Wednesday, December 12, 2018

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Girls of Paper and Fire by Natasha Ngan




Girls of Paper and Fire is a Young Adult fantasy novel that's been fairly well promoted (the book has a foreword by James Patterson and is part of a line of his, so yeah).  It's also seemingly the first in a new series/trilogy, with a cliffhanger ending, although it's reasonably satisfying as a complete novel.  It's also a novel featuring only young women as protagonists fighting against racial (kind of) and sexual oppression, and a F-F romance at its heart, which piqued my interest.

And it's a promising start to a series with a really nicely done romance and a very good lead protagonist.  Still the pacing is a bit slow and the tension this builds is kind of hard to read due to it relying in large part on sexual violence.  If you can get through that element of this book, Girls of Paper and Fire is a nicely done fantasy/romance story and worth your time, but that element is not a minor part of this story. 

Trigger Warning - Rape, Physical abuse of Women:  While it's never directly shown, this book features our main characters as humans taken from their homes (with varying decrees of willingness) to be called as a concubine for a demon king on nights he chooses them.  This includes our main protagonist, who is definitely not willing.  The lack of showing anything prevents it from ever being gratuitous - and this very system is part of what our heroines are fighting against, but it was incredibly hard for me to read a chapter knowing a character was being called in to serve that fate and I imagine for many with such traumatic experiences, it will be too much.  

---------------------------------------------Plot Summary-----------------------------------------------------
In a world where people are split into three castes - the Moon Caste, which consists of demons who look like humanoids (to some extent) with full traits of animals, the Steel Caste, which consists of humans who have demonic elements to their bodies, and the Paper Caste, which consists of normal humans with no demonic/animal features whatsoever - the Paper Caste is the lowest of the low.  Paper Caste members are treated like dirt by most of the other Castes and suffer under the rule of the Demon King who rules them all from his capital.

Lei is a young Paper Caste woman who lives in a village far away from the Demon King's capital, but not far enough to be away from his influence - seven years ago a raid by the Demon King's forces resulted in her mother being taken away for good.  She wants nothing other than to stay with her father and Steel Caste friend, but her unique gold-colored eyes attract attention far and wide.  So when a demon general of the King needs to find a way to gain the King's favor, he abducts Lei and sends her to the capital to be a "Paper Girl" - one of the King's paper caste concubines who exist solely for his service.

As a paper girl, Lei is expected to learn Court skills and to learn how to please the King and to save herself from being anyone else's and to forget her family.  But Lei can't seem to do that and can't bring herself to bend to the King's will, even though there seems to be nothing she can do to resist with her family's life at stake.  But Lei can't help but notice a fellow Paper Girl named Wren, a young reserved woman from noble paper family, and begins to want more.  But as Lei and Wren grow closer together, the risks of acting on that attraction increase and Wren's own secrets threaten to change everything.
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This book's best feature - and it's a good one - is the romance between Lei and Wren.  A lot of books with romances that I read - whether they are YA or not - tend to be very overt in describing attractions between the various characters and bang you over the head a little with the romances - and don't get me wrong, that can work quite well at times!  But it always feels to me a little less natural, and that's not the case with this book's romance, in which you can see our characters getting interested in one another before either of them realize it, and when that realization comes, it again feels so believable.  And it helped me care so much about the two of them and want them to be happy - which is a hard thing for either of them in their present circumstances: with both essentially to be used as sex slaves by the King for a year and Lei feeling guilty over any small pleasures she has as a result and Wren seeking to do more to help her own family, they both have tremendously real insecurities that make them feel real and special as characters.

This is helped by Ngan doing a great job with the other characters in this book as well - well with most of them at least.  There are nine girls chosen to be Paper Girls, and 5 or 6 of them are really well developed, with relationships that feel real and interesting.  Besides our heroine and Wren, there's the young girl Aoki who starts as Lei's only friend and whose response to her "sessions" with the King are a bit disturbing...though sadly not that surprising.  The next biggest character is Blue, who starts as the typical spoiled brat girl but turns out to be something different...but isn't one of the two most common versions of that character: she's not either the girl who comes to become a friend of our heroine or the girl who continues to be a thorn in the side as a jerk throughout, she's just complicated.  The other four Paper Girls are a bit less defined, with a few of them (oddly, twins) feeling kind of like extras, but enough are significant that it doesn't really matter.

As I mentioned before the jump, the issues I had with this book mainly stem from the fact that a major source of tension is the omnipresent threat of sexual violence our heroine and her fellow paper girls face.  I was thisclose to quitting the book before the first chapter in which our heroine is assigned to act as the King's concubine for the night and while no rapes or sexual violence are ever shown/described on page, just knowing that is happening off-page is hard to take.  And the book milks this tension for a long while, with it being the major threat on the protagonists' heads until really the last act.  It works, and is necessary for the plot to work, but it's not really something I want to read and if I'd realized how bad that tension would be, I'd probably have skipped this book.  In addition, while the ending is satisfying in clearly resolving this act of the story, the cliffhanger kind of cheapens the events of this book and is rather irritating as a result.  The book avoids the "Tragic Lesbian Lover Death" trope thankfully, at least.

I look forward to the sequel despite the annoying way the cliffhanger works, since now that we're done with this stage of the story, things hopefully will be a lot more readable, and I really want to see the relationship between our heroines grow further.  We'll see.
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