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rushthatspeaksYesterday I was at the library looking for comfort reading, after having picked up a chunk of books that probably won't be. I was in the YA section, and I took Patrice Kindl's Goose Chase off the shelf, looked at it, and thought 'Hmmm, I very much liked Owl in Love, and this is one of that one sort of book, so it's probably comfort reading; I'll take it'. I put it in my bag, and then I thought to myself 'Wait. That one sort of book?'
And discovered a genre distinction within fantasy that I have been making for about the last five years or so.
I'm not quite sure what to call it, other than a fairly quiet trend. It's not domestic fantasy, because there are a whole bunch of things that are obviously domestic fantasy that are not actually what I mean. Domestic fairy tale, maybe?
At any rate, what I expect when I pick up That One Sort Of Book:
-- almost invariably a female protagonist (quite frequently but not always a princess)
-- who lives in a secondary world
-- which is a fairy-tale society, the kind of place which is the ur-background of many, many stories: small kingdoms at a more or less medieval industrial level, usually with magic. This society does not have to be Western but usually is.
-- quite frequently there is a specific fairy tale the book is based on, either thematically or directly, but with substantial subversions and variations in the details.
-- the scale is domestic, not epic or world-shaking. If there is a war, the focus is on prevention, or on stopping it, or on individual responsibility for actions taken in war. The fate of the kingdom may be at stake, but usually in the sense of planning a royal marriage. There is no dark lord trying to take over the world and quite often no unambiguous villain. Often, the problems are family dynamics.
-- a hallmark of these books is a focus on pragmatism, class and economics, the real complexity of human interaction, and hard work. The heroine has to learn her skills, which is difficult and time-consuming. The food has to be grown. Minority groups may well be oppressed in ways which require political action and planned change over years. If there is a romance, it may have a fated or soul-bonding element, but there's also emphasis on the difficulties of a relationship and the possible political ramifications and that you ought to like the person you marry; a good chunk of the romances are also not with the originally obvious partner, not heterosexual, not monogamous, or otherwise complexified. The moral would be 'one person can't do everything, but you can do a lot if you work really hard at it'.
-- at the same time, nothing really impressively lastingly terrible is ever going to happen to anyone, which is why they make such great comfort reading. Although honestly a lot of them are not terribly good books-- I just find them very readable.
-- there is also quite frequently a focus on close female friendship and the empowerment of girls and women in ways that both do and do not have to do with military prowess and traditional femininity.
The very first one of these I ever read, back when I was a kid, was Patricia Wrede's Dealing with Dragons, which was definitely an outlier from the rest of fantasy at the time. I see elements of this in Howl's Moving Castle and early Robin McKinley, but I think the book that made these popular (and it's a wonderful book) was Robin McKinley's Spindle's End. Nowadays, this sort of book is the entire oeuvre of Gail Carson Levine and makes up most of the work of Shannon Hale, all of Sharon Shinn's YA, a good portion of Sherwood Smith, Malinda Lo's Ash, Mercedes Lackey's recent (impressively awful) Five Hundred Kingdoms books...
Now, as I said, I don't think many of these are terribly good. On a sentence-by-sentence level, I cannot recommend Sharon Shinn, and while Shannon Hale's Princess Academy is decentish, the Books of Bayern have serious predictability issues and about half the cast is cardboard. Since nothing permanently terrible is going to happen in these books, and you can usually tell that by the tone of the writing, there's an endemic lack of suspense which puts a lot of weight on the romance(s); this leads to problems if that wasn't what the writer had in mind. As I said, several writers have attempted non-Western settings for these, though I haven't read any of those yet, so I don't know how well it works. However, the settings for the ones that are Western-ish vary sufficiently little that I sometimes find myself forgetting which characters live in what world. There's a great deal of attention paid to the more ordinary sorts of human complexity, but a lack of scope for the emotions that people have which are on occasion genuinely epic-scale. There usually isn't any numinous, and I miss that in fantasy.
But domestic fairy tale is a genre I do read and seek out and find new books in, because it's relaxing, it does not cause me feminist angst, it avoids many of the problems with many romance novels (while having different ones), it usually has a good sense of humor, it quite often gives the sort of pleasure that one gets from books in which people learn in detail about complex and interesting fields, and it's nice to see an awareness of economics and of the necessity of labor both domestic and otherwise. It's not my favorite genre, but I'm glad it exists and apparently I will on occasion select for it.
Is there a term for this genre already? It seems to be getting more popular, but I haven't seen anyone talking about it. Of course, I may not be looking in the right places. I've seen an awareness of the general girls-kick-ass fantasies, Tamora Pierce et al, but I'm talking about something specifically domestic in scope here.
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And discovered a genre distinction within fantasy that I have been making for about the last five years or so.
I'm not quite sure what to call it, other than a fairly quiet trend. It's not domestic fantasy, because there are a whole bunch of things that are obviously domestic fantasy that are not actually what I mean. Domestic fairy tale, maybe?
At any rate, what I expect when I pick up That One Sort Of Book:
-- almost invariably a female protagonist (quite frequently but not always a princess)
-- who lives in a secondary world
-- which is a fairy-tale society, the kind of place which is the ur-background of many, many stories: small kingdoms at a more or less medieval industrial level, usually with magic. This society does not have to be Western but usually is.
-- quite frequently there is a specific fairy tale the book is based on, either thematically or directly, but with substantial subversions and variations in the details.
-- the scale is domestic, not epic or world-shaking. If there is a war, the focus is on prevention, or on stopping it, or on individual responsibility for actions taken in war. The fate of the kingdom may be at stake, but usually in the sense of planning a royal marriage. There is no dark lord trying to take over the world and quite often no unambiguous villain. Often, the problems are family dynamics.
-- a hallmark of these books is a focus on pragmatism, class and economics, the real complexity of human interaction, and hard work. The heroine has to learn her skills, which is difficult and time-consuming. The food has to be grown. Minority groups may well be oppressed in ways which require political action and planned change over years. If there is a romance, it may have a fated or soul-bonding element, but there's also emphasis on the difficulties of a relationship and the possible political ramifications and that you ought to like the person you marry; a good chunk of the romances are also not with the originally obvious partner, not heterosexual, not monogamous, or otherwise complexified. The moral would be 'one person can't do everything, but you can do a lot if you work really hard at it'.
-- at the same time, nothing really impressively lastingly terrible is ever going to happen to anyone, which is why they make such great comfort reading. Although honestly a lot of them are not terribly good books-- I just find them very readable.
-- there is also quite frequently a focus on close female friendship and the empowerment of girls and women in ways that both do and do not have to do with military prowess and traditional femininity.
The very first one of these I ever read, back when I was a kid, was Patricia Wrede's Dealing with Dragons, which was definitely an outlier from the rest of fantasy at the time. I see elements of this in Howl's Moving Castle and early Robin McKinley, but I think the book that made these popular (and it's a wonderful book) was Robin McKinley's Spindle's End. Nowadays, this sort of book is the entire oeuvre of Gail Carson Levine and makes up most of the work of Shannon Hale, all of Sharon Shinn's YA, a good portion of Sherwood Smith, Malinda Lo's Ash, Mercedes Lackey's recent (impressively awful) Five Hundred Kingdoms books...
Now, as I said, I don't think many of these are terribly good. On a sentence-by-sentence level, I cannot recommend Sharon Shinn, and while Shannon Hale's Princess Academy is decentish, the Books of Bayern have serious predictability issues and about half the cast is cardboard. Since nothing permanently terrible is going to happen in these books, and you can usually tell that by the tone of the writing, there's an endemic lack of suspense which puts a lot of weight on the romance(s); this leads to problems if that wasn't what the writer had in mind. As I said, several writers have attempted non-Western settings for these, though I haven't read any of those yet, so I don't know how well it works. However, the settings for the ones that are Western-ish vary sufficiently little that I sometimes find myself forgetting which characters live in what world. There's a great deal of attention paid to the more ordinary sorts of human complexity, but a lack of scope for the emotions that people have which are on occasion genuinely epic-scale. There usually isn't any numinous, and I miss that in fantasy.
But domestic fairy tale is a genre I do read and seek out and find new books in, because it's relaxing, it does not cause me feminist angst, it avoids many of the problems with many romance novels (while having different ones), it usually has a good sense of humor, it quite often gives the sort of pleasure that one gets from books in which people learn in detail about complex and interesting fields, and it's nice to see an awareness of economics and of the necessity of labor both domestic and otherwise. It's not my favorite genre, but I'm glad it exists and apparently I will on occasion select for it.
Is there a term for this genre already? It seems to be getting more popular, but I haven't seen anyone talking about it. Of course, I may not be looking in the right places. I've seen an awareness of the general girls-kick-ass fantasies, Tamora Pierce et al, but I'm talking about something specifically domestic in scope here.
You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are
