2015 read #61: The Queen of the Tearling by Erika Johansen.

The Queen of the Tearling by Erika Johansen
435 pages
Published 2014
Read from October 21 to October 29
Rating: ★★½ out of 5

Between October 11, when I finished China Dolls, and October 21, when I began this book, I don't think I read so much as a dozen pages. Part of the reason for that was my fruitless attempt to read Holly Black's Tithe -- for whatever reason, it just wasn't grabbing me, nixing my confident plan to breeze through Black's Faery Tale trilogy to beef up my book numbers for the month. But most of the blame can be laid with one word: Minecraft. Downloading and playing it for the very first time on October 7, I got hooked bad for a while there, playing literally every free hour of the day, and dreaming in cubes at night.

But I kept on accumulating books from the library, books I was eager to have read but couldn't quite get myself to read, if that makes sense. What I wanted was a book of old school high fantasy, a fun, pulpy adventure through what-the-fuck that would make me feel like I was inside a Roger Dean painting. But I wanted it packaged with adequate prose and some semblance of modern progressive ethics and values.

At first The Queen of the Tearling seemed to fit my order exactly, a straightforward fantasy of a young queen emerging from hiding and getting shit done, written in prose that didn't make me cringe or toss it across the room. But within a couple chapters, I saw signs that Queen was, if anything, too old school -- and in fact, it proved to be aggressively formulaic. There's the rightful heir, raised in seclusion, bookish and idealistic! There's the technomagical Macguffin, the power of which our queen learns to access exactly when she needs it! The technomagical Macguffin allows her to see visions and shoot bolts of electricity, but its use might cost her! There's the stoic and competent guard captain with a troubled past! There's a dashing and handsome and mysterious King of Thieves! There's the spidery secondary bad guy! There's the evil ruler of evil, her rooms curtained in crimson, who uses and disposes of sex slaves nightly! The evil ruler of evil even calls herself the Red Queen of Mortmense, for fuck's sake, and calls upon the power of a shadowy being who feeds on the blood of children. It's as if every high fantasy series of the '80s and early '90s regurgitated into a bowl, and watered the mixture down to yield this mess.

With the author mentioning her sense of social justice in the acknowledgements, and the central hero being a self-conscious and chubby 19 year old woman who kicks ass and holds onto her idealism, you'd think that Tearling would at least satisfy my desire for progressive ethics and values. One book into a trilogy, with much of the history and background of the setting intentionally left mysterious (for example, is it set on an alien planet, the tale of a founding space voyage corrupted into a myth of a sea voyage, or is it set on an Earth modified by magic, and the Tearling founded with an actual sea voyage across a magically expanded sea?), perhaps it's too early to tell which elements of Tearling society were chosen by the author to make a point, and which slipped in from unconscious bias. Whichever way the Tearling was founded, it was envisioned as a socialist utopia, breaking free from the corruption and near-feudal oligarchy of modern day or near-future America. So why is everyone white? When a brown or black character appears for a page or two, their existence is commented upon as a curiosity, which doesn't explain why they're so rare. Is this a deliberate choice on Johansen's part, to be explored in detail in following volumes? Was William Tear a racist piece of shit? Or did Johansen just neglect to imagine that a utopian colony drawn together by socialist idealism from modern Americans would be considerably darker and more diverse than she depicts here?

And why, oh why, would a girl raised in total isolation by a kindly old man and a strict, in-command woman be obsessed with her looks? Why would she emerge from a vision of horror and invasion and be able to think only of stroking the bare chest of her guard? A sex-positive heroine is still a novelty in fantasy literature, a chubby one still rarer, but honestly, at times Kelsea felt less like a progressive new figure and more like the blushing, looks-obsessed damsels of old school fantasy.