2022 read #4: Alphabet of Thorn by Patricia A. McKillip.

Alphabet of Thorn by Patricia A. McKillip

314 pages

Published 2004

Read from March 1 to Match 10

Rating: 4 out of 5

I had hoped to read at least one book each calendar month this year, a feat I haven't managed since 2016, but alas. Life and mental health got in the way again. I had opportunities to read during February, but my ADHD insisted that none of the books I had -- not even the new ones I got for Christmas and my birthday -- sounded just right. I wasn't able to read more than a couple pages of anything all month.

I had enjoyed McKillip's Winter Rose last fall, so I figured this book would finally do the trick and pull me in. McKillip's prose is aesthetically deft and beguiling, though perhaps not so gorgeous as it was in Winter Rose. The plot incorporates language, romance, political tensions, magic, and time travel, but the narrative feels breezy and is well-paced.

The book shows its age in its early 2000s approach to female agency and empowerment. Spoilers ahead:

The most powerful sorceress in all of history erases her name and her very identity in order to be a magical helpmeet for her cousin-turned-lover, an Alexander-esque conqueror. All she asks for in return is to bear him a child. The sorceress travels across space and time and realizes that she cannot raise her child and be with her cousin-lover at the same time, so she abandons the baby girl at a library 3000 years in the future. But the baby isn't fully abandoned, oh no. The sorceress entrusts to a convoluted magic scheme involving a book written in the titular alphabet to unlock the magical ways through time when her daughter comes of age, permitting the sorceress and the conqueror to come to the child's time and conquer the world to be the youth's own queendom. When the girl rejects this plan at the end, the sorceress realizes she must choose between her cousin-love and her child, and chooses the girl.

Again, the most powerful magic-user in all of history erases herself in order to please a man, and only reasserts her identity when she realizes it's what her child would prefer. At no point does this sorceress exercise any agency for herself. She doesn't even really have any interest in her cousin-lover's conquests; she enables him because it's what he wants, conquering kingdoms across thousands of years because she's just that besotted with him.

I can't bring myself to dislike this book. McKillip's prose, settings, and characters (the ancient cousin pair aside) are too well-rendered for that. But it's fascinating how much more dated this feels than Winter Rose, a book published eight years prior.