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juushikaTitle: The Goblin Emperor
Author: Katherine Addison (Sarah Monette)
Published: New York: Tor, 2014
Rating: 5 of 5
Page Count: 446
Total Page Count: 173,975
Text Number: 509
Read Because: fan of the author & multiple recommendations, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: After the sudden death of his father and his father's first three heirs, Maia, youngest son, half-goblin, and relegated to a backwater estate, suddenly becomes the emperor of elfland. Similar to Monette's Doctrine of Labyrinths series, this is a second world fantasy of manners; unlike those books, the focus here is on goodness. The worldbuilding tends towards steampunk but its aesthetic doesn't overrun plot; the court intrigues are only complex because of the confusing names. (For that and other reasons, the appendix is useful.) Perhaps the best bit of worldbuilding is the use of first and second person formal and informal, because—despite the fantasy setting, despite the intrigue—the true focus is interpersonal.
Maia begins the book uneducated, outcast, and traumatized, but he possesses a stubborn goodness. As he attempts to do right with the power he's been granted, he's rewarded with respect and friendship. That process is transparent but utterly satisfying—in the slow, intimate pace of the book's first half; in the heartstring-yanking interactions near the end. If the book has a flaw, it's that it's too good—the villains incompetent, Maia's luck superb, too many decent people in the cast—but that's a flaw I will happily accept, because makes for a welcome break from convention which is consistently delightful to read. I recommend it with enthusiasm, and will return to reread it.
A moment to talk about Katherine Addison/Sarah Monette’s The Goblin Emperor.
There used to be (perhaps still is) a fandom habit of compiling lists of 101 narrative kinks—and a list of that size forces you away from larger tropes like hurt/comfort and into precise particulars. I never had the wherewithal to sit down and write all 101, and am not active in fandom besides, but:
The Goblin Emperor is about an uneducated and uncultured character who has a knack for asking insightful questions precisely because he doesn’t have any knowledge to take for granted and doesn’t know what conversations he shouldn’t have, which in turn makes him privy to valuable information, able to make unexpected social change, and garners him the respect of allies—and if that’s not half a dozen bulletproof narrative kinks in one sentence then I don’t know what is.
I loved Monette’s Doctrine of Labyrinths series and it’s surprisingly similar to The Goblin Emperor, second world fantasy of manners, trope/id-emphatic by nature. Doctrine of Labyrinths, though, tends to romanticize darkness, and I don’t say that as criticism—it’s engaging and even comforting to have characters forgiven even as they do awful things. The Goblin Emperor, by contrast, is about someone good—young, and keenly aware of the mortal limitations of his own goodness, but better than he knows; and operating with critical self-awareness but outside of most social and cultural assumptions, ultimately to his benefit. Sometimes he’s too good. Sometimes his goodness is too readily awarded—not so much in the main plot as in the interpersonal. But, because he’s a sympathetic outsider who ultimately finds strength in that, and also because a core of goodness is a welcome deviation from fantasy of manners norms, it’s singularly gratifying to spend time in that head.
Author: Katherine Addison (Sarah Monette)
Published: New York: Tor, 2014
Rating: 5 of 5
Page Count: 446
Total Page Count: 173,975
Text Number: 509
Read Because: fan of the author & multiple recommendations, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: After the sudden death of his father and his father's first three heirs, Maia, youngest son, half-goblin, and relegated to a backwater estate, suddenly becomes the emperor of elfland. Similar to Monette's Doctrine of Labyrinths series, this is a second world fantasy of manners; unlike those books, the focus here is on goodness. The worldbuilding tends towards steampunk but its aesthetic doesn't overrun plot; the court intrigues are only complex because of the confusing names. (For that and other reasons, the appendix is useful.) Perhaps the best bit of worldbuilding is the use of first and second person formal and informal, because—despite the fantasy setting, despite the intrigue—the true focus is interpersonal.
Maia begins the book uneducated, outcast, and traumatized, but he possesses a stubborn goodness. As he attempts to do right with the power he's been granted, he's rewarded with respect and friendship. That process is transparent but utterly satisfying—in the slow, intimate pace of the book's first half; in the heartstring-yanking interactions near the end. If the book has a flaw, it's that it's too good—the villains incompetent, Maia's luck superb, too many decent people in the cast—but that's a flaw I will happily accept, because makes for a welcome break from convention which is consistently delightful to read. I recommend it with enthusiasm, and will return to reread it.
A moment to talk about Katherine Addison/Sarah Monette’s The Goblin Emperor.
There used to be (perhaps still is) a fandom habit of compiling lists of 101 narrative kinks—and a list of that size forces you away from larger tropes like hurt/comfort and into precise particulars. I never had the wherewithal to sit down and write all 101, and am not active in fandom besides, but:
The Goblin Emperor is about an uneducated and uncultured character who has a knack for asking insightful questions precisely because he doesn’t have any knowledge to take for granted and doesn’t know what conversations he shouldn’t have, which in turn makes him privy to valuable information, able to make unexpected social change, and garners him the respect of allies—and if that’s not half a dozen bulletproof narrative kinks in one sentence then I don’t know what is.
I loved Monette’s Doctrine of Labyrinths series and it’s surprisingly similar to The Goblin Emperor, second world fantasy of manners, trope/id-emphatic by nature. Doctrine of Labyrinths, though, tends to romanticize darkness, and I don’t say that as criticism—it’s engaging and even comforting to have characters forgiven even as they do awful things. The Goblin Emperor, by contrast, is about someone good—young, and keenly aware of the mortal limitations of his own goodness, but better than he knows; and operating with critical self-awareness but outside of most social and cultural assumptions, ultimately to his benefit. Sometimes he’s too good. Sometimes his goodness is too readily awarded—not so much in the main plot as in the interpersonal. But, because he’s a sympathetic outsider who ultimately finds strength in that, and also because a core of goodness is a welcome deviation from fantasy of manners norms, it’s singularly gratifying to spend time in that head.
