy younger sister has been captured by the HORRIBLE KAPELLANS who have been feuding with them for GENERATIONS, and since their older sister and family head is off having a diplomatic baby, Tzenni decides it's her responsibility to rescue the other one.

Then of course, after some initial diplomatic awkwardness when she gets there, it turns out her enemies haven't got any idea where her sister is either.

THE KAPELLANS: Yes, things started to get weird right around when your sister saved the life of our oldest son --
TZENNI: ...that does seem unlike her...
THE KAPELLANS: And then she seems to have disappeared, along with our son, who was about to enter into an arranged marriage that he didn't want --
TZENNI: .......oh. Oh dear. @__@

It took me (and possibly also Tzenni) a few chapters to realize that the sons being referred to in this conversation were two different sons, enmeshed in AT LEAST two different complicated and potentially murderous marriage plots. The Kapellans have a lot of sons. This is also a world in which marriage generally consists of at least three participants, sometimes more, some of whom are often siblings or cousins -- I was never entirely clear on all the social rules surrounding this -- but it does make for some extremely cool and complicated family dynamics!

This is also a world in which there are a number of androgynous intersex people called epicons running around, one of whom is a fashionable, witty, swashbuckling person with a tragic backstory named Innes Liang who rescues Tzenni in the first chapter and goes on to become her bodyguard.

...I did not expect to feel such seething resentment when it turned out that Innes Liang was not Tzenni's love interest, but I did, and I am sad to say that despite my enjoyment of the books that resentment has not entirely dissipated. I mean, her actual love interest is perfectly fine! (Although I am kind of not into the twenty-year age difference.) And in the normal way of things I would be all about Innes and Tzenni's emphatically platonic friendship, but I did not realize how excited I had gotten for the potential of a non-heterosexual romance until it became clear I was not going to get it -- and Innes Liang is otherwise such a heroic-romantic archetype that it's hard for me not to feel a little bit like they were disqualified for romance by being Not Enough Dude.

(I'm using a 'they' pronoun, but for the record, the books shift between 'he,' 'she', and 'it' for the epicons, which is a strategy I'm not really sure about. Also for the record, the other major epicon character in the book is one of the primary villains, an abusive rapist who figures prominently in Innes' tragic backstory and might as well have waltzed out of one of those Mercedes Lackey novels where all the villains are sadistic rapists who take great pains to look like cat-people. Innes Liang is awesome enough as a character that I can just about look past this, but only just, and I really don't love that both prominent epicons in the book are linked by sexual violence.)

That aside, though, I do love Innes, and I love Tzenni, who is not at all a warrior sort of person and prone to getting distracted in the middle of important scenes by wondering about the engineering of the toilet; and I love Tzenni's exasperated relationship with her younger sister, who is much more the kind of YA protagonist who runs around falling in love with suitable people and punching everyone else in the face, and how they don't understand each other at all, and fight over everything in the way only people who've known each other since toddlers can, and are deeply loyal to each other all the same. And I like most of the politics, frenetic and Byzantine as they are, although I think the plotlines and characters could probably have been pared down by about 25%. But it's a very rich world, and a lot of fun!

...but I'm still kind of bitter about the gender-destabilizing romance that I feel I deserved and I did not get. >:(