297 pages
Published 2022
Read from January 4 to January 9
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
Oftentimes when I'm reading a book that explicitly centers queer, neurodiverse, or disabled experiences (or all of the above), there's a didactic element to the text: an effort to lay out basic concepts in, say, consent, communication, accommodation, and so on. I know these are important and necessary concepts to normalize, especially when an astounding percentage of our society is either ignorant of, or actively hostile toward, such radical considerations as "treat other human beings like people" and "try to avoid unnecessary cruelty toward people who don't deserve it." This normalization process can create sections of text that feel particularly hand-holdy, but I understand the need for it and try not to begrudge it.
It occurred to me while reading this book that this process of centering queer, neurodiverse, and disabled perspectives carries a burden of exposition that cishet-normative and allistic-centered texts rarely, if ever, have to deal with. Mass media assumes everyone knows the norms and expectations of white, cishet, allistic culture inside and out. You don't need to spell out why the manly hero can't just have a normal conversation about his feelings with the conventionally attractive love interest, no matter how bizarre that concept seems from the outside, because mainstream fiction assumes no one is reading it from outside the overarching white, cishet, allistic culture.
A lot of the assumptions of queer and neurodiverse perspectives are some combination of newly articulated, evolving, or known only to a small subset or even a single individual. So any book that approaches fiction from these perspectives is gonna have a ton of baggage -- even something as commonsensical and straightforward as enthusiastic consent might need to be highlighted, made explicit, because so many readers might be encountering the idea for the first time.
Anyway, those were some thoughts I had while reading Sanctuary. It is a tale of found family, purposeful community, and mindful cohabitation, perhaps the closest thing to "cozy cottagecore fantasy" that can exist in the parameters of what is, in essence, our own world. The living residents of Casswell House are all some flavor of queer, neurodiverse, disabled, and impoverished. By pooling resources (and kind of sort of squatting in the rambling old manor house), they're able to eke out an existence that, to all of them, is the first time they can truly be their full selves. There are also ghosts, and a malevolent presence that begins to eat away at the intentional life the characters have built for themselves.
The bulk of Sanctuary depicts the day to day management of the characters' sensory and social needs, the respectful negotiations of space, communication, and communal chores, and the pleasures of being around others who more or less understand you and are happy to give you the space you need to function. While reading it, I kept trying to imagine if a straight allistic narrator had to spend so much of a book explaining something like, say, how hint culture and unspoken hierarchies work. (I concluded that it would look a lot like the inner monologues of Dune.) Books like Sanctuary can seem didactic and hand-holdy because, well, they need to be. This stuff is never treated as the default. And here, explaining and normalizing this perspective (and detailing how groceries are obtained and describing how dishes might be done) is much of the point of the book.
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