So, Your Humble Blogger has had a lot of luck with judging books by their covers recently, particularly YASF first novels. Dragon Slippers by Jessica Day George, was a library pick-up based on the title, the cover, and then the blurb on the back, which was actually a well-chosen excerpt.
OK, things I liked about it. Well, it was nice that both Our Hero and the Villain were young women, which gave the intended audience something to aspire to. It was also nice that Our Hero in addition to being brave and clever and funny and pretty and strong is also particularly talented at embroidery. She winds up at milliner’s (no, not that kind of milliner’s), and there are some very nice bits about sewing and embroidering, and the ways that Our Hero uses those skills to her advantage over the course of the plot. Often the Girl Hero of a book like this one has some magnificent talent, but that talent is, say, accurate throwing or foot speed, which come off as tomboyish, which certainly isn’t bad but has become, to me, a bit tired, and also runs into a little trouble with the way I read gender in these books. Come to think of it, Ella (in Ella Enchanted) (the high-quality book, not the disturbingly bad movie) has a magnificent talent for languages. Hm.
I also liked the dragons. The book made me ruminate about the various ways that writers of fantasy can deal with dragons. You can make them more or less like people, more or less frightening, bigger, smaller, breathing fire or not, talking or not. The dragons in this book were simultaneously very people-like (in conversation and individual idiosyncrasy) and somehow significantly alien as well, not only because of their tremendous age but because of some specific magic in them and around them. And we are introduced to them in a great way, which helps, too.
The last thing I’ll bring up here is that the characters in this book did a great deal of worrying about money, which actually I liked a lot. There’s an invented, implausible and very fun economic system that pits class against class in unexpected ways. There are characters who turn out different than you expect, and you realize (or I realize) that those expectations had a lot to do with class assumptions and economic conditions.
And, oddly enough, I have a vague sense that in the real world Ms. George might hold opinions about the economy that I do not share at all, and feel very strongly about. But I’m not certain of that (and that sense derives at least in part from my stereotypes of BYU alums) and even so, how many people put any sort of thought into making the economy a fun part of the worldbuilding in YASF?
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.