Wednesday, October 17, 2018

Empress Of All Seasons - Emiko Jean


Empress Of All Seasons is a book about monsters, and people, and the way that the line between the two is quite a lot blurrier than you might think.

Mari is, at least in theory, a monster. A yokai, she can grow claws on demand, and use them to cause more than a little difficulty to people who might want to take advantage of her. Socially, she’s circumscribed by the customs of her village, filled with other yokai. They send daughters out into the world to find husbands, abandon them and then return with their treasure. Sons…well, it’s best not to think about what they do with sons. Mari, though, is different. In a village of beautiful monsters, she thinks herself ugly. So in order to find a husband, she trains to kill as well as to deceive. Because what she’s looking to steal isn’t just plates and rings, but an empire.

Mari’s world is encircled by the empire. The emperor is a man who hates the monsters in his realm; not just the yokai, but other creatures, greater and lesser threats to a dominion which relies on uniformity. But when the son of an emperor weds, their bride is chosen by competition. The competition is, of course, filled with elaborate death-traps – and if they aren’t enough, the competitors all have the desire to become an empress.

This is a book about monsters.

Mari is an outcast among monsters, to be sure. A young woman whose community see her as less than themselves, a disappointment and an oddity. She bears up under it, and that resilience is one of the threads tying together her story. If she carries the marks of a monster, it’s the capacity of her people to accept, or to hurt, that defines who they are. The same is true of the emperor – an old man whose broken heart manifests in oppression and a detached, spiteful rage. As those who are different in his empire are oppressed or enslaved, even as they’re decried as monsters, one has to wonder whether he protests his own role too much. The story seems to want to throw a mirror up to our monsters – to spider queens and ice-killers – and use their treatment as a way to show that the way minorities are treated is really the marker of a monster. Mari is fast, physically co-ordinated, with a keen intellect, but she carries the weight of unreasoning prejudice from others wherever she goes. She’s easy to empathise with, and if she’s sometimes making bad decisions, it’s easy to see why. If she has anything, it’s a strength she things is derived from being alone – though over the course of the text, that strength is challenged by interactions with family and new friends. It’s a thoughtful presentation of complex relationship dynamics, one which doesn’t promise easy answers, but whose realism gives the prose a real emotional kick.

And what prose it is. There’s a delicate, mythopoeic quality to it; the rhythms are those of a fairy tale, best spoken aloud. But this story is at the darker end of that spectrum, with enough blood and thunder for anyone. What it really draws though are hard choices, those moments when characters sit on the knife edge of a difficult decision, when the tension is keeping you prowling down the page, turning pages, looking to see what they do, and what the effects are.

This is a story of monsters.

It’s a story of a young woman finding herself and deciding what she wants to be. It’s a story of how she sets out with her own agency, and makes her own choices. It’s a story of defiance, and of friendship. It’s a story which makes you ask questions, about the way people are talked about, and the way they’re treated. It’s a challenging book, in the sense that it wants the reader to think, not to accept what’s on the page, but to follow the story, follow the fairytale down a rabbit-hole and realise something about themselves in the lens of these characters.

This is a story about monsters. And it’s a damn good one. Give it a try.

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