UD Part 1 (Spoilers through the wingtest)

[Alan]

I like the characters and setting so far but part one left me with this nagging question ...

Basically, why does Kirit respond so very negatively to the idea of becoming a singer? They seem to be very high status in her world so I would have thought a big part of her response would be to be flattered by the offer. Similarly, why are the singers so antagonistic? Aren't there easier ways to convince her to join than something guaranteed to make her dislike them?

I guess I feel a bit like the disagreement is happening more because the story needs conflict than because it arises organically from the characters. I'm hoping to hear contradictory views because I like the book so far and would like to quiet that little voice in the back of my head.

[Joanna Chaplin]

Alan wrote: "I like the characters and setting so far but part one left me with this nagging question ...

Basically, why does Kirit respond so very negatively to the idea of becoming a singer? They seem to be ..."

Kirit idolizes her mother and wants to please her. I'm not convinced that she actually wants to be a trader for its own sake (although that's pretty good, too) as much as because it means becoming her mother's partner.

[terpkristin]

I've just finished this section and I guess I just assume that there will be more to common the Singers and why they seem so revered yet feared and maybe even reviled. Seems like a starting point for a religion, now that I think on it.

[Tassie Dave, S&L Historian]

I am just past this section as well.

Kirit doesn't want to be a Singer because it means giving up her family and friends. Also she doesn't want to have to punish (even kill) people who break the Laws, even someone she loves.

[Ruth (tilltab) Ashworth]

Just finished the first part, and I agree, it seems to be more that she has her heart set on being with her mother, a woman she clearly admires greatly, and strives to be recognised by. Her mother is very independent, but it seems she earned this position by challenging the Singers. The role of a Singer locks her away in a tower, outside of the freedom to explore the skys that the trader roll seems to offer. Kirit will bring honour to her family if she joins the Singers, but she will just be a member of a secretive, powerful group, unable to cut her own identity like her mother has. I got the feeling that (putting the next bit in spoiler tags as it was an unexpected twist for me) (view spoiler)[when her mother trader her away to another family, she was angry because she had both not been acknowledged by her mother, and, more importantly, had not been given a choice - at that point it seemed almost as though being given to the Singers would be a lesser betrayal than what had already happened. (hide spoiler)]

I'm also wondering if the name Singer isn't off-putting to her, since she is frequently mocked for her singing voice.

[Greg]

I think a lot of her response is based on what her dreams have been. If you've had your mind set on doing something and been dreaming about it and trying to achieve it it's hard to change direction. Especially when the way it's done is not saying "Hey you're awesome consider this" but more "We are going to do everything in our power to force/pressure you to do what we want"

[Lara]

I agree that Kirit idolizes her mother and wants to be like her or even better. There is a weird sort of competition there for a mother daughter relationship. However, I also agree that she hasn't really thought about her options and has accepted her mother's distrust of Singers as a truth to live by.

But, I do also think there is a gap in the character development for Kirit. She is stubborn, but doesn't really change much.

[Vanessa]

I also just finished the first part and am struggling with Kirit. I find her to be unlikeable, selfish and self-centered, and am having trouble sympathizing with her.

Anyone else feel same way? I'm hoping she changes as the story progresses, or the mystery of the bones gets more interesting, or Nat becomes the main protagonist instead...

[Lara]

Vanessa wrote: "I also just finished the first part and am struggling with Kirit. I find her to be unlikeable, selfish and self-centered, and am having trouble sympathizing with her.

Anyone else feel same way? I..."

I felt that Kirit was a typical teen focused on her future. She doesn't have many friends, and tailors herself after her mother, who is ambitious. Her life is basically school and learning a bit from her mother about being a trader in the future. She isn't given many opportunities to be focused on others and isn't taught to care either.

However, she doesn't seem to care that Elna and Nat are only up high because of her mother. She accepts them like family and doesn't lord anything over them. To me, that is the first sign of her true character--that she doesn't sneer at those who are worse off than she is. In fact, she is more open than Nat when she considers Elna's behavior towards Tobias and treats him as a person.

[Paulo]

Vanessa wrote: I also just finished the first part and am struggling with Kirit. I find her to be unlikeable, selfish and self-centered, and am having trouble sympathizing with her.

I'm feeling the same. Kirit's motivations are making me really confuse. Later on the book, her love/hate feelings for the Singers only make me feel worse. Sometimes (view spoiler)[ she seems proud to be one of them - jumping at every task received - just to say something on the next paragraph seeming to hate them for what they do and what they force her to do. (hide spoiler)]

Oh, teenagers...

[Lara]

Paulo wrote: " Vanessa wrote: I also just finished the first part and am struggling with Kirit. I find her to be unlikeable, selfish and self-centered, and am having trouble sympathizing with her.

I'm feeling ..."

As I got towards the end of the book, I had issues with (view spoiler)[Kirit identifying as a Singer. It didn't feel to me that she ever came to feel that she was one. She was always just going along with the training to get to her goal of uncovering the mystery. At the end when she is one of them, I didn't buy it (hide spoiler)]. I think it was a lack of character development. She learns skills and information, but doesn't really develop as a person.

[Joanna Chaplin]

Paulo wrote: " Vanessa wrote: I also just finished the first part and am struggling with Kirit. I find her to be unlikeable, selfish and self-centered, and am having trouble sympathizing with her."

I think that she's kind of teenager who has a hefty capacity of self-deception, in this case I think her reasons for wanting to be a trader, who still experiences these few blinding moments of insight about herself and others. She's groping toward immaturity with fits and starts. I grew up with folks like that. I was for a while like that. While I'm not sure I want to be best buds with her, I found that very refreshing.

[Joanna Chaplin]

Lara wrote: "...I had issues with (view spoiler)[[Kirit identifying as a Singer] (hide spoiler)].

Shortened because nested formatting is weird. I think there's two aspects to that. Long bit in here: (view spoiler)[Aspect 1: in order to understand how her world truly is, she signs a pledge to them. The leader guy Rumul tells her that she is already complicit in their violence by her inaction. Now, I think that's a gray area. While it would have been more morally pure for her to somehow act in protest to try to save those lives, it also probably would have gotten her killed and she had no way to be sure whether or not that would have been the catalyst to start a revolution. So lawful stupid. I probably would have done the same combo of chickening out /trying to find a better way to put down the whole corrupt thing. But assigning more complicitness (is this a word?) than deserved is the sort of thing an abuser does to secure a target almost caught. It's blackmail. So I think she is mildly abused by authority figures into publicly and shallowly embracing an identity that she doesn't truly identify with, deep down.

Aspect 2: as soon as she is taken by the Spire, the populace hitches her fate to that of the Singers. Singers don't come back except as strangers there to order their lives and judge their deed. When she comes back well fed, with new, odd physical mannerism and fancy wings, they have no way to perceive how oddly her newly accepted identity sits on her shoulders. And then when she displays Singer powers, there's the fear. She's a Singer in every way they know. It's hard not to respond, especially as a teenager, to the way your feel yourself to be perceived. So even if she isn't sure she feels like a Singer, she's learned new skills and secrets that have changed the way the reacts to the world. She is no longer really an ignorant tower dweller either, whose competences are not her own.

Another thing, when she finds the old carvings in the ruins of Lith, she sees everyone but the Singers in particular acting truly through compassion, not just cold utilitarianism. There's a streak of that old way in the Songs of the Spire, even if the present reality is quite different. There's helping there, and prestige, and elite flying techniques, and now being always tied to a single tower and the tight social structure (not that the Spire is much looser, but it seems so at first), and I think these aspects of the Singers honestly appeal to her. They're not all that different from what she wanted out of being a trader.

tl;dr : I think the narrative cannot entirely be trusted because it is colored by mild abuse, self-deception, and emotional overreaction. (hide spoiler)]

[Lara]

Joanna, I agree with much of what you say. (view spoiler)[Kirit knows when she first meets Rumul that he's manipulative, but doesn't have the experience or skills to figure out his position or how to play him back.

It does seem that the authority figures are awfully willing to sacrifice her, perhaps because they live a precarious life and it's easier to marginalize those related to someone who had trouble?

I understand that by joining the Singers she is now separated from the general populace. However, she didn't really fit in well before, and I just saw that despite her spending the time training, she never internalized being a Singer. I would have thought that she'd start to identify with them more, even if she were conflicted. Then she would be even more concerned about how as a Singer she's supposed to help the people, not hurt them. Instead, I saw that she continued the me vs them mentality completely until the crisis at the end when suddenly is calling herself a Singer (even in her own head) without out any real transition.

Maybe if she'd had more experiences where she had it drilled into her by being treated differently I'd accept it more. But while she played the role of the Singer when she went back to her tower, several others responded to her in ways that made it clear they still remembered her as herself, not just a Singer. Plus, she was constantly told she had to stay in form. It just reinforced to me that she was playing at being a Singer in order to reach a goal, and she didn't identify as one, but was willing to accept the benefits as it helped make things easier for her.

Overall, I'm not sure how much self-deception there is. I saw it more as being over focused on one way of seeing the world and being unwilling to question things if it detracted from her focus on her goals. Her mother also colored her perceptions and beliefs while sheltering her from realities. So, she was done a disservice as she was not encouraged to look for motivations or complexities other than in trading goods. She didn't learn about how to recognize or handle politics at all. (hide spoiler)]

[Andrew]

Even having finished the book, I'm still a bit undecided about this. I had no problem with Kirit's motive to be like her mother, but her rejection of the powerful opportunity to become a singer felt a little underdeveloped. If she'd considered the potential upside of that just a little more while forcefully rejecting it, finding reasons to ignore the benefits, I'd have bought into it a lot more. Similarly, the very blunt way of pushing her into being a singer felt like it could have been the best option for those involved, but wasn't given enough explanation to quite make it convincing. Why didn't they try anything with more carrot and less stick? There were probably reasons, but what were they?

That said, in reality we often do stupid, unnuanced things. We'll sometimes buy into whatever reasoning best fits the actions we're most comfortable taking, or have already committed to. So in that sense, Kirit's actions were very convincing for a real person. Maybe I just expect fictional characters to be more consistent than real people.

[Silvana]

Just finished part 1. Am I the only one who thought she obviously would not get the wingmark because it would be too easy and the plot needs to move? I mean, since she was threatened by Wik I knew she would end up in The Spire one way or the other. And getting a wingmark is not one of them.

I agree though that her mother's move was the unexpected twist.

[Trike]

I figured she'd end up at the Spire since that holds all the secrets to the mysteries set up in the first couple chapters, but the *how* of that happening was still -- wait for it -- up in the air.

So she could have passed or failed the wingtest, as that was immaterial to the plot. Schrodinger's flier, basically. At the end of part one it was obvious where she was headed so it didn't matter to me how she ended up there.

Spoiler-free comment: Come to find out in part two, though, Wilde took the easiest and dumbest way possible. Slightly spoilery comment: (view spoiler)[It's dumb because it was obvious to everyone that Kirit passed the wingtest, making her failure a clear political move. Since the Singers are keeping the towers in the dark about stuff, that was just a heavy-handed thing to do. They're inviting questions. (hide spoiler)]

[Silvana]

Hmm. You had a point there.
Anyway, I decided not to continue after finding out the series is (view spoiler)[post apocalyptic fantasy (hide spoiler)]

[Joanna Chaplin]

Silvana wrote: "Hmm. You had a point there.
Anyway, I decided not to continue after finding out the series is [spoilers removed]"

Hm. I'm not sure that that's exactly right. (view spoiler)[I think it's more like a very slow apocalypse is happening, in that every year there are fewer people and less stuff. It's a dystopia because the Singers have gotten out of control. But it's not a planned utopia after a disaster that's actually screwed up, a la Divergent or Hunger Games. And I'm 90% sure this isn't our world, but a secondary world. (hide spoiler)]

[Silvana]

Thanks for clarifying, Joanna.
I guess I would still stop though, I haven't felt any connection with Kirit yet. I did like the flying stuff. Might come back to this book but not in the near future (or later after the second one is out and see if it gets better).

[Joanna Chaplin]

Silvana wrote: "Thanks for clarifying, Joanna.
I guess I would still stop though, I haven't felt any connection with Kirit yet. I did like the flying stuff. Might come back to this book but not in the near future ..."

Life's too short to slog through a book you're not liking.