Read Along with Faye is a new series of book reviews and commentary by Faye Bi on the Sirens communications staff, in which she attempts to read 25 books and complete the 2016 Sirens Reading Challenge. The series will consist mostly of required “theme” books and will post monthly. We invite you to read along and discuss! Light spoilers ahead.

Alas, this month I was planning to review Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s This Strange Way of Dying, but ran into the problem we all occasionally have after hearing about authors doing cool but quieter-buzzing things: accessibility. I will read this book for the challenge when my copy arrives in the mail. (Needless to say, if Amy were here, she would pipe in that This Strange Way of Dying will be available at the Narrate bookstore, yet another reason to come to this year’s Sirens with a full wallet and an empty suitcase.) This month, instead, I’m offering up a review of Mary Robinette Kowal’s Shades of Milk and Honey.

As a Jane Austen fan, Shades of Milk and Honey has been on my radar for years. I’m not quite sure why I hadn’t picked it up before now—I’d heard that maybe it was perhaps too much like Jane Austen? You wouldn’t be incorrect, fellow reader, if you thought so. The book is an intimate portrait of Jane Ellsworth, a plain 28-year-old spinster who’s been left on the shelf, who potential suitors pass on in favour of her younger, more beautiful sister Melody. I won’t harp on the similarities between Shades and Austen’s novels, except to say that nearly every character in the book has an Austen analogue—the doting father, the fussy mother, the gallant gentleman, the one who can’t express his feelings but has a heart of gold, the dastardly scoundrel, and so on—coupled that with Regency manners, occasionally inconsistent period/modern spelling, and familiar plot twists like secret arrangements, duels and carriage chases.

I like to call these parallels Kowal’s homage to Austen, as it’s clear that Austen was hugely influential, and for a debut effort, I could read past them and get to the best part of the book—the magic. Picture Austen’s Regency England with magic (or as they call it in-world, “glamour”) as a ladylike art, akin to needlepoint, drawing or playing the pianoforte. Young ladies entertain company with moving illusions, like a rustle of the wind on flowers or a scene from a play. Our protagonist Jane is particularly gifted at glamour for someone with no formal training, but then she meets Mr. Vincent, a trained glamourist who has been hired to tutor Jane’s handsome new neighbour’s younger sister.

The interactions between Mr. Vincent and Jane are, perhaps, what you might expect—uppity Mr. Vincent is annoyed that Jane keeps trying to work out the mechanics of his illusions, believing that they take away from the awe of the moment, but can’t help but admire her for it either. Jane is clueless for the most part, until Mr. Vincent sends her his journals with all his glamour notes and essentially professes his love for her. But what I love most is how glamour is so fully integrated in Kowal’s vision of Regency England as piano or drawing could be; when women practice it, it’s a mere frivolity, but when men practice it’s an art—or perhaps even a career. Jane laments her lack of education—everyone coos over Mr. Vincent’s illusions but hers are lacking life, movement, and soul.

Yet, because of glamour’s association with women, it’s still not quite respectable. Mr. Vincent, which we later learn is the younger son of a quite well-to-do family (surprise!) practices glamour without his prestigious family name in order to keep it unsullied. Be it glamour or cooking, making clothes, composing music or writing books, women should just be distracting themselves until they grow into their value by getting married, because obvs.

I’m really pleased to hear that Kowal explores men vs. women’s work further in her glamour-infused Regency world in later books, as well as the relationship between Jane and Mr. Vincent, who are now two practicing glamourists. I look forward to reading more—four more books, to be exact.

Next Month: Recap Post!

Faye Bi works as a book publicist in New York City, and is a member of the Sirens communications team. She’s yet to read an immigrant story she hasn’t cried over, and is happiest planning nerdy parties, capping off a long run with brunch, and cycling along the East River.

The Sirens Review Squad is made up of Sirens volunteers, who submit short reviews of books (often fantasy literature by women authors) they’ve read and enjoyed. If you’re interested in sending us a review to run on the blog, please email us! Today, we welcome a review from Kayla Shifrin on Alaya Dawn Johnson’s The Summer Prince. 

The Teenager’s Closed Pyramid: A Review of Alaya Dawn Johnson’s The Summer Prince

Any review of The Summer Prince would be incomplete without dwelling, in detail, on the grand city of Palmares Tres. A soaring glass pyramid, divided into tiers that re-enforce class divisions, crawling with technologies that alternately soothe and spy on its citizens – Palmares Tres is life breathed into glass, and the reader sees and hears every inch of the city as the protagonist June passes through it. Her friend and lover, the doomed Summer King Enki, can literally feel the heartbeat of their city in every cell of his nanotech-enhanced body. Still, there’s a flaw in the gorgeous world of Palmares Tres. It’s not the pyramid, it’s not the technology, and it’s not the stubborn, driven, occasionally bratty June – not exactly. The problem is that the world of The Summer Prince is a teenager’s world. I don’t mean “the story is centered on a teenager”; I mean that the narrative itself conforms to a teenager’s understanding, desire, and political perspective. There’s a subtle but important difference in YA fiction between writing a teenage protagonist and writing a teenage world.

June, like many YA heroines and all good teenagers, has figured out that her civilization is founded on complete and utter bullshit. She loves her city, but the entire pyramid is rife with lies and inequality. The adults who run it are various combinations of cruel, stupid, and cynical. Traditions and taboos are enforced out of hatred and fear – especially fear of young people, change, and anything associated with either. All societies devour their children, but Palmares Tres does so literally: the teenage Summer King is sacrificed every few years in order to maintain the dominance of a corrupt matriarchy. At the end of the story, the brilliant, transcendent Enki engineers his sacrifice so that June can be named the new Queen of Palmares Tres. Once enthroned, June rewrites the law so that no Summer King will ever have to die again.

Our new queen June proves herself to be obnoxious, judgmental, self-righteous, loving, devoted, passionate, and ambitious. She’s consumed by the desire to do the right thing but frequently makes tactical mistakes, mostly when she fails to understand other people’s feelings and motivations. In other words, she’s a perfectly realistic teenager. But teenagers, generally speaking, don’t make very good political leaders. Their diagnosis of social problems is absolutely correct – “this is all total bullshit” – but their prescribed treatment – “I should run the world” – is not a cure. An enlightened despot is still a despot. June may be sympathetic toward the people of the slums at the bottom of the pyramid, but it’s hard to imagine how a privileged eighteen-year girl could single-handedly fix an entrenched economic disaster zone. Even if she tried, it’s hard to imagine that the despised council of Aunties – who still hold significant political power in the city – wouldn’t just assassinate her as soon as they had the chance.

But The Summer Prince is content to end with June ascending the throne. Revolutions, as we discussed at the last Sirens conference, aren’t easy. They aren’t easy in real life and they shouldn’t be easy in fiction. Removing a bad leader from power and replacing him/her with a good one is a start, but it doesn’t remove the entrenched inequalities that fed the system in the first place. At best, it’s a symbolic move, and symbols can’t fix societies. They can only provide focus and direction.

June is tricked into becoming queen, but the decision to remain queen – and therefore become a symbol – is entirely her own. As “the best artist in Palmares Tres”, her canvas is frequently her own body, or images of herself. Her collaborative projects with Enki culminate in her queenship, where she’s fully transformed into the living embodiment of the movement toward youth and growth and political change. Enki has a very uneasy relationship with self-as-symbol, but June blithely accepts her new role. She grieves over her dead friend, of course, but never appears to doubt she’ll transcend their social order even after Enki was crushed beneath it.

Maybe The Summer Prince, for all its focus on inequality, isn’t really opposed to the concept. Maybe hierarchies are only a problem – from June’s point of view – if the wrong symbol sits on top. The mean and bitter old lady, instead of the totally reasonable teenage girl. Maybe June’s revolution fails because it’s not really meant to succeed.

But I wanted a revolution. I wanted June’s teenage perspective to open up, dilating into the larger, messier world of adulthood. I wanted her to realize the old queen was more than just a symbol of authoritarianism and stagnation – she was a person, with thoughts and intentions. I wanted June to notice that sometimes leaders have to compromise if they plan to keep their heads. More than anything, I wanted June to grow up.

Maturity doesn’t necessarily mean cynicism or amorality. Stories don’t always have to descend into grimdark, where leadership is always diabolical or stupid and getting worse. But a coming of age story – like a revolution – is a journey. It doesn’t end in the same small place where it began, but opens up into a strange, uncertain world. All the glorious imagery of Palmares Tres, the ambiguity of its perspectives – from the heights of the ballroom looking down through a glass floor into the mists of the slum, from the slum gazing up at the unreachable, glamorous palace above – all of this would have benefited and been enriched by a more complex, maturing, evolving ending.

Kayla Shifrin lives in Brooklyn with her husband, a very large pile of books, and two cats who are possibly demons. She writes sometimes and reads constantly, and would read in her sleep if that were a thing, and hopes someday that will be a thing.

Read Along with Faye is a new series of book reviews and commentary by Faye Bi on the Sirens communications staff, in which she attempts to read 25 books and complete the 2016 Sirens Reading Challenge. The series will consist mostly of required “theme” books and will post monthly. We invite you to read along and discuss! Light spoilers ahead.

It took me a long time to process Helen Oyeyemi’s Boy, Snow, Bird. There were so many things I loved about it—and so many elements that were done brilliantly. The novel starts off from Boy’s, a young white woman’s, point of view set in the 1950s in New York City. Her abusive, drunken father is a rat catcher and Boy takes her first opportunity to hightail it outta there to a small town in Massachusetts, where she meets Arturo Whitman, a light-skinned widowed craftsman and former history professor.

Yes, light-skinned. Because Oyeyemi uses the classic fairy tale of Snow White, with her “skin as white as snow” as a departure point for a truly bold and nuanced portrayal of racial passing. At first, Boy becomes entranced to Arturo’s daughter from his first marriage, Snow, who is so pale, so graceful and beautiful she is practically alight with a virtual halo.  After Boy marries Arturo, she gives birth to the dark-skinned Bird and discovers that the Whitmans have passed as white, or “light enough,” for generations, shunning and ignoring their darker-skinned relatives. Particularly noxious is Olivia, Arturo’s mother, who treats her granddaughter Snow as a treasure to be worshipped and fawned over. For Olivia, Snow represents what her race and her family could be—not black. “Snow’s beauty is all the more precious to Olivia…because it’s a trick. When whites look at her, they don’t get whatever fleeting, ugly impressions so many of us get when we see a colored girl—we don’t see a colored girl standing there.” Contrast this to the aloofness and (hopefully unintentional) shame she has towards Bird.

Boy begins fulfilling the role of the supposed wicked stepmother in the Snow White tale, though Oyeyemi cleverly weaves in the setting of early Civil Rights America and themes of motherhood, race, beauty and identity that she imbues the motifs with new meanings. Boy sends Snow away to live with her dark-skinned Aunt Clara and her husband, far away from Bird, Arturo and Olivia. One could argue that Boy’s act is cruel, and in fact, many would—but even Snow herself, in later chapters narrated by Bird, admits in a letter:

“I may or may not have hated my own face sometimes. I may or may not have spent time thinking of ways to spoil it somehow… But I’m slowly coming around to the view that you can’t feel nauseated by the Whitmans and the Millers without feeling nauseated by the kind of world that’s rewarded them for adapting to it like this.”

Would she ever have come to this conclusion had she stayed in Massachusetts? Boy’s act of sending her away forces Snow to see herself in a new light, instead of becoming part of the same warped system that has rewarded the Whitmans for passing, because ugh, racism is real. And on the other hand how can you blame Olivia, who has lived within this system all her life in fear of being discovered she’s actually ‘colored’?

But where Boy, Snow, Bird exceeds all expectations in delving into the implications of racial passing, with beautiful, poetic writing and the careful weaving of a classic fairytale, it fails spectacularly when it comes to gender. The last twenty pages of the book didn’t completely ruin the book for me, but I could easily see it ruining it for other readers. I will avoid major spoilers, but the plot lurched and took a sudden turn for the random and for the worse. It didn’t relate thematically to the rest of the book, and problematically attempted to address a trans character’s identity through rape, self-loathing, mental illness and trauma. I had such a negative reaction to it I would advise fellow readers to just avoid the last twenty pages altogether.

I still loved Boy, Snow, Bird for the insight it offered me, but due to the last twenty pages (and a very annoying character—Boy’s “friend” Mia) I’d recommend it with reservations.

Next Month: The Strange Way of Dying by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Faye Bi works as a book publicist in New York City, and is a member of the Sirens communications team. She’s yet to read an immigrant story she hasn’t cried over, and is happiest planning nerdy parties, capping off a long run with brunch, and cycling along the East River.