Each year, Sirens chair Amy Tenbrink posts monthly reviews of new-to-her books from the annual Sirens reading list. You can find all of her Sirens Book Club reviews at the Sirens Goodreads Group. We invite you to read along and discuss!

A decade ago, I read the entire Twilight series. The whole thing: the creepy sleep-watching, the blank chapters, the suicide attempts, the imprinting, the popsicle sex. Not because I loved it, because I didn’t. No, I read Twilight because they were zeitgeist books. Millions of women read those books. Millions of girls loved those books. Millions of men (and other women) judged them for it. There were Twi-hards and Twilight conventions and, unlike a lot of series, the entire Twilight series made it into theatrically released movies.

I didn’t really get it. And I don’t really get it now. And while I don’t care so much about not getting it – not everyone loves everything – I often want to understand why, if you will, the zeitgeist. So every year I pick up books that maybe I otherwise wouldn’t read simply because the general public – the not-necessarily-fantasy-loving general public – seems to like them a lot.

Which is why The Witch’s Daughter, by Paula Brackston, made the Sirens Book Club this year. You’ve all seen it. You probably recognize the cover. It’s a New York Times bestseller. It made the tables at the big bookstores. It’s the first in a series. This is one of those books – like Big Little Lies, maybe, or Gone Girl – that was the right book at the right time to capture a lot of readers’ attention. But why?

The Witch’s Daughter is one of those sweeping historical novels: We start in modern-day England, more or less, but then jump back to several periods in England’s history: the witch-burning period, Jack the Ripper, a world war. Those of you looking for historical accuracy, however, should look elsewhere. While Brackston makes some attempt at differences in dialogue in different periods, this isn’t going to make even an armchair historian happy.

The crux of The Witch’s Daughter isn’t history, however; it’s fantasy. We’re in a world where magic is something between a skill and a talent: it’s somewhat unclear, but it seems that a powerful witch can turn anyone with the slightest propensity into a witch, though perhaps not an especially powerful witch, and then if that witch practices, they become more powerful. One of my greatest frustrations with this book is actually that lack of clarity. I couldn’t tell what the criteria are for becoming a witch, why some witches are more powerful than others, or how much more powerful you could become with practice. Which is to say that I spent a lot of this book thinking, “Why don’t you just…?” And, “But what about…?”

Our protagonist, Elizabeth, is both the titular witch’s daughter and a witch herself. She wasn’t born a witch, but we learn relatively early on in the book how she became a witch. SPOILER Back in witch-burning England, the plague came. After losing two children and her husband, Elizabeth’s mother traded God-knows-what to Gideon, an arrogant, power-mad male witch (trigger warning: rape), in exchange for the power to heal Elizabeth. Facing execution for witchcraft and knowing that the hysteria will call for her daughter’s death next, her mother tells Elizabeth to seek out Gideon for protection. Following her mother’s death, Elizabeth does. Gideon teaches Elizabeth magic and, thinking she’ll be his immortal soulmate, makes a deal with the devil to grant Elizabeth great power. (Only in a certain type of book does procuring great magic for your soulmate involve having a threesome with two other women.) Elizabeth witnesses the ritual and, terrified, horrified, she flees.

And spends the next few centuries continuing to flee. The Witch’s Daughter jumps back and forth between modern-day, as Elizabeth meets and then trains local-girl Tegan in witchcraft (or Wiccan; the book doesn’t seem to differentiate between fantastic witchcraft and real-world Wicca, which is obnoxious), and history, as she changes her name and occasionally encounters Gideon (who is, of course, Jack the Ripper). BIGGER SPOILER Eventually, you learn than Tegan’s older boyfriend is also Gideon and that we’re going to have a showdown. A showdown that, ultimately, I found unsatisfying.

Should you read it? I think that ultimately comes down to a couple questions: Do you like reluctant, even passive heroines? Do you love the witch oeuvre so much that you’ll happily read even flawed books? Is it going to drive you insane when Elizabeth doesn’t seem to try very hard to evade or defeat Gideon? Are you going to be mad when Elizabeth reconciles herself to being less powerful than Gideon, even though she’s made very little effort to develop her skill?

I wouldn’t recommend this book to myself. I like my heroines to drive the action, not react to it, and what interests me most about women who work magic is their embrace of power, their ambition, and their willingness to put in the work to augment that power in service of that ambition. Elizabeth isn’t that woman. But there are many, many aspects of women who work magic, and she might be your woman.

Amy
 

 
Amy Tenbrink spends her days handling content distribution and intellectual property transactions for an entertainment company. Her nights and weekends over the last twenty years have involved managing a wide variety of events, including theatrical productions, marching band shows, sporting events, and interdisciplinary conferences. Most recently, she has organized three Harry Potter conferences (The Witching Hour, in Salem, Massachusetts; Phoenix Rising, in the French Quarter of New Orleans; and Terminus, in downtown Chicago) and seven years of Sirens. Her experience includes all aspects of event planning, from logistics and marketing to legal consulting and budget management, and she holds degrees with honors from both the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music and the Georgetown University Law Center. She likes nothing so much as monster girls, Weasleys, and a well-planned revolution.

Each year, Sirens chair Amy Tenbrink posts monthly reviews of new-to-her books from the annual Sirens reading list. You can find all of her Sirens Book Club reviews at the Sirens Goodreads Group. We invite you to read along and discuss!

I love a good mean girls story.

You know the ones: they’re usually set in high school or college, featuring a queen bee and some sidekicks, boys who are largely props, and a girl who wants so badly to be part of the clique – so badly, in fact, that she inevitably does something catastrophically stupid, or betrays her friends, or reinvents herself into something shallow and vile, wrapped in the ultimate evil of female trappings: hairspray, glitter eyeshadow and miniskirts. You know, something a girl can redeem herself from.

These are stories born of female power, and they almost always evidence our discomfort with that same power: after all, almost all of these stories start by casting the powerful girls – hot girls with dangerous tongues and relentless ambitions – as villains, and then end with the outside girl – that same girl who wanted all that desire and access and dominance – rejecting all of those things in favor of being a good girl with a heart of gold. It’s a uniquely female story – and, I think, a uniquely hateful story that requires that a woman forego her power in order to achieve redemption. And redeemed from what? Why, her desire for that power in the first place. Of course.

So why do I love these stories? Because they are, fundamentally, inexorably, about women’s power. About inimitably feminine forms of power – the monstrous feminine, if you will, at its most potent – and our profoundly complicated relationship with that power. About how, in trying to be skinny and pretty and sexy and desired, what we’re really seeking is not only acceptance, freedom from our society-bred insecurities, but power, formidable, earth-shaking power. The power to walk down a school hallway – or a quad or a street or a corporate corridor – and have so much power and confidence and swagger that you know you’re indestructible. These stories, even when they’re ultimately dissatisfying, address a form of feminine power that almost all of us have wanted at one point in time or another. And much like I read “Bluebeard” over and over and over trying to find a feminist ending that doesn’t make me rage, I read mean girls stories over and over, seeking one where the outside girl, in the end, takes all that power that she’s busted her ass for – that she’s so often recreated her ass for — and revels in it. Because that’s what I want for her.

And that? That is how The Graces ended up on the 2017 Sirens Book Club list.

The Graces is cast just a bit differently: There’s no queen bee here, at least not one with a female hive of friends. Instead, we have the Graces, a nuclear family that is so mysterious and so aloof and so amazing that local lore says they’re witches. (As you do? I suppose in a fantasy book you must.) Thalia, Fenrin and Summer are the hive in The Graces, without a clear leader, but with all the sway and pull of a mean girls pack. Everyone in school wants them: to be their confidante, their friend, their lover.

River wants that, too. She and her mom have just moved to town – dad is not in the picture, and there’s some bitterness around that – and River’s in need of new friends. Like everyone else, River wants in with the Graces: in awe of Thalia, crushing on Fenrin, and ultimately, becoming uneasy best friends with Summer. But unlike everyone else, who has presumptively simple motives revolving around popularity and physical desire, River wants something else too: for the Graces to teach her magic.

The Graces is a dark book and a deliberately slippery one. River is an unreliable narrator, so wrapped up in what she wants to be true that it clouds the truth for the reader as well – and most of the book is spent in an uneasy will they-won’t they seesaw: Are the Graces really witches? Are the spells they’re doing actually magic? If it really is magic, can it be taught? Will they teach River? Or will River get too close to the Grace family secrets, causing them to cast her from their circle?

And ultimately, for me, a reader who badly wants the outside girl to do or be or want something other than a heart of gold in the end, this book satisfies. Because there’s a twist, a twist you might guess, but a twist that nevertheless has something to say about female power. (And a twist that, were there not so many other books to read, might make you want to read this book again for all the clues it surely contains.)

I don’t usually do read-alikes for books in this book club, but The Graces has some very similar literary sisters, in terms of the dark tone, the shifting truth, the unreliable narrator, the unclear magical elements, the strong desire to be something or someone else: The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer, Imaginary Girls, The Secret Sisterhood of Heartbreakers, The Accident Season. If any of those were in your wheelhouse, The Graces might be, too.

Why read it? If you, like me, are a sucker for an unreliable narrator. If you, like me, like your plot and your world to be a bit unknowable. If you, like me, like stories of girls chasing their power.

Amy
 

 
Amy Tenbrink spends her days handling content distribution and intellectual property transactions for an entertainment company. Her nights and weekends over the last twenty years have involved managing a wide variety of events, including theatrical productions, marching band shows, sporting events, and interdisciplinary conferences. Most recently, she has organized three Harry Potter conferences (The Witching Hour, in Salem, Massachusetts; Phoenix Rising, in the French Quarter of New Orleans; and Terminus, in downtown Chicago) and seven years of Sirens. Her experience includes all aspects of event planning, from logistics and marketing to legal consulting and budget management, and she holds degrees with honors from both the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music and the Georgetown University Law Center. She likes nothing so much as monster girls, Weasleys, and a well-planned revolution.

Each year, Sirens chair Amy Tenbrink posts monthly reviews of new-to-her books from the annual Sirens reading list. You can find all of her Sirens Book Club reviews at the Sirens Goodreads Group. We invite you to read along and discuss!

As a daughter of the Midwest, I have a complicated relationship with the housewifely arts: namely, cooking, cleaning, and sewing. I practice all of these, in some fashion (though my cleaning is notably desultory), but none so well as to meet the expectations of my foremothers, for whom no speck of lint was too small to pick up, no embroidery too complicated to tackle, and Lord above, no cookie too perfect to try, try, try again. (It took me decades to realize that I don’t even really like cookies.)

But in the Midwest – and indeed, in many, many cultures around the world – those housewifely arts are, in fact, the highest possible form of female caretaking. You got a promotion at work? I baked you a cake! You have a solo in the church choir for Easter? I made you a new dress! How do I love you? Let me count the chores that I did this morning before you awoke…

For all that I struggle with the complexities of that caretaking, even now, when I’ve shed most of my upbringing for professional ambition, those deep-seated expectations turn up at the strangest times. When I want a challenge? I bake bread. When I feel the most like a failure? When my house is messy. What do I do while I watch TV? Cross-stitch. And I have the most unexpected soft spot for books about women who work magic with food…

I chose The Mistress of Spices, both for the 2017 Sirens Reading Challenge and for my book club, in large part because it is about a woman who works magic through a classic feminine art: in this case, spices. Tilo – short for Tilottama, or, in part, “sesame seed” – is already in the third act of her life, having spent her childhood as a seer and her youth as a pirate queen. Having grown disenchanted with piracy, Tilo makes her way to a remote island – and begs to be allowed to join the assembly of aspiring mistresses of spices: those Indian women who learn to work magic through correct application of the correct spices: ginger for courage and so on. Once they have learned enough, they sacrifice their youth, beauty and future relationships, and are sent around the world to help the Indian people. Tilo chooses Oakland.

Rather early on in the book, Tilo wakes up in her spice shop in Oakland, and the rules of her magic are clear: don’t leave the shop, don’t get to too close to your customers, don’t use the spices for yourself. And all is well, more or less. Tilo uses her skills to help immigrants struggling with a panoply of issues: racism, violence, arranged marriage, abuse. But then, one day, an American man walks into her store and she’s smitten – and despite her aged appearance, so is he. Suddenly, Tilo begins to learn that not all things are how you might intend and that, sometimes, the spices have a will of their own. Tilo’s intent clashes with the spices’ as she leaves the store for the first time, buys new clothes, worries about her customers, and begins seeing her American man.

In the end, I loved three things about The Mistress of Spices. First, as you would expect if you’ve read anything else by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, the language is exquisite. Divakaruni’s craft, even in this, her first novel, is light years ahead of so many other authors: it has a poetry to it, the feel of a legend, and it’s a joy to read. Second, I loved that Divakaruni, an immigrant herself, addressed, unflinchingly, so many issues that face immigrant communities in America: racism, abuse, violence, trying to fit in, wondering if you should just go home – if you even know where home is anymore. Despite the pervasive magic in The Mistress of Spices, Tilo’s customers are real people, with real-world problems. Third, I loved that, to get to the climax of the book, Tilo had to battle her own magic. Despite her talent and her experience, the spices are sentient: rule enforcers, tricksters, who thwart Tilo in ways both obvious and quite subtle. So often, magic is the means to the end, something to be mastered and used, and it was a treat to read a book where a woman’s relationship with her power was very different, something to be coaxed, perhaps, or negotiated with.

And in the end, there was only one thing about The Mistress of Spices that I didn’t like as well: something I call the “Medea problem.” In the Greek Medea myth, Medea gives up everything – including being a princess – to help Jason of Argonaut fame steal the Golden Fleece from her father and run away with him. Later, she kills for him – and eventually, when he casts her aside, she kills their children. Which leads one to wonder: What kind of dude is so awesome that a woman would do all of that?

I’m predestined to be skeptical of a woman who’s willing to give up not only her business and her life as she knows it, but her magic and her immortality, for some guy. Must be some guy, right? And maybe that guy is out there, but Tilo’s American man isn’t that guy. He’s a restless former playboy who has made and spent millions: on houses, on cars, on girls. Falling in love with Tilo is, I suppose, meant to be his redemption, but it turns out that I don’t care about his redemption: I just want her to keep doing her, magic and all.

Is The Mistress of Spices worth a read? Absolutely. (Which is good, since it’s required for the 2017 Sirens Reading Challenge.) It’s a beautifully crafted folktale of an indomitable woman who battles her own magic to aid her people, and what’s not to like about that?

Amy
 

 
Amy Tenbrink spends her days handling content distribution and intellectual property transactions for an entertainment company. Her nights and weekends over the last twenty years have involved managing a wide variety of events, including theatrical productions, marching band shows, sporting events, and interdisciplinary conferences. Most recently, she has organized three Harry Potter conferences (The Witching Hour, in Salem, Massachusetts; Phoenix Rising, in the French Quarter of New Orleans; and Terminus, in downtown Chicago) and seven years of Sirens. Her experience includes all aspects of event planning, from logistics and marketing to legal consulting and budget management, and she holds degrees with honors from both the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music and the Georgetown University Law Center. She likes nothing so much as monster girls, Weasleys, and a well-planned revolution.

Each year, Sirens chair Amy Tenbrink posts monthly reviews of new-to-her books from the annual Sirens reading list. You can find all of her Sirens Book Club reviews at the Sirens Goodreads Group. We invite you to read along and discuss!

A confession: I have read a lot of romance. Not fantasy romance, mind you, but straight up historical romance. With the laced bodices and too-tight breeches and elaborate coiffures. With the heaving bosoms and the throbbing manroots and the honeyed caves. With, I am so not kidding, footnotes. (Hi, Susan Johnson!)

Why? Why, thanks for asking. Largely through a combination of not-uncommon factors. Back in the day, there wasn’t so much in the way of young adult books. So when you’d already read approximately a thousand Sweet Valley High, and Nancy Drew Files, and Baby Sitters Club (Baby Sitters Club Super Special 1 FTW!), and the bookstore doesn’t have anything else and you’ve read pretty much everything in your shoebox, small-town library, well, you read your mom’s books. So I have read a lot of romance. (Also, a lot of mysteries. So many mysteries with dead girls of mostly ill-repute. Yes, my tween reading was problematic all over the place.)

And, let’s be real, when you read a lot of romance, especially the romance being published a couple decades ago, you read a lot of misogyny, exoticism, toxic masculinity, and other bullshit. The men are manlier, the biceps are bigger, the vaginas are flowery-er, the natives are darkly beautiful, and the tears glisten on usually ivory, but sometimes pale or snow-white, cheeks. You’ve all read the books. You know.

And while we’re at it, we could chat until the cows come home about the myriad issues with the sex in these books. There is sex, of course, lots of it, the more graphic the better. But it all-too-often involves virginity worship, dubious consent, painful cherry-popping, ridiculously experienced and always-hard men, and nearly inevitably, motherhood.

But when your theme is lovers, that includes, without question, fantasy romance. So here we are: an emperor, a damaged assassin, and an empire to, depending on who you are, destroy or save. With, you know, some magic. And a great lot of oral sex.

Vitala, part of the Obsidian Circle, is a world-class assassin. She was taken from her parents at a young age, and raised for the sole purpose of killing Lucien, the emperor of Kjall. The hope is, with Lucien’s death, the empire will descend into civil war, giving her people the opportunity to regain their freedom.

In the grand tradition of overblown romance tropes, Lucien is a war mage, blessed with preternaturally fast reflexes. There are two ways to kill a war mage: bring three assassins and strike simultaneously…or kill him during orgasm. If you guessed that Vitala’s path is the latter, ding ding, you win the teddy bear!

The Obsidian Circle plays the long game, so Vitala is trained in Caturanga, which is, wait for it, a board game of battle and strategy. Vitala wins a regional tournament and, like her victorious predecessors, is invited to the palace to meet the emperor, who is a player of the game. There’s some nonsense, some drooling, sex interrupted by an assassination attempt, a rape, and (not a spoiler even a little bit), Vitala, rather than killing Lucien – or letting him die and taking the credit with her bosses – saves him. Then there’s some strategy, a lot of wandering through the land, some sex, an usurper, a siege, and a trio of girls saving the world (or at least the empire). That last part is awesome.

There are some things in this book that are, I think, well-intentioned, but that, more or less, fail in execution, and you will want to know about these things. Thing the First: Vitala has PTSD, born of her assassin training, that is inexorably tied to intercourse. Why? Dude, I don’t know, but I suspect because it provides the opportunity for that same fawning masculine over-solicitousness about sex that often applies to virgin heroines – which many, many women find romantic. Raby dedicates dozens of pages to the issue: it’s the primary source of conflict between Lucien and Vitala (even though, you know, he’s the emperor and she’s charged with killing him) and is the reason that the book has so much oral sex instead of intercourse. There’s a too-pat solution at the end of the book, and I found the whole issue too-lightly handled. (Of course, if you want to discuss the too-light treatment, we could discuss the on-page rape of Vitala that seems not to affect her at all.)

Thing the Second: Vitala is mixed race, a child born of her mother’s forced relationship with a Kjallan soldier. Little is made of Vitala’s relationship with her parents: her mother’s eventual love, her non-existent relationship with her father, her terrible relationship with her mother’s husband. But much is made of the fact that Vitala has her father’s dark hair, instead of the blond hair of everyone else in her country. As a result, Vitala is resented by both her people and her Kjallan overlords, and while Raby is attempting, I think, to make a point about people caught between cultures, it mostly just reads as the whitest of privilege for a heroine to whine about her brown hair. (Note: If you want a more sophisticated take on a heroine caught between cultures in a fantasy romance, try Song of Blood & Stone by L. Penelope, which features a biracial heroine.)

Thing the Third: Lucien is an amputee. Hooray, not so much for Lucien, but for everyone who wants to see people with different physical abilities in books. (Of course, sorry, Lucien, one memorable Amazon review deemed you too beta to be sexy.) Regrettably, though, you’d hardly know he’s an amputee. He has an artificial limb and a crutch, both of which function poorly, so that Vitala can give him a better, amazing leg for a wedding present. But in between, there’s a lot of horseback riding and carriage riding and sitting and, weirdly, as soon as he takes his leg off to get into bed with Vitala he has these amazing, cat-like reflexes. It reads as both too easily handled and too easily dismissed.

So should you read it? Look, do you like romance? Do you like the overblown circumstances, the largely manufactured conflict, the panting, the contrived circumstances and frankly, the contrived sex? That’s okay! Then go for it! Assassin’s Gambit has solid fantasy world-building, pretty funny dialogue, and unlike a lot of fantasy heroines, a super-competent heroine who saves the world. But if you already don’t like romance, this isn’t going to change your mind.

Have you read Assassin’s Gambit? What did you think?

Amy

Amy Tenbrink spends her days handling content distribution and intellectual property transactions for an entertainment company. Her nights and weekends over the last twenty years have involved managing a wide variety of events, including theatrical productions, marching band shows, sporting events, and interdisciplinary conferences. Most recently, she has organized three Harry Potter conferences (The Witching Hour, in Salem, Massachusetts; Phoenix Rising, in the French Quarter of New Orleans; and Terminus, in downtown Chicago) and six years of Sirens. Her experience includes all aspects of event planning, from logistics and marketing to legal consulting and budget management, and she holds degrees with honors from both the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music and the Georgetown University Law Center. She likes nothing so much as monster girls, Weasleys, and a well-planned revolution.

Each year, Sirens chair Amy Tenbrink posts monthly reviews of new-to-her books from the annual Sirens reading list. This month, one of Sirens programming coordinators, Hallie Tibbetts takes over for July. You can find all of the Sirens Book Club reviews at the Sirens Goodreads Group. We invite you to read along and discuss!

This month, Amy of Amy’s Book Club is on vacation, so I am PLEASED to be filling in for her. This month’s selection is The Star-Touched Queen by Roshani Choksi, a lyrical story that incorporates Hindu myth into a romantic, lush read.

Mayavati—Maya—has a terrible horoscope, such that she is blamed by the other women of the harem for her mother’s death. Death stalks her too; her father chooses her as the sacrificial bride in a political maneuver meant to force a fight on his terms. That’s only the beginning, because Maya’s husband knows something about death, and Maya finds herself a resident of places beyond life.

I don’t want to spoil you for this book, but I will give you one enticement. I hate, hate, hate talking animals 99% of the time. I LOVED the flesh-hungry horse in this book, and I want to thank that hungry hungry horse for saying what we’re all thinking: can we just bite somebody already?

Maya’s story comes in two distinct parts, and to me—insert here a big disclaimer about my familiarity with the underlying stories, as well as (an admittedly uneducated) appreciation—it seems like she begins in death, and finds her way to life, as opposed to the journey that the rest of us follow; that is, we head toward our dying days. I’ll give you another riddle to ponder: death, here, is life. Consider, then, reincarnation as a complicating factor…

Amar, Maya’s love, seems at first to be far more mature than Maya, and it’s not immediately clear what he finds so attractive in her, especially as he’s a riddle himself, and unable to tell his whole story. As the tale progresses, we find that Maya not only has strengths she has never known she possessed—both mystical and practical—but that her story with Amar is threaded through time. Again, there is the nudge of awakening, and Maya has to fumble through the darkness (literally and figuratively) to rescue her one true love.

I particularly liked that Maya screwed up sometimes, and screwed up a lot, but with legitimate, logical reasons for doing so. No breaking character here, no failure to understand for story purposes; Maya simply has her reasons to make choices, and then she has to work through her failures and mistakes. It’s a refreshing change from some recent reading with characters who fail to question the world around themselves, even in the direst circumstances. (Am I right, or am I right?)

I found that the story sinks into beautiful prose after a few chapters, but doesn’t necessarily linger, if that’s not right for the moment. This is a book to drink in sips, but it’s nice to gulp as well.

Have you read The Star-Touched Queen? What did you think? What other books with aching, star-crossed love or poetic prose would you recommend?

Hallie Tibbetts co-founded Narrate Conferences in 2006, and has chaired many of its events, though of late, she’s happy to devote her spare moments to helping with programming. She graduated from the University of Southern California with a bachelor’s of music in music education, taught, and then headed to New York University for a master’s in digital and print media. She works as an editorial assistant and has a strong preference for subversive picture books, whimsical middle grade, adventurous young adult, and serial commas.