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the-knights-who-say-book · 7 years

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Girls made of snow, language made of thorns, and putting ourselves back in the narrative

I’ve had some ideas swirling around my head ever since I finished reading Girls Made of Snow and Glass by Melissa Bashardoust that condensed while I was reading Leigh Bardugo’s short story collection The Language of Thorns, so I want to talk about it a little.

It started with the realization that Girls made of Snow, while it is a Snow White retelling (or perhaps better called a reimagining), completely leaves out the whole seven dwarves part of the story. In my review, I pointed this out as something I liked — the story didn’t need to sidetrack there, and it kept us focused on the real core of the story: Lynet’s relationship with her stepmother, Mina. Lynet being Snow White, Mina is the Evil Queen.

The book alternates chapters between Lynet’s present day and Mina’s journey from the daughter of a sorcerer to the bride of Lynet’s father, making Mina the second main character. This is where the book’s “feminist fantasy reimagining” tagline comes in. The point of Bashardoust’s story is to explore the stepmother-daughter relationship and how they could come into conflict without it being about who is the fairest of them all.

The point of tension Bashardoust goes for is about politics and power, a much more satisfying reason than “well, women get angry when another woman is prettier, that’s all”. But the framework of Snow White also gives her plenty of room to work with how women’s appearances and age are seen and judged. What if Lynet’s beauty binds her to her dead mother in a way that strangles her, while Mina struggles with knowing her beauty gains her what respect she commands and aging could steal it away? The commentary that emerges isn’t new — I think we all realize how damaging the value placed on women’s appearances is — but using the cultural touchstone of Snow White makes this version powerful. It’s probably my favorite thing about the book, even above giving Lynet a female love interest, which is something we’re going to circle back to.

Consider, for example, Mina’s power to control glass. The idea of giving a woman who is forced to care about her beauty the power to make looking glasses into weapons (the power to control what controls her in the original story) has an inherent message that’s only as powerful as it is because the iconography of Snow White is so well known to Bashardoust’s audience. That’s why she can give us a handful of Snow White parallels and then leave out one of the biggest story points and still have us understand the commentary she’s making. The messages are built in; she doesn’t have to build them first in order to tear them down. They’re already there.

Because we know fairytales. Reference Cinderella’s slipper, Sleeping Beauty’s spindle, or Snow White’s glass coffin and you can easily call up a whole set of values, assumptions, and feelings with hardly another word. Our reservoir of shared stories (consider also the Greek myths) is essentially a resource for writers who want to make it obvious they’re subverting our cultural mores. It’s shorthand for “Society is fucked up, hold my beer and watch this”. It’s a way of making subtle commentary in an... obvious manner? It’s a unique way of balancing obvious and subtle; it’s the equivalent of roadsigns you only need to glance at to know that you’re driving towards; it’s an ocean of potential stories waiting to be overturned. The ability of writers to take any of these classic objects or situations and drop them into their stories and immediately add a whole slew of connected ideas is fascinating to me. It’s magical.

Which brings us to The Language of Thorns. The collection isn’t exactly labeled “retold/reimagined faiytales” anywhere (it’s a collection of stories that would be read to children in her Grishaverse), but Bardugo says in her author’s note, “That unease [with the ending of Hansel and Gretel] has guided me through these stories […] The more I listened to that note of warning, the more inspiration I found.” The stories indeed feature a retelling of Hansel and Gretel, a prequel to The Little Mermaid, and a reimagining of The Nutcracker.

In one of my gleeful posts as I read the book I ended up gushing that “by writing her own fairytales [Leigh Bardugo] gets to play with our expectations, because we get all the references to our own stories — gingerbread houses, labyrinths holding monsters, clever talking animals — so we have a false sense of security that we know where it’s all going, and then she treats the ending of the stories more like writing a novel and adds more complexity than we expect of stories like Cinderella or Hansel and Gretel” and yes I’m going to quote myself in my own essay-thing because I still think that was a good reaction.

The first story of the collection, Ayama and the Thornwood, makes Bardugo’s intentions clear when the main character literally retells three different tales with improved endings to satisfy the boredom of a beast who finds fairytales too predictable and unrealistic. So it’s, you know, meta.

There’s an excitement there, in reading the fairytales you (sort of) know with their seams torn open to make room for you, stitched into something new. In Bardugo’s stories, the Grimm brothers’ female villains are reexamined, blame is shifted, new ideas are put forward (not all connected to feminism, but the treatment of Hansel and Gretel and The Little Mermaid’s villains, and the creation of a new female villain in Bardugo’s The Too-Clever Fox, make a clear argument about the roles women are given in our fairytales).

This is a nice connection to Girls Made of Snow and Glass: the deeper treatment of women’s motives that make familiar tales new. I’m almost disappointed The Language of Thorns didn’t include a Snow White story to compare and contrast with.

But let’s circle back to Lynet’s love interest in Girls Made of Snow: Nadia, the castle physician. It was the promise of a gay Snow White that drew me to the story, and it’s still a wonderful aspect of the book. Putting women into slots reserved for men is almost always a breath of fresh air, especially when the rest of the story isn’t then adjusted to keep it heterosexual. One reason is because it eliminates the “man always saving the woman” aspect by making it one woman saving another — consider Nadia filling the prince’s role in awakening Lynet from her coffin, and the female river spirit of Little Knife winning the hand in marriage of the beautiful girl. But of course the major reason is getting to see non-heterosexual people in fairytales.

We don’t get this when we’re younger. At least, I didn’t, though I hope that starts changing for kids now. So to read stories where the women love women, where men can love men and women (to reference The Language of Thorns specifically, since we get a bisexual protagonist in one story and a wlw couple in another) feels like — to quote a certain musical — putting ourselves back in the narrative. I can’t change the stories I was read when I was little, but I can (we all can) read the stories that are slowly but surely filling up goodreads’ “lgbt retellings” shelves.

(Possibly it’s weird to use the phrase “putting ourselves back in the narrative” when I’m actually not sure about either author’s sexuality, but this is mostly about the perception of queer readers getting queer retellings anyway. If I read Julia Heslin’s Once more recently I would have loved to add something about her version of reimagining queer fairytales but it’s been a bit too long for it to be fresh in my mind.)

“I put myself back in the narrative” isn’t a flawless parallel for other reasons as well. After all, the whole point about “Eliza and the narrative” is that she took herself out of it in the first place, and then put herself back in. The first action was as much an act of power as the undoing, and queer people never took ourselves out of fairytales in the first place (I don’t think that’s really a thing that happened, anyway). But I couldn’t get that line out of my head as I thought about this, so it seems like the right way to end this ramble.

When we put ourselves back in our narratives, when we tell our touchstone stories with us included, it’s automatically a powerful statement that we belong there. So yes, while this has mostly been me trying to figure out how to say “we all recognize fairytale elements at such an essential level that it gives authors an amazing tool to work with to make their works more nuanced and gives them a basis to build social commentary on”, I want to end this with the point that works created with these tools, narratives constructed on these foundations, are so liberating and important and wonderful because they not only make use of our childhood tales but tell us we belong there.

#girls made of snow and glass #The Language of Thorns #melissa bashardoust #leigh bardugo #lgbt literature #feminist literature #fairytale retelling #the rambles of an overbooked worm #purronronner #allfortheloveofabook #ghost-with-the-toast-babe

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emperorsarevainanduselessthings · 10 years

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The Importance of Being Bilingual

Hey, so this is for the lovely allfortheloveofabook, cuz they requested a fun Leviathan AU. The prompt was, “please for the love of god help you’re the only one here who speaks english” and well, I kind of ran with it.

***

In retrospect, maybe going to Austria without someone who spoke the language had been a mistake. But it all would have been completely and totally fine if she kept track of her older brother, Jaspert.

Not like that had happened. Definitely not.

Deryn Sharp was the kind of person who liked to consider herself as prepared for every situation life threw at her. She attributed that to a combination of preparation, keeping her barking wits, and what Jaspert liked to call “a little derring do.”

Her preparation, wit, and derring do had not prepared her for losing her older brother in the Hofburg Palace, which of course was packed with a plethora of people of all size, shape, and color, none of whom appeared to speak english. But Deryn was confident she could get out of this barking mess.

Most likely.

She stood on her tiptoes, attempting to see her brother above the crowd, but to no avail. Jaspert appeared to have vanished from the building.

Which, now that she thought about it, was almost more of a problem than not being able to find him. If he left without her, she probably wouldn't be able to find the hotel they were staying at on her own. She dug in her pocket for her phone and pulled it out. “Blisters,” she groaned. It was dead. Why hadn't she listened when Jaspert had told her to charge the thing?

Deryn brushed a strand of short, blond hair out of her eyes and sighed deeply. Well, now what was she going to do? She couldn’t stay here forever. The palace would be closing in about an hour, and if she didn’t find her brother, she wouldn’t have anywhere to go that night. And who knew what would happen to her if she stayed on the streets all night?

She scanned the crowd again, listening for anyone who was speaking in English. Deryn listened as hard as she could, but she couldn’t hear anyone at all.

So she decided to go with the more direct approach. Deryn walked up to the nearest person, an old woman wearing a scarf over her bushy hair. “Um, can you help me?” she asked.

The old woman stared at her blankly before saying something in another language that sounded like a scolding. “Sorry,” Deryn muttered, then tried the next person, a middle aged man. She received pretty much the same response from everyone she asked, a blank stare followed by unintelligible chatter.

After twenty minutes of searching, her notoriously short temper was beginning to wear thin. Deryn stood in the exact center of the main ballroom, staring over the crowd, asking at the top of her lungs for anyone who spoke English in utter desperation.

Someone tapped her shoulder, and she whipped around. It was a boy about her own age, a few inches shorter than her, with dark auburn hair and a sprinkling of freckles. “Um, yes?” he said in a lightly accented voice.

“Please, for the love of god, help, you’re the only one here who speaks English,” she blurted out.

The boy’s eyes widened. “Okay,” he said, holding up his hands in a pacifying gesture. “I’m Alek, and what’s your name?”

It was at that moment Deryn felt her stomach flutter, but she stuffed the feeling down. This was no time to be going moony over some Austrian boy she’d just met. “D-deryn,” she stuttered.

“And what seems to be the matter?”

Deryn shifted her feet. “Well, um, I was here with my brother, and then I lost him, and I don’t know if he’s still because I can’t find him and I can’t call him because my phone’s barking died and no one in this building speaks English.” She took a deep breath. “Sorry.”

Alek nodded. “Not a problem. I have my phone on me, so you can give him a call, if you’d like.” He dug through his pockets and produced a battered slide phone, which he handed to her.

“Thank you so much,” she said. “This doesn’t really happen all that often to me.” Deryn took the phone and dialed Jaspert’s number. He picked up on the first ring.

“Deryn? Is that you?” he demanded.

“Jaspert! I lost you in the crowd and then I couldn’t find anyone who spoke English and my phone was dead and so I had to borrow one from this boy.”

“Where are you?” Jaspert said, his voice ringing through the speaker. Deryn winced, and Alek held out his hand for the phone. She handed it to him wordlessly, and he pressed it to the side of his head.

“Hello? Sir? This is Aleksander Hohenburg. I’m with Deryn right now.” He paused and waited while Jaspert spoke. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, certainly. We’ll be on our way right now. All right, thank you.” He slid the phone shut and looked up at her. “Your brother wants to meet us by the main entrance, and he wanted me to take you there.” Alek paused. “He was quite specific, actually. Threatened something about having my guts for garters if I left you alone for a moment.”

Deryn groaned. “Sorry about him. He’s a little protective.”

Alek shook his head. “No, no. He’s quite a colorful fellow.” He held out his arm for Deryn, who took it. “Shall we?”

***

They saw Jaspert leaning on a wall next to the entrance, scowling at various passerby. Deryn tried to quench a nervous giggle. How could this get more uncomfortable? Her overprotective brother, herself, and the cute foreign boy who’d kept her from staying on the street all night.

This could be bad.

Jaspert straightened and inspected her as they approached, looking for any bruises, she thought. His gaze switched to Alek, and Deryn winced. Jaspert stepped forwards and shook Alek’s hand.

“Jaspert Sharp,” he said. “We spoke on the phone.”

Alek nodded. “Yes, we did. You made some interesting comments about what might happen to my intestines.” Deryn’s lips twisted into a grimace. Oh, this was going badly.

“Right,” she interjected. “Well, he brought me back, and I’m fine, so there will be no intestine stockings, thank you very much.” They both stared at her.

“What?” Deryn said.

Jaspert rolled his eyes. “Right. We should be off, then. Wouldn’t want to take up any more of Mr. Hohenburg’s time.”

“Oh, no,” Alek said. “It was my pleasure to be of assistance.” He smiled at Deryn, and the bottom dropped out of her stomach. Oh no, she thought fiercely. You stop that right now. “Perhaps I should give you my cell number, though? In case you get lost again. Vienna can be a very dangerous city if one doesn’t know where they are going.”

Deryn looked up at Jaspert, who sighed. “Fine, fine. Get the boy’s phone number.”

Alek pulled a sharpie out of his pocket (honestly, what else did he keep in there? Calculators?) and took her hand with cool fingers, tracing the digits onto her skin. Deryn shivered. “There,” he said. “and don’t forget to charge your phone.”

Deryn could only stare. As he walked away, Jaspert elbowed her. “So,” he said, “He was a nice looking young man.”

Deryn groaned. “Oh, shut up.”

#leviathan trilogy #deryn sharp #jaspert sharp #prompt fill #allfortheloveofabook #alternate universe #modern #alek of hohenberg

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