Recent Reading: Hemlock and Silver

Okay, so not only do I generally like T Kingfisher / Ursula Vernon’s books, but also commenter Robert sent me a personal email saying, “This book couldn’t have been more written for you if it had FOR RACHEL NEUMEIER stamped on the cover,” and, I mean, I’m as persuadable as the next person, particularly when it’s a commenter who’s been right before about things like this. I was thinking Hmm, what should I read next? anyway, so there you go: Hemlock and Silver.

And, spoiler, yes, I enjoyed this story very much – even the talking cat, and I’m dead over talking cats as a rule, having gotten utterly bored with them back when I was, oh, about fourteen, I suppose. They are everywhere in fantasy, just as cat aliens are everywhere in SF, and it does get tiresome. However, a good enough writer can get me over this hump, so sure, I even liked the cat.

What else did I like? I’m going to avoid important spoilers, though there might be a few that are tiny or vague or both.

A) The scenery!

From this distance, the city was dwarfed by the pale stone of the mesas that rose around it and by the three enormous figures painted across the cliff face above. Greatly elongated but still recognizably human, the paintings stretched several hundred feet before being abruptly truncated at the shoulder. In pace of heads were the profiles of animals – a fish, a snake, a leaping hare.

There’s a reason those figures are there, obviously, and this is a quite clever bit of plot setup as well as worldbuilding and scenery. I’m deeply amused by the way T Kingfisher designed the setting to make certain bits of the plot work. I’m very certain the plot came first and then she designed the setting, and I did not exactly think of that until the end, though I should have and probably some of you would catch it much faster than I did.

But besides that, this is just a fun setting, well removed from Fantasy Medieval Standard. That is, the society is standard, but the physical setting isn’t, and I enjoyed that. Also, the idea of chime adders, with bells on their tails instead of rattles, is completely delightful. I’m pretty sure this is impossible – can you make any organic material chime like metal? I don’t think so – but so what, it’s still completely delightful.

B) The plotting!

This is not a long novel. I mean, it’s not particularly short, but it’s no longer than average. My Kindle app says 360 pages (I guess it copies this number from the paper edition because this number doesn’t change if you resize the text). A rough conversion provides a wordcount guess somewhere in the neighborhood of 110,000 words. I would call that shortish average for fantasy. It’s tightly plotted to get it to fit.

T Kingfisher begins with the hook for the plot setup, and very nice this is, very hooky:

I had just taken poison when the king arrived to inform me that he had murdered his wife.

I’m trying to restrain myself from saying that this is a killer of a first sentence, but as you see, I couldn’t quite resist.

Chapter one sets up the situation and it’s very well done, very catchy. Then chapter two is an extended flashback. Why is Anja interested in poisons? Let’s show this in a prologue, but instead of calling it a prologue and putting it in the front of the book where a third of readers will skip it, let’s call it chapter two and put it right here after chapter one so we can coax all the readers to actually read it. This is clever! And I didn’t even think anything of it until I wrote this review! And now I want to try that myself! It’s a great way to just sidestep neatly right around the whole prologue issue and I have got to remember to add this book of an example of a way to put a prologue into a novel in a sly, backhanded way that nobody will complain about. Then chapter three brings us back to story present and the rest of the novel proceeds in chronological order, so that’s one reason I say chapter two is a disguised prologue, because generally if the author puts in one extended flashback, they keep doing it, because one extended flashback unbalances the story. That’s why I put two flashbacks in Suelen, and of course you can look at Sharon Shinn’s Whispering Wood to see a wonderful, elegant use of repeated flashback chapters. But in this case this is really a disguised prologue and therefore there’s not the slightest need for another flashback.

Then the plot gets astoundingly ornate, or I should say the worldbuilding gets astoundingly ornate and carries the plot, which echoes strongly with Sleeping Beauty, but is also quite far removed and by no means a retelling. What we have: the Queen, Snow, poison apples, magic mirrors. What we don’t have: the huntsman, dwarves, an enchanted sleep (no, we don’t either, though that line was funny as a callback to the fairy tale), or a prince. So the story is very different, even though it has all these familiar elements.

And I find myself thinking that an aspiring author could do worse than outline this story and see how T Kingfisher put it together. It’s got a bit of a romance, nothing surprising and also the romance isn’t centered as in the various Saint fantasy romances. Here, the romance is extremely restrained, with exactly the kind of male lead I prefer, and I guess here I will pause and say –>

C) Tropes!

The Bodyguard, the Natural Philosopher, the Innocent Child In Need Of Saving, the Honorable King (I would have liked to see more of him), the Evil Queen (kind of?), the Talking Cat, the Misunderstood Monster. Hmm. I think that’s it? Of these basic tropes, AS YOU KNOW, I especially like the Bodyguard, the Natural Philosopher, and the Honorable King. Talking cats are a tougher sell these days, but I did like this particular example.

I also particularly like a specific sort of trick where a character starts off seeming evil and then the author jerks the plot neatly into a different direction and no! The character seemed evil, but this was never actually true. In this case, not exactly evil, but extremely grotesque and possibly dangerous, which is close enough and I enjoyed this abrupt reorientation a ton.

But I was going to say, great bodyguard here. This is a bodyguard romance, and very neatly handled, though not at all surprising. Raise your hand if you recognized the male lead as the male lead in a probable romance subplot practically the moment he stepped on stage. I’m sure lots of hands just went up. He is also a great example of a character who is genuinely intelligent, about whom no other character says, “Wow, he’s so smart.” He just is smart, and says intelligent things at important moments, and this is nicely handled throughout.

As you may recall, I found T Kingfisher’s A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking unreadable because of protagonist stupidity, and there were a couple of moments in this book where the protagonist seems a trifle slow. (More than a trifle. (I’m having to repress the urge to point to the one moment that annoyed me the most, but I really don’t want to put any serious spoilers into this post. (Though this occurs at a highly predictable moment that the reader could see coming practically from the beginning. (But even so.)))) These are brief moments, and the bodyguard makes up for it.

D) The natural philosophy!

I love Lady Trent in Marie Brennan’s A Natural History of Dragons and sequels.

I love Emily in Emily Wilde’s Encyclopedia of Fairies. I have both the second and third books, but I haven’t read them. I know I have the ebooks, and I think I also have them in audio form from Chirp – I’m sure I’ve mentioned how direly perilous Chirp is, how extraordinarily tempting it is to just drop tons of audiobooks into your library at the stunningly good prices Chirp offers. I should move those to the top of one TBR pile or the other.

I love Rowen in The Steerswoman (this still has my vote for Most Tragic Unfinished Series, and also still has my vote for Series Most Extremely Worth Reading Even If It’s Not Finished. (Come to think of it, I know exactly where the author ought to be going; maybe someday when I have nothing else to do, I’ll write the final book and drop it on Archive of Our Own or something. (Don’t hold your breath))).

Oh, another example, kind of, is Archimedes in Gillian Bradshaw’s The Sand Reckoner. Historical, obviously, not fantasy, but mathematics and particularly geometry is certainly a natural philosophy sort of thing, so I hereby declare that counts.

Well, that was more of a digression than I intended. My point is, I really like natural philosophers in fantasy and fantasy-adjacent novels. Thus Lady Tehre in The Land of Burning Sands, who appeared because I’d just been reading JE Gordon’s excellent book on materials science, Structures: Or Why Things Don’t Fall Down. There aren’t nearly enough natural philosophers / scientists discovering the world in fantasy.

Here, we have a narrowly focused but quite splendid focus on poisons. And antidotes. I bet T Kingfisher had fun putting all this stuff about poisons and antidotes into this novel. I mean, obviously she did. And though I like The Physician – as you can tell, given Suelen, but the physician/veterinarian/healer is a trope that appeals to me a lot – but my point here is, Anja is not an example of this trope at all. She’s a natural philosopher with this specific knowledge base, and T Kingfisher writes her just perfectly. Speaking of tropes, she’s a bit of the Awkward Young Woman, which I don’t care for, but in this case I enjoyed it, because when Anja is feeling socially uncomfortable, she tends to tell whoever is handy something interesting about obscure poisons. This is massively more fun than the random comments many other Awkward Young Women might make.

So this element is important in the story, obviously.

Then we get the ornate part of the setting, and I don’t think I want to say anything about that, except this certainly presents challenges for verbal description of physical setting, and I do have to admit, I wasn’t entirely sure I was picturing this element correctly. I enjoyed this anyway, especially the Misunderstood Monster, though extreme grotesquery, not ordinarily my favorite thing. I would absolutely not call this Horror, but I will say that T Kingfisher lives up to her well-deserved reputation for dropping something grotesque and horrific into every single novel, even if the novel is a fantasy romance. Sometimes this is just purely scenery (and a potential hook for a subsequent book). In this case, it’s a crucial element. A very snazzy element.

Then everything sorts itself out. Villainy is defeated, the Innocent Child is saved, the romance shows every sign of progressing in a satisfactory direction … I don’t feel any of this constitutes a spoiler, because what else would you expect? The tone is just lighthearted enough to ensure no one can doubt a happy ending is on the way.

Is it a fairy tale? Oh, close enough, close enough. It’s got a breezy style more than a fairy tale style, but it’s chock full with fairy tale elements in general and Snow White elements in particular. So: recommended, and if you’ve read it, what did you think? With some caution about spoilers, please.

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