So the matter as it stands is that I have never enjoyed a piece of Sherlock Holmes media, with the exception of Elementary, which I watched for two seasons. I would have watched a lot more of it if Natalie Dormer had been the co-lead with Lucy Liu. As a gesture of intellectual broad-mindedness and public spirit, I have generously conceded that I will watch any Sherlock Holmes adaptation in which Natalie Dormer is the Holmes guy; but as yet nobody has agreed to make such a show. By and large, I do not love Sherlock Holmes media and would likely not have read Angel of the Crows if I had known that it is a piece of Sherlock Holmes media. Which it is. Though that fact is not emphasized in the marketing materials.

Our Watson guy, Doyle, is returning from the war in Afghanistan having sustained an aetheric injury. Actually, what Doyle says is “being shipped home a useless cripple,” which marks the first point in this book (page 2!) that I made a sort of muted strangledy noise. The book talks a lot about accommodations Doyle requires and receives where long walks are impossible, which I’ll get to in the section entitled “the Sherlock Holmes guy is not an asshole!”, but I wish it had not begun its depiction of disability on this note. Searching for affordable accommodation in London, Doyle meets a slightly outcast (but, importantly, not Fallen!) angel called Crow. Crow is the Sherlock guy. He keeps irregular hours and gets impatient when the police don’t listen to him. Importantly, though, he doesn’t ask searching questions or require the use of a shared lavatory, and Doyle can be confident of maintaining personal secrets that it is not desirable the general public should know.

Though not marketed as a Holmes/Watson story, The Angel of the Crows very definitely is one. It reimagines a series of classic Holmes mysteries (“The Speckled Band,” “The Sign of Four,” Hound of the Baskervilles, etc.). Like Addison’s last book, The Goblin Emperor, it has an episodic structure that allows the author and reader plenty of space to explore her richly inventive world and the carefully drawn relationships between the main characters. It felt like a very fanfic way of writing, a feeling that was justified by an endnote in which Addison explains that the book started its life as Sherlock wingfic. That was kind of neat to see! I know that The Angel of the Crows is not the first book with a genesis in fanfic, but I was surprised and pleased to see the acknowledgement in there.

Despite my friend Ashley’s impassioned insistence that Holmes! loves! Watson!, one of the primary reasons I don’t tend to enjoy Sherlock Holmes stories is because I get tired of what a pill the Sherlock guy often is to the Watson guy. Maybe I would feel differently now! I have not read an actual Sherlock Holmes story by actual Sir Arthur Conan Doyle since I was like, seventeen. Anyway, Crow is not a pill to Doyle! I actively enjoyed their relationship, which is so unusual for me and Sherlock Holmes stories. You could see right away that Doyle finds Crow a very restful person to be around, in a world that has felt very hostile and encroaching for many years, and Crow of course appreciates Doyle’s intelligence, humor, and kindness. Consistently throughout the book, you see Crow keeping an eye on Doyle’s leg and pain levels and making accommodations to ensure that Doyle can carry on doing the investigations without physical consequences. It was really lovely to see that kind of consistent care and attention around a main character’s disability.

A good book, basically! An enjoyable book I enjoyed, for all the same reasons I enjoyed The Goblin Emperor! Only there was, like, some stuff. That I wished did not happen!

• Doyle is told that Romani call themselves Romani, rather than g*psy, but still refers to them using the slur. I am not sure why! I actually am not sure why it was necessary for anyone, anywhere to use the slur in the first place.
• I’d just love to have a disabled protagonist that doesn’t self-describe as “a useless cripple.” As a society we’re already at saturation point with the idea that disabled people are useless (and, for that matter, with the idea that “useful” is a quality of human beings at all!)
• While Addison rightly identifies taking jewels and things out of India as theft, the only character who actually is from Southeast Asia — in fact from a union territory of India called the Andaman Islands — does one of the murders. The circumstances are such that he kinda had to, and Doyle and Crow both endeavor to protect him. I still felt a bit “hmmmmmmm” about it, particularly because he’s petite (under five feet) and Crow one time makes reference to others seeing him as “a savage child.” HMMMMM.

Lastly and mostly, I really really dislike how this book talked about asexuality. The idea that sexual desire is a necessary condition to being human, with its inevitable correlate that ace people aren’t human, is still an unfortunately common one. A lot of so-called ace rep involves characters who are asexual because they’re not human — which plays into this same set of harmful ideas about asexuality. Crow states outright that as an angel, he’s asexual, and he quotes St. Augustine to say “God gave to Adam and Eve that which he gave not to the Angels of the Garden,” reinforcing the implication that allosexuality is the natural state of human beings. In the same scene, there’s a degree of implication that an ace person cannot consent to sex, which is untrue and infantilizing. Later, Crow says “insofar as it makes sense to apply gender to asexual beings,” which suggests a very outdated conflation of gender with sexuality. Of course asexual people have gender! It was an entire mess and I really didn’t like it.

So yeah, ultimately, The Angel of the Crows is a book I wanted to like, but can’t really recommend, due to its portrayal of asexuality.

The post Review: The Angel of the Crows, Katherine Addison appeared first on Reading the End.

All of which to say, my first instinct upon discovering that Katherine Addison, author of The Goblin Emperor (affiliate links: Amazon, B&N, Book Depository), was the same person as Sarah Monette was to avoid the book. You can’t write a bad review for a book you never read! But really, when Anastasia and Ana and Memory all rave about a fantasy book, it is difficult to make the case that I shouldn’t give it a try. Not to mention Dear Author praising it to the skies, and Kim highlighting the undercurrent of social justice and feminism, and Charlotte comparing it to The King of Attolia. I am not blinded by my prejudices, people. I can give things a second chance.

The son of the emperor and his cast-aside goblin wife, Maia has grown up far from the capital of the Elven Lands, subject to the tyranny and abuse of his guardian Setheris. But one day a messenger comes from the emperor’s court to say that the emperor and his sons have all been killed in an airship accident, and that Maia must now come to the Untheilenenise Court to be crowned as the next emperor. Unsure of himself and wildly underprepared for the job that faces him, Maia must learn to make his way in a hostile court.

Let me just start by saying OMG THE MACHINATIONS. There are so many machinations. On his very first day, for example, he receives a letter from his father’s widow, who signs herself “Ethuverazhid Zhasan”, demanding that he meet with her at a certain time. He politely declines, sets another time for them to meet, and returns the letter to her by way of her messenger.

The boy was lingering nervously on the landing. “Here,” said Maia. “Take this to the zhasanai with our compliments.”

 

Wide-eyed, the boy took the letter. He had caught the nuance — “zhasanai,” not “zhasan” — and Maia did not doubt the widow empress would be told. She could style herself a ruling empress all she liked, but she was not one. She was zhasanai, an emperor’s widow, and had best remember that she was now dependent upon her unknown stepson’s goodwill….Already I become a tyrant, Maia thought.

There’s a lot of this: the small but crucial distinctions of etiquette, the implications conveyed by the smallest irregularity of phrasing. Some of them Maia is able to understand on his own, but many more must be explained to him by his (all-too-limited) coterie of trusted advisers. Addison’s creativity is bottomless: She forces you to recognize the stakes in everything, and question the motives of everyone, whether they’re sending Maia a goblin-made coronation gift or shouting him down about the clockmakers’ plan for a new bridge.

Apropos of that, has anybody written a book that’s like, A month in the court of [insert historical monarch here]? The Goblin Emperor made me desperately curious for a book that would just methodically go through all the tasks that Edward IV had to do in a day. Who were his meetings with, and what kinds of decisions was he making? Inquiring minds want to know! And I think that’s very much to the credit of The Goblin Emperor and Katherine Addison’s deft hand with the minutiae of being a ruler.

BUT, to a non-zero extent:

“You only thought that was a flaw this whole time,” his mentor…told him. “It was actually your secret strength. You don’t have any flaws at all and you’re going to destroy the bad guy so much.”

He totally did.

—“Flaws Only a Protagonist Could Have”

If I’d let myself sink into an eye-rolling mindset, I could have done a lot of eye-rolling about how Maia’s always horrifying the court people by apologizing to The Lowly, and sympathizing way too much with the poor and oppressed and women who want to go to universities. That is a flaw in the book (I know the author knows the reader knows that it is nice, and not embarrassing, to apologize to The Lowly where indicated), but I was able to let it go. I embraced the mindset that, yes, Maia’s kind of a Mary-Sue-y hero; but he exists in a book that’s brilliant at court intrigues and machinations, which I would enjoy tremendously if I just accepted that I was reading for the machinations and not for the characters. So I did that.

(I still don’t think I would like Melusine. But I am very willing to read more of the Katherine Addison–brand books, if this is a representative of how machinations-heavy they are going to be.)

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