Review: Sword Catcher

Sword Catcher by Cassandra Clare
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Cassandra Clare's first fantasy series for adults has, naturally, already made the bestseller lists, and also gotten a lot of flack from those who think she hasn't put her old plagiarizing ways behind her. Namely, they look at the fact that one of the protagonists is a boy named Kel with a strong connection to a crown prince in a realm where red and gold are the royal colors, and think that he's a ripoff of Kell from V.E. Schwab's Shades of Magic universe. No, it's pretty safe to say that this story and Schwab's share little similarities other than that, and while Clare's newest series is something of a mixed bag at first, the positives outweigh the negatives enough for me to round up a 3.5 rating to 4.

The book takes place in Castellane, a city-state kingdom somewhere at the western end of Dannemore. The cultures and nations of Dannemore all have a lot of clear real-world counterparts across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia in particular. Castellane combines Spanish colors with a vaguely French milieu (what little pieces of the Castellani language incorporate their way into the text are taken from the Occitan language, according to Clare). Then there are neighbors like Sarthe (which has a Venetian-style culture), Malgasi (whose language is supposed to be entirely made up but reads suspiciously like Hungarian, and given that the Malgasi are indicated to be harsh, conservative, and bigoted in universe, that's probably not an accident on Clare's part) and Marakand (the Moroccan-esque homeland of the current crown prince Conor's mother), as well as various far off lands inspired by India, China, Korea, and more. The various kingdoms play off each other in ways that make it clear why George R.R. Martin gave such a favorable blurb to this book - I can already see the events of this book, especially the fantasy politicking, playing out eerily similarly to Game of Thrones or especially House of the Dragon.

Curiously, while there seems to be very little racism against most other nations in Castellane, and LGBTQ+ acceptance appears to be the norm, as is common in Clare's books (it's suggested that Kel and Conor may both be bisexual, generally preferring women but open to the possibilities of relationships with men), there's still one group in particular that bears the brunt of bigotry in universe: the Ashkari, who are very clearly based on Jewish people, in particular the Ashkenazim. Their origin stories read eerily like the Old Testament with a twist or two (namely that they worship a Goddess instead of a male God), they are said to be the last practitioners of magic in the world because they are the Goddess's chosen people, and almost all the other races fear and hate them to the point where they're forced to live in the Sault, an impoverished ghetto. Given the recent horrors in Israel and Palestine, and the rise of horrifying hatred against Jewish and Muslim people alike, this book's release ends up being far more poignant than anyone could have expected.

(A lot of negative reviews, when not claiming that Clare was a plagiarist, instead tried to assail her for writing a book with so many references to historical antisemitism - either not knowing or not caring that Clare is, in fact, Jewish.)

Lin, one of the book's two protagonists alongside Kel, is Ashkari, and training to be a physician, despite the fact that even her own people don't believe that a woman can take that job. (Very interesting that they worship a Goddess and yet are still prone to such misogyny, although then again, the Ashkari legends do still feature a lot of male warrior types, namely Judah Makabi - yes, that is in fact the name of an in-universe historical figure.) Lin therefore has to be as tough as nails as she struggles to prove herself in the face of this kind of opposition, as well as proving her abilities to Kel and Conor, who find themselves in need of her healing powers a fair few times over the course of this book. Curiously, Lin isn't a particularly likable protagonist - she also feels like she came out of the mind of V.E. Schwab, who has long had a tendency to experiment with just how unlikable she can make her strong female leads, just because she can - but she definitely earns all the sympathy for having to carry so much baggage as a woman and as an Ashkari. Especially as the book wears on and she starts taking on some new and unexpected responsibilities which will really set the stage for Book 2.

On the subject of Book 2, it's supposed to be titled The Ragpicker King after the criminal mastermind who serves as a semi-villain in this book, and quite honestly I couldn't care less about the bloody Ragpicker King. He's an enigma to be sure, but he feels so ridiculously hyped up, with the most obnoxious minions trying to force Kel into a deal with the devil, that I couldn't care less about him. His parts of the story could honestly be cut out entirely and it would improve the book considerably, focusing instead on Lin being the hero the Ashkari need, and Kel and Conor's brotherhood, and the densely detailed fantasy politics of this world.

And when it comes to the politics of this world, as Stefon would say, this book has everything: a customary royal body double, trips to the brothel (in the ironically named Temple District), arranged marriages (including one kingdom sending over a girl who's way too young for marriage just because no one looked closely enough at their family tree), a king so obsessed with astrology that it can't possibly end well, and rumblings of the rise of an ancient evil that destroyed the Romanesque empire on whose ruins Castellane stands.

Sadly, this first book in the series does build up to rather a non-ending. But Clare didn't spend the last nearly 20 years writing tons and tons of Shadowhunters stories for nothing - there's no way she doesn't have wilder plot developments planned to really stun the readers in the next book, or two, or three, or however many she may have planned for this series...

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