A.K. Larkwood’s debut novel The Unspoken Name has gained some moderate attention in genre circles this year, despite reviews that tend towards the mixed: Larkwood’s up for the Astounding Award for Best New Writer, and her novel seems to have had a fair publicity effort behind it. It’s being talked about, is what I’m saying. What’s interesting is that nobody seems to be talking about it as YA, when it shares a lot of DNA – in terms of theme and approach – with novels like Kristin Cashore’s undoubtedly YA Graceling series.
Our teenage protagonist, Csorwe, has lived all her life knowing when it will end: on her fourteenth birthday, when she’ll be sent to the sanctuary of the Unspoken God, to die as his Chosen Bride. However, on the very threshold of his sanctuary, she’s offered a way out: to become an apprentice to the wizard Belthandros Sethennai, and to help him find the Reliquary of Pentravesse, an object of great power that he’s been hunting for a while.
This opening sets us up to expect a certain type of novel: a straightforward quest narrative, perhaps, with large but surmountable obstacles along the way, and a clear character arc that sees Csorwe come into her own. But part of what Larkwood’s doing here is about undercutting such expectations; and instead of a traditional, coherent quest structure, we get something that’s much more episodic and bitty. The narrative makes years-long time jumps into Csorwe’s future, moves from setting to setting just when we’ve started getting comfortable; if this stop-start structure didn’t so neatly underscore Csorwe’s actual character journey, about which more in a minute, I’d say Larkwood was having trouble knowing where to start her novel, as many novice writers do. But our narrative expectations are undermined in other ways too. The Reliquary of Pentravesse turns out to be a bit of a red herring, in terms of what the narrative’s actually interested in; Belthandros Sethennai is no kindly Gandalf, but instead a self-involved and somewhat manipulative employer.
This narrative hesitancy – the way it starts down paths that then prove to be red herrings – is why I’m tempted to read the novel as YA: it mirrors Csorwe’s own stops and starts as she tries to figure out who she is, independent of the various adults in her life trying to mould her into a specific image – the submissive sacrificial bride of the Unspoken God; the brutal, efficient mercenary Sethennai would like her to be. The novel as a whole, then, speaks to typical YA concerns about how to function in society independently of what your parents (or parental figures) want for you; how to define yourself in the face of perhaps-oppressive social expectations. I mentioned Kristin Cashore’s Graceling novels above: in The Unspoken Name Larkwood seems to be interested in similar themes of overcoming specifically generational trauma – the kind of trauma you might experience if you were expected to die submissively at fourteen – and of working through the realisation that the conditions you were raised in were abusive and dysfunctional.
It’s relevant here that The Unspoken Name is an unapologetically queer book: Csorwe is a lesbian, and most of the characters fall somewhere under the LGBTQIA+ umbrella. Although this queerness is in Larkwood’s world unremarkable (this is no tale of queer tragedy), I’d say it absolutely adds a new dimension to Csorwe’s journey. Many, many queer people must as they grow up come to terms with unsupportive or downright abusive families of origin, and have to discover who they are on their own, building new found families that better reflect who they want to be and how they want to relate to the world. The Unspoken Name is not about queerness, but it reflects queer concerns in a relatable way that ties into the book’s larger themes of self-discovery and self-invention.
So: is The Unspoken Name YA, then? Lots of novels do examine the process of growing up and coming into oneself without necessarily being “for” the young people going through that process – James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is the classic example, but Guy Gavriel Kay’s Children of Earth and Sky, which I reviewed here last week, also works. These are texts that look at their protagonists’ coming-of-age from a perspective that is not strongly rooted in the teenage experience. Kay’s novel, for instance, has an omniscient narrator who frequently looks into his characters’ future, giving glimpses of how their present choices shape their lives in a way that’s at odds with YA’s emphasis on self-determination. By comparison, the voice of Larkwood’s novel is much closer to Csorwe’s own voice, so we experience her journey of self-discovery along with her. By the same token, though, The Unspoken Name doesn’t offer the kind of hyper-focus on a teenage protagonist that we tend to get in YA. As the Bandersnatch helpfully pointed out, speculative YA novels tend to have broad-brush, recognisable settings without too much sociopolitical complexity – think of the generic medieval fantasy setting of Cashore’s books, of Suzanne Collins’ high-concept, authoritarian Panem, of the high school analogue in PC and Kristin Cast’s Marked. That’s not automatically a bad thing: this broad-brush worldbuilding allows the author really to focus on their protagonist’s struggles without needing to explain what’s going on in the background. Whereas the setting of Larkwood’s novel is one of the things that’s slightly (deliberately) wrong-footing about it: its combination of inter-dimensional travel technology and D&D paladin-style magic insouciantly blends science fiction and fantasy, offering a little resistance to the reader expecting a straightforward romp through a recognisable world. That resistance takes the focus slightly off Csorwe, making us aware of her wider context in a way that YA isn’t always interested in.
It’s possible that this slight resistance is a factor in why The Unspoken Name isn’t being read as YA, despite its distinctively young adult features. Marketing, too, will be playing a huge part in how the novel’s being received: that cover, for instance, says “edgy grimdark fantasy”, not “affirming queer coming of age”. (Of course, if we wanted to be really facetious, we could point out that, since YA is primarily a marketing category, anything that’s not marketed as YA is de facto not YA. But that doesn’t get us very far, so.) On the whole I think this is a shame: I can imagine a young queer teen really enjoying The Unspoken Name, and getting a lot out of it, and a book missing a portion of its audience because of a commercial decision is never ideal. If The Unspoken Name isn’t technically YA, it’s certainly at least YA-adjacent, and a number of the flaws that reviewers have pointed out make a lot more sense in that context. Wherever we choose to place it generically, it’s a promising first novel that’s attempting some interesting things and largely succeeding; it’ll be good to see what Larkwood does next.
The English Student 