Smith, Sherwood: Crown Duel

Too bleh to read, so will write about reading instead. This may be slightly scattered, but the more time passes, the worse it’s going to get, because we’re going way into the backlog now, all the way back to August.

Sherwood Smith’s Crown Duel was originally published as Crown Duel and Court Duel. This fantasy novel opens with two teens of an impoverished noble family promising their father on his deathbed that they’ll kick the bad king off the throne, to which their mother had a good claim. From there, it both does and doesn’t go where you might expect; I didn’t find many surprises as the various characters came on screen, but it doesn’t take the most obvious route, either.

My primary reaction to this book was to the first-person narrator, Mel. I like and understand her, I do. Honest. But I still found myself wanting to kick her not infrequently. (She gets better, which is the point.) I have a feeling that if I’d found these earlier, I would have identified with her ferocious awkwardness a lot more, which is possibly the most significant way it’s within the YA genre.

This is a lot smoother than the Wren books. The story is definitely structured in two halves which are fairly different in content, but I was expecting that from the prior publication history. I only experienced a couple of very minor glitches, which might well be idiosyncratic reactions: for some reason, I thought the retrospective narration was further removed than it turned out to be; and I had trouble getting the characters’ names to stay in my head. Other than these small things, I quite enjoyed the story.

I understand that Crown Duel takes place in the same world as a much larger story (including the forthcoming Inda, a summer hardcover from DAW), the hints about which are very tantalizing. This book is quite self-contained, however, so you needn’t be nervous about jumping into an unfinished tale.

Crown Duel is often mentioned in discussions of Fantasy of Manners, because the second half of the story concerns Mel coming to court for the first time. I’m personally not sure where I’d classify it, considering that Mel ends up rejecting the existing system of manners, but it certainly would be of interest to people who like FoM for the cultural anthropology, as it were. (People who like FoM for the wit and tone might find Mel too passionate a narrator to really scratch that part of the itch.) I would also recommend it for people looking for stories about Girls Who Kick Butt.