Published in January this year, Kristin Cashore’s Winterkeep marks her return to the acclaimed Graceling Realms series, a run of high fantasy YA novels dealing with themes of parental abuse, coercive control and personal agency. This latest outing is a departure in terms of tone, setting and structure, and although on the whole I enjoyed it, that enjoyment was despite its many quirks rather than because of them.
The people of the Graceling Realms have recently discovered a new continent, the land of Torla, and have opened up trade with the nearest nation on that continent, Winterkeep. When a delegation from the Monsean Queen Bitterblue (who we saw struggling with the legacy of her monstrous father Leck in Bitterblue, the previous novel in the series) goes missing, Bitterblue and her retinue go themselves to Winterkeep to find out what’s going on. Their story is interwoven with that of the young woman Lovisa, daughter of two powerful Winterkeep politicians, who is slowly waking up to the emotional harm her parents have done to her and her younger brothers.
It’s hard to summarise beyond that simply because there’s so much going on here. This is the first Graceling Realms novel to feature multiple points of view: whereas previous outings in the series focused narrowly on the emotional journey of a single character, allowing Cashore to explore their coming-of-ages in great depth, Winterkeep takes a broader approach, attempting to draw its conclusions from multiple examples. It also, somewhat jarringly, introduces environmental concerns: Torla, in stark contrast to the other Graceling Realms, is in the middle of an industrial revolution, and the fuel that powers their economy is toxic and dangerous to use and to produce. There are discussions of two-party politics, arms manufacturing, capitalism; there’s boarding school drama, murder, arson, imprisonment, court politicking and romantic intrigue; there are telepathic blue foxes, sentient sea-creatures and a massive gentle tentacled being with POV chapters.
This kitchen-sink approach is a poor fit with Cashore’s strengths as a writer. Generally, what’s enjoyable and valuable about the first three novels is the way they use tropes such as mind control and absolute monarchy to literalise the concerns about agency, privacy and consent that many modern teens face as they grow up, focusing those concerns through a single viewpoint character. In Winterkeep, that close focus is diffused: agency, privacy and consent all remain key themes, but they’re not literalised in the same way (there is telepathy in Winterkeep, but it’s somewhat sidelined in favour of more mundane forms of emotional abuse), and the introduction of a more political dimension to the text detracts from the clarity and depth with which Cashore’s other novels discuss them. And Cashore is not good on the politics. Her takes on two-party systems of government, environmental degradation and capitalism are basic, shallow, uninteresting; and she is unable in this volume to resolve the series’ increasingly inconsistent position on democracy. One of Bitterblue’s contingency plans for Monsea, should she die in Winterkeep, is for the country to transition into a republic; by this we are to understand that she is a just and progressive ruler. And yet by the end of Winterkeep she is discussing future children with her love interest, talking of teaching them to rule justly (instead of, for instance, abdicating her throne in favour of the republic she has already planned for). By this we are to understand that she has achieved a desirable romantic dream. Herein lies the problem: Cashore is fundamentally most interested in her characters’ personal lives, and so introducing an ill-thought-through political dimension creates tensions and fractures that the text is not set up to address.
The pleasures of the earlier novels are, however, not entirely absent from Winterkeep. Their fundamental good-heartedness about what their characters deserve from life remains: Bitterblue and Lovisa come through different kinds of abuse to find understanding, support and love. We care about them. We care about their ability to process and make it past what has happened to them. Ultimately it’s this that kept me reading despite the novel’s messiness, despite my initial scepticism about the telepathic foxes and the move from cod-medieval fantasy into quasi-steampunk: despite everything, Cashore’s love and concern for her characters is what shines through.
The English Student 