Let this be a lesson to authors in choosing the best title for their novel! And let this be a lesson to potential readers not to judge a book by its title! When I first saw the title Graceling I was convinced that it was quite literally a fairy story; that is, a story about fairies, and I had no interest in it at all. That's not to stake a claim that I would never read a fairy story, but I've never yet been moved in that direction by any such novel of which I've become aware.
Even when I learned that the female protagonist in this novel was an assassin, it didn't fire up any deeper interest in the novel within me because I still thought it was about fairies! It was the 'grace' combined with the 'ling' which did it, I think; it was too much of a airy-fairy title! Then I happened to be looking along the library shelves and saw Fire. I picked it up not realizing that it was in the same world as Graceling and I was intrigued by the blurb. Graceling just happened to be sitting right next to it. Thinking they were sequential I picked that one up as well. I discovered that they're not a sequential pair, but they do share the same world, so I decided that if I'm going to read Fire, I ought to read Graceling first, just in case. In for a pennyweight, in for a pounding. So here I am, a hundred and 30-some pages into this 470-some page story and I have to confess that I'm not disappointed so far.
The female protagonist is Katsa, the male protagonist probably Prince Po. Yeah, about those names! I actually love 'Katsa', but Po? No! What is it which makes cat-like names so cool for female protagonists? Kat, Kitai, Katsa? Anyway, we start with her helping to bust out a Lienid prince (with the bizarre name of Tealiff) from prison. Katsa harms no one, she merely knocks the guards out and pops a sleeping pill in their mouth to keep them out long enough for her team to get away with their prisoner.
Though Katsa is supposed to be King Randa's enforcer, she's working as an independent on this job. She's supposed to be traveling to a neighboring kingdom to beat up on a guy who took more forest acreage than he had contracted for, but before she makes that trip, she side-tracks to spring this aging foreign prince, and returns him to Randa City, her own capital, where they keep him hidden so no one will know that Middluns (Katsa's home nation) will know they had anything to do with it.
The only unexpected thing on this entire adventure was her encounter with another of her kind, whom she knocks out, but doesn't kill. It's just as well, because he later shows up at the palace where she resides, and it turns out he's another prince of Lienid. Lienid has seven princes, and the world in which these people all reside has seven kingdoms: Nander, Sunder, Estill, Wester, Middluns, Monsea, and Lienid. The first four nations in that list tend to be at war with one another for one reason or another, the latter three, not so much.
In these nations there is, on occasion, a child is born who has a 'grace' - that is a special talent at something or other. These graces can be for anything from cooking, to taking care of horses, to swimming, to being an expert at fighting and killing, and even mind reading. Katsa discovered her talent when she accidentally killed a much older cousin who was touching her way too familiarly. Those who have graces are readily recognizable by having eyes of two different colors. Katsa's are blue and green, Prince Po's are silver and gold. Such people are shunned as a general rule, but if they have a great talent for something their king deems useful, then the king can order that the bearer of the grace be brought into his service; hence Katsa's permanent presence at the palace. The King is also her uncle.
Katsa isn't happy being an enforcer. She dislikes hurting people and becomes very angry when her king demands her services, but she is the best there is, better even than Prince Po, though he is older and stronger. The two of them begin to bond over their shared grace, and fight with each other each day just for the pleasure of being able to combat someone who is actually a challenge to them. But Katsa is really painfully slow to realize that Po is not only graced as a fighter, he's also graced as a mind reader - as long as your mind is focused on him. This ability to read her intentions towards him is how he manages to stay in a fight with her, but of course it makes it rather questionable as to how Katsa was able to knock him out when she encountered him at the start of this novel!
Katsa is also friends with Randa's own son, Prince Raffin, who hangs out with a very close male friend called Bann, pursuing intellectual interests, particularly medicine. In one experiment, he ended up with his hair dyed blue, and so currently isn't in his father's best graces. He and Katsa, together with spy chief Oll and Lord Giddon, who is in love with Katsa, along with a web of people across the seven nations, are part of The Council. It was on Council business that Katsa rescued Prince Tealiff.
The apparently budding romance between Po and Katsa is being handled rather nicely, so I don't even get to complain about that(!), and there appears to be no love triangle here, but there comes a threat to the smooth unfolding of that love when Katsa is dispatched by Randa on another bullying mission. She's supposed to bully Lord Ellis into giving up one of his daughters in marriage to another lord who lives in such a besieged locale that he's having a hard time finding a wife. Randa volunteers one of Elli's daughters, but Ellis refuses. Katsa refused to beat up on him for that. Instead she gives both Giddon and Oll slight injuries and orders them to tell Randa that she refused and they were injured in foolishly trying to coerce her. In that way, she takes sole blame for her action - or lack of it.
Giddon, trying to help her out of her dilemma, proposes to her, somehow thinking that a marriage to him will reduce or deflect the King's opportunities for punishment. Katsa refuses him, but during their discussion, she is finally clued in to Po's talent, and she confronts Po angrily, calling him a traitor before storming back to her room where her maid, Helda, tries to comfort her. Then comes an unintentionally hilarious sentence:
Later, when Katsa was dressed and Helda grappled with her wet hair before the fire, there was a knock on her entrance.
Po tries to apologize to her, but she's very angry. Without having resolved her relationship with him, she's summoned to the King's presence to answer for her refusal to obey him in the Lord Ellis affair. She takes charge of her own life from this point onwards. Rather than being cowed by the King, she refuses to work for him any more and in the morning (why the delay?!) she leaves the castle with Po, and they head towards Monsea to investigate further the kidnapping of Prince Tealiff.
The Journey is long and they use it to pursue their differences, resolve their issues, and plan ahead for what they might encounter in Monsea. Katsa also grows to know herself better - and realizes that her grace is not murdering, but surviving. Her fighting skills are only a small part of this. For her own peace of mind, Katsa practices both conveying messages to Po just by thinking, and on also blocking him out of her mind. As they meander through the forest and scale the mountains into Monsea, they discuss the king. He came to power oddly. He was not of the royal blood, but showed up as an orphan and vagabond. He had only one eye and people took to him readily. Eventually the king adopted him and named his as heir to the throne, whereupon the king and queen and his top advisers all mysteriously died, leaving the one-eyed vagabond to rule.
It's Po's and Katsa's considered opinion that the reason the vagabond king is one-eyed is that he deliberately cut out the other eye to hide the fact that he has a grace: a grace which enables him to control the minds of others, which is how he got away with all that he did. I think we're about to learn a bit more of his history in a prequel called Fire, which I'll be reviewing next.
Unfortunately for Katsa and Po, all their plans come to naught because the first person they encounter upon entering the kingdom is the king himself, chasing his escaping wife Ashen (a kinswoman of Po's) and slaughtering her. Her dying thought is to Po, to find her daughter who is now alone in the forest.
For the first time in her life, Katsa realizes that there is something which she can neither fight nor defend against: the king's mind control. They run and hide in the forest, eventually finding the young princess. Po is protected against the King's power because he can sense the King's thoughts and repel them, but Katsa cannot. She has turned her weapons over to Po and vowed to do everything he asks without question as a protection against being mind-controlled, but she couldn't obey Po's order to strike the King down because the King had already overpowered her mind. Now the two of them have no plan and must urgently decide what to do next.
I love this story so much that I'm going to award it a 'worthy' even though I haven't finished it yet. I don't even care if the ending sucks! This novel is so good that it's worth reading even if the ending is awful!
Well the ending wasn't awful, it was awesome (and no, I'm not going to tell you what happens! I wouldn't dream of robbing you of that joy.) This is a really amazing novel, with great characters, very well-written, a superbly well-done YA "romance" which ought to make other YA romance writers pay attention if they know what's good for them, and learn something about how intelligent, self-respecting people really behave in relationships. And no, I'm not talking about the fighting! Go read it: grace yourself!
Graceling is followed sequentially by Bitterblue and preceded by Fire, although I understand that Cashore recommends that they be read in the order they were published, which is how I've been reading them.
