Marchetta, Melina - Finnikin of the Rock

[oyceter]

(book one of the Lumatere Chronicles)

Warning: there is a fair amount of sexual violence in this book

Ten years ago, the impostor king slaughtered the royal family of Lumatere. In the panic, the people of Lumatere turned on the Forest Dwellers, an oppressed minority in the country, and when they burned one of them at stake, she cursed the land and the people. As such, half of the Lumaterans are trapped in its borders and the other half are wandering exiles who don't know anything of what is now going on within their country. Finnikin of the Rock is one of these exiles, and he and his mentor are recruited by a girl Evanjalin who claims she can lead them to the heir and break the curse.

Marchetta says, "I was told often that I couldn't write fantasy unless I had read all the greats and knew the conventions well." I think the book is a good example of both why this is right and wrong. The worldbuilding isn't the best I've read, but it's also not bad: Marchetta has thought about things like trade and economics and minority populations and how each country has its own subpopulations. I particularly like notes such as how one country hates the Lumateran exiles because the Lumateran curse has cut off their access to the river trade and thereby improverished the country. On the other hand, I wanted a broader range of cultures and governing styles across the countries, especially because this book is so concerned with hereditary rulers and blood. It's also, like so much of fantasy, vaguely Eurocentric in inspiration, and I found that and the focus on prophecy and gathering together enough plot tokens people to defeat the curse not nearly as interesting. One specific prophecy in the book rears its head several times quite annoyingly.

That said, this is above-calibre fantasy in terms of characters; I didn't mind the various people Finnikin and Evanjalin had to round up because I found them all interesting. Also, I love that the book explores themes about community and nation and loss, how big the loss of Lumatere is to all the Lumaterans but also how they all react differently. I kind of wished that the journey to gather all the exiles had taken longer and been more difficult, especially given how many qualms Finnikin has about their quest.

Also, while the book seems very heavy on the male characters, Evanjalin is absolutely awesome and terrifying in a way I think many female characters don't get to be.

Spoilers

I absolutely love that she is the missing heir, and I love her ruthlessness in selling out Finnikin and in selling Froi to get her ring back. I loved how walking in sleep worked, particularly how she got the cure for the sickness via Vestie.

I kind of wanted to slap Finnikin after his umpteenth bout of woes over Seranonna saying he would become king by shedding Isaboe's blood, but the whole wanting to marry the queen and desperately hoping you are good enough to be king-consort is apparently a narrative trope that I adore. I also love that Finnikin is most definitely the consort, as opposed to one of my other favorite books with this trope.

I was also very glad to get glimpses of the resistance within Lumatere, and I thought it was really interesting that the quest to take the exiles back—traveling, linear direction, single goal— was mostly coded as male (finding Finnikin, the Captain of the Guard, the priestking, and the Guard), while the resistance inside Lumatere is very much female, with Beatriss and Tesadora hiding the girls away. It's interior and contained and survival based; it's a waiting game that depends on Isaboe to finally end the curse.

I'm a bit uneasy about the role of sexual violence in the book. On the one hand, it's a very real weapon used against colonized peoples, and the book reads as very real in that way and I don't feel that Marchetta is simply being exploitative. On the other hand, it was hard to read, even as summarized accounts. The parts inside Lumatere were the worst, and the bit that bugs me the most is how families would choose their daughters to be the first ones killed to avoid rape. I can't exactly put my finger on why. It's something about how in the book it's phrased as the fathers making the decision for their daughters that makes me think about people who would rather have women be dead rather than sexually violated.

Also, I am really not sure why this was published as YA, except for YA being Marchetta's usual genre of choice.

In conclusion: very good, and I really hope Marchetta keeps writing fantasy and hopefully starts to mess around with more genre conventions. (Also, I totally blame this book for completely wrecking my sleep schedule.)

Links:
- rilina's review
- lab's review (middle of entry)

Comments

[rilina]

Yay Marchetta!

Australian YA tends to skew toward the 16+ readership, but even if Marchetta was a US author I would see this as YA. There's a lot about Finnikin's and Evanjalin's experiences in the novel that speak toward the teen experience of transitioning between childhood and adulthood (see, especially, Finnikin's and Evanjalin's relationships with the adults in their life, particular Finnikin's with his father).

I really love how the book's female characters emerge in the last third of this book--I didn't see this coming AT ALL at the start. Neither did Finnikin, of course and I love how he's gobsmacked late in the book when the women have been making decisions without him. And I also love that Finnikin is really the consort.

I really need to reread the sequel, Froi of the Exiles, because it takes the most difficult parts of the story here and runs with it. The fact that Froi is the main character should tell you something! I'm not entirely convinced it works, at least not without having book 3 in hand. (Want it now....)

SPOILERS!

[oyceter]

Re: the YA, I can see that, although for me the book is more about healing and recovery after trauma and not centered around the transition between childhood to adulthood. Frex, my sense of Evanjalin is that there's very little of that going on until the last part of the book when she comes home, and I read that more as... I don't know. Reclaiming childhood, definitely. But mostly it's that the book feels a lot like the fantasy I read as a teen being published as fantasy (hahaha Shannara!), so it feels like the YA label is more a marketing decision? I.e. if fantasy were the hot genre right now, this fits in pretty well.

Ahahaha, have already read the next two, need to get brain together to post.

Re: SPOILERS!

[rilina]

Ah, I haven't got my hands on Quintana. Yet. Not that I'd have time to read it now lalala.

Have you read Marchetta's realistic fiction? I might love it even more than the fantasy. Though potentially triggery for its depictions of depression, amongst other things.

Re: SPOILERS!

[oyceter]

Not yet, though I have them in the pile... I think I am on an sf/f streak right now, finally started Cold Magic!

[jadelennox]

I think it's YA because the "new adult" market is currently forming partly *because* of people like Marchetta.

fox1013 has convinced me that the book only thinks it's about Finnikin; it's actually about Evanjalin. I love Evanjalin; I love how flawed and selfish she can be.

My qualms with the books are that I think it does better when it tries to be low and personal, and not as well when it tries to be hifalutin and epic.

[oyceter]

Heh, oh marketing categories. I love Evanjalin SO MUCH, and I think Marchetta actually pulls the same trick with the next two books as wel.

[skygiants]

Ever since I read this book I have been convinced that it's a great act of trolling on Melina Marchetta's part. She contracted with her publishers to write a YA fantasy book with appeal for boys, with a boy protagonist, doing active questing boy things, and then presented them with a novel that's like "SURPRISE! Finnikin is a decoy protagonist and this has been a book about women and women's work all along!"

Which is to say: I do not much care about Finnikin, but I love Evanjalin and the fact that basically everything important in the end is achieved by the female resistance. (Although I too have somewhat conflicted feelings about all the rape.)

[oyceter]

I kind of love this thought. But yes, mostly I like Finnikin because he adores Evanjalin, and I feel anyone who feels that way must have good taste. I also love that the whole "I am not good enough for her" isn't done in the standard romance novel way of having a jerk hero thinking about an innocent lovely heroine, and I especially love that Marchetta has two broken people falling in love, and that the more broken one is female.

Because holy crap, the women in the book are kind of terrifying.

[badgerbag]

I thought it was slightly odd that there was plenty of guys getting raped at least implicitly like in the mines but the imposter king and others apparently only went for the women. But yeah, me too, I didn't like that the fathers decided to kill their daughters... wtf.

[oyceter]

Okay, there was rape going on in the mines as well? I didn't remember clearly. But yeah, I mean, I get the focus on saving the girls, given the usual demographics of rape, but it seemed kind of odd that no one seemed to be that worried about their sons. It was just very weird and kind of icky when the underlying sentiment seemed to be about "saving" people from rape, even by death.