In a world where a small percentage of people have an extreme skill called a Grace, King Leck's Grace allowed him to tell lies that everyone believed. When Bitterblue became queen at ten years old, she thought her father's murder meant the end of his violent, sociopathic influence.
She was wrong.
Bitterblue isn't going to make much sense if you haven't read Graceling, or Fire, to a lesser degree. It's not the book I hoped it would be after the first two, but that doesn't mean it's a terrible book. And certainly once you've read the Graceling and Fire you will have to read this one, if only to find out how Bitterblue turns out [spoiler alert: she's a dick].
It begins with Bitterblue, age 18, deciding she needs, like Princess Jasmine in Aladdin, to see a bit more of the world and winds up, like Princess Jasmine in Aladdin, meeting with some less-than-upstanding citizens, who she befriends and romances, etc. etc. It's the weakest of the trilogy, although my mother and I disagree as to which of the other two books we prefer more.
Both Graceling and Fire revolve more around a straightforward action-adventure plot, with character interaction taking center stage. Bitterblue is more of a mystery book, and there are so many new characters introduced, it can be difficult to keep them all straight, especially Bitterblue's four elderly advisers, Rune, Runnemood, Darby, and Thiel.
Overall, I just wasn't as pleased with this entry. It does suffer from such an excellent first and second entry, and the anticipation of waiting months to read this. I remember feeling a similar feeling when I first started reading Fire, but I was won over by the end of that, which I wasn't, quite, here. For one thing, I think Ms. Cashore had enough material for two more books, and the way that it's all squished into Bitterblue means that she (and the reader) are juggling a few too many plot lines at once, until they all start wrapping themselves up quite suddenly. Bitterblue starts the book with a lot of questions, mostly about why her cabinet is acting so strangely, why people are attacking her friends, why things are being stolen that were never there in the first place, and why no one will tell her the truth about anything that happened during Leck's reign. Unfortunately, it's structured so that we're asking more and more questions, and getting no answers, until everything is unraveled at once. It's like a balloon popping in your face, yes, it's quite exciting, but not something particularly enjoyable. I wound up feeling exhausted after everyone's secrets were out in the open.
Tied in with that is the secondary problem that Bitterblue suffers from, which is the problem of telling, not showing. There were several times in there where two characters would be having a conversation between themselves, and, well, like this one, where Bitterblue wants to know who knifed her new-found friend Teddy in the gut:
"Teddy, who did attack you?"
Teddy answered this with a quiet smile, then said, "What did Saf mean about you asking your third question?"
And that's it! This is one of the questions that Bitterblue writes down as one of the mysteries she totes around for the first half of the book, and we don't even get to hear the answer. Plus, it's something that comes up again and again, since Teddy was apparently the victim of a faction out to stop people from bringing up the past, and who turn out to be the big "villains" of the book. Why would this clue be so off-screen? Bitterblue doesn't even acknowledge it, she doesn't bring it up again at all, not even to say, "Hmm, that name means nothing to me, but I'll keep my ear to the ground." Come on, anything!**
[Interjection Time! As you may know, often I can be a little slow myself, and it's only after writing something all out that I realize I am completely wrong. In this case, I think a bit of linguistic confusion was the cause of the problem. Looking back on it now, it's pretty clear to me that "answered with a quiet smile" means that he didn't say anything, just smiled and moved on. HOWEVER, I want to maintain that it could also be read as "answered with a quiet smile" meaning that he answered her question while smiling. Obviously I took it the second way. I would take this section out and replace it with one that actually supports my point, but I am, too lazy to care about the quality of my output. Which is why I am a reader, not a writer. And a lover, not a fighter. And a count, not a saint!]
That brings me to my next beef: Bitterblue is kind of (a) a jerk and (b) stupid. I didn't want to say stupid, but she's got blinders on the size of Texas, which has the same effect. She knows (since she was there and all) that her father basically mind-raped (and rape-raped) his constituents for decades. She herself has nightmares about his handwriting. And yet, she uses people's experiences during that time as like, a conversational tool, a I'm-tired-of-losing-this-argument-so-I'm-going-to-say-the-most-hurtful-thing-I-can-to-you kind of a thing. For example, when her adviser, Thiel, is trying to get her to talk about the fact that she maybe should be thinking about marrying someone, she goes,
"There's something I'd like to discuss," she said. "Do you remember the time you came into my mother's rooms to say something to my father that made him angry and he brought you downstairs through the hidden door? What did he do to you down there?"
and then later, when he shuts down and leaves, like she wanted:
Left along, Bitterblue shuffled papers, signed things, sneezed at the dust - tried, and failed, to talk herself out of a small shame. She'd done it on purpose. She'd known full well that he wouldn't be able to bear her question. In fact, almost all of the men who worked in her offices, from her advisers to her ministers and clerks to her personal guard - those who had been Leck's men - flinched away from direct reminders of the time of Leck's reign - flinched away, or fell apart. It was the weapon she always used when one of them pushed her too far, for it was the only weapon she had that worked. She suspected that there'd be no more marriage talk for a while.
Wow, can you be more of an asshole, Bitterblue? "Let's talk about that time you watched my father kidnap and torture hundreds of little girls and perform experiments on them and kill them so I don't have to answer questions about boys." I'm getting ticked thinking about it again. Plus, she keeps doing it, like, what does she hope to accomplish? Thiel does snap, eventually, and hits her with some truth she maybe could have figured out a few hundred pages ago, so, uh, great plan?
The fact of it is that her entire kingdom is suffering from some mass PTSD and she goes around using that as a weapon. Even after someone has to tell her that of course, her father couldn't have accomplished all this theft and kidnapping on his own, he had to have people helping him, she still doesn't ease up on her interrogation techniques. Even after she finds out that he appointed four doctors to be his advisers, in all likelihood so that when he cut people open, they'd be there to sew them back up and keep 'em alive, she doesn't take a moment to go, "well, gosh, maybe they're suppressing some seriously heavy shit, let's get them to a therapist, stat." Nope, it's all, "When you lie to me in an effort not to talk about that time my father mind-controlled you in raping little girls, you lose my trust." I'm not surprised that she's down to only one adviser by the end of the book, I'm surprised she has any.
It's a somewhat similar storyline to the one in the Miles Vorkosigan books by Lois McMaster Bujold, specifically the first two (Shards of Honor+Barrayar=Cordelia's Honor). That also concerns a man who was kept as the puppet of a psychopath, and forced to deal with the resulting mental anguish in the fallout. People are a lot more understanding in that book than this one. And yes, I know Bitterblue is only 18, but she lived it as well. She watched her mother live through it, and she's not unintelligent. She should know better. She should also maybe not have waited eight years to even peek through her father's old rooms or the other closed-off areas of the castle.
That's really the problem (and the difference between Bitterblue and Graceling or Fire). In Bitterblue, when there's a problem, Bitterblue can't really go out and do something about it - she basically assigns people to collect information for her, instead. In the other books, even when Katsa or Fire wasn't really accomplishing anything, at least there was visible progress. This is a claustrophobic book, and I think it suffers from the main character being so restricted in her movements. There's a lot to explore here, and it's telling that a lot of big discoveries (the river of bones, the Dells, the re-taking of the crown) take place completely off-page. I'm sure it was a deliberate choice, but it should have been explored a little more. What's weird is that we spend the whole book in Bitterblue's head, but I still feel like I don't know her all that well, not as well as Katsa and Fire, or even secondary characters in the earlier books.
Besides follow-up-itis, Bitterblue also has the problem that the reader knows all about the Dells (from reading Fire), so that when Bitterblue finds out that her father's fantastical stories may have, in this case, actually been true, the reader is all, finally, instead of whu-uh? There's a feeling of impatience instead of wonder, which makes me peevish, as I'm sure will come as a big shock to anyone reading this.
Plus, the book kinda ends abruptly, so I'm left wondering about all these loose ends I have - like who put the red language dictionary on Death's shelf? Was that explained, and I just missed it? What is going on with that revolution up in Estill? What about Bitterblue's sadly depleted cabinet? I felt like the other two books had a lot more closure than this one, even though it's ostensibly the final book.
There's just such a rich story here, that I don't feel like this book does justice to it. The idea of a mad king and the reconstruction and restoration of trust is a grand topic, and I felt like it got obscured in the frenetic introduction of new plot points and characters. Oh well, I'm off to re-read Graceling!
To sum up, I leave you with the immortal words of Martin Blank:
"A psychopath kills for no reason. I kill for money, it's a job... that didn't come out right."
