Summary: “The long-awaited companion to New York Times bestsellers Graceling and Fire Eight years after Graceling, Bitterblue is now queen of Monsea. But the influence of her father, a violent psychopath with mind-altering abilities, lives on. Her advisors, who have run things since Leck died, believe in a forward-thinking plan: Pardon all who committed terrible acts under Leck's reign, and forget anything bad ever happened. But when Bitterblue begins sneaking outside the castle--disguised and alone--to walk the streets of her own city, she starts realizing that the kingdom has been under the thirty-five-year spell of a madman, and the only way to move forward is to revisit the past. Two thieves, who only steal what has already been stolen, change her life forever. They hold a key to the truth of Leck's reign. And one of them, with an extreme skill called a Grace that he hasn't yet identified, holds a key to her heart (Amazon.com, 2012)
Things I liked:
- There is humor. I like that. This book was very funny in parts. It certainly isn’t always funny, but especially in the beginning there were such funny things being said and discussed... sometimes very silly things.
- The librarian. His name is Death (rhymes with teeth). There are a lot of librarians in books written for youth and, while it is true, that many of them are heroic, lovely model human beings, some are not. The one fault I always found with the Harry Potter series was that Hogwarts had such a mean and vindictive (and old) librarian. Whenever I run across a mean librarian in fiction I imagine that the author is getting her revenge on some real-life librarian who did her wrong as a child or who refused to help her while she worked on her first book. The librarian in Bitterblue is different. At first he starts out as the stereotypical old-school, sour librarian, but so extreme that he makes me laugh. Out loud. As the book goes on and I get to know him more I came to understand where his behavior comes from; what shaped him into the dour person he has become. He wins me over as he wins over Bitterblue herself and he becomes one of my favorite characters in the book. Whatever you do, don’t skip over the list of characters at the end of the book as Death wrote it and it is also incredibly humorous – in a witty, biting kind of way.
- Cashore is a master of creating real and honest relationships on the page - relationships that I, as a reader, feel a part of. I actually went back and re-read Graceling and realized that even though I love so many things about the book the parts I treasure the most (and like to go back and reread) are the sections where Po and Katsa are becoming close. There is a quality of openness and honesty in those sections that takes my breath away in Graceling (for sure), but also here in Bitterblue.
- The theme of this story is not as original as the themes in the two previous books, but that isn’t necessarily a criticism. While Graceling is about a young woman with extraordinary physical prowess learning to face the only real fears she has – fears around loving and trusting and Fire turns teenage angst about appearance on its head by creating a character that possesses shocking, otherworldly beauty, but who desperately wants people to know her inner self, Bitterblue is a somewhat more standard young woman’s coming of age story. But Bitterblue is not just any young woman growing into adulthood she is also the leader of her country – a country that is coming out of the long shadow of the her father’s devastating tyranny. Although this is a fantasy novel, I felt like the problems that Bitterblue faces are not so far from reality… say if she happened to be the new leader of North Korea or Albania or Romania after the fall of communism instead of the Queen of Monsea.
Citations: Amazon.com. (May 1, 2012). Available at: http://www.amazon.com/Bitterblue-Graceling-Kristin-Cashore/dp/0803734735/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1336419409&sr=1-1.
