I recently (and I mean just-an-hour-ago recently) finished Terry Brooks' Magic Kingdom for Sale--Sold!. And let me tell you, I had some problems with it. Now, I would not normally have finished a book that I disliked this much. But the problem I had here was that I kept waiting for it to get better, to turn around and a make a comeback, to maybe for FUCKING ONCE break a cliche or twist a trope and have something interesting happen. But no. Again and again I was disappointed. So, now I really hate this book.
Many of the reasons I hate this book are explicated in this blog post. But the post's author left out one big glaring problem: THERE ARE TWO WOMEN IN THIS ENTIRE BOOK. You heard right, folks. Of all the people in the Magical Kingdom of Landover, two women (who are alive) have names and dialogue. One is GOOD and one is EVIL, both are hot.
The evil woman is called Nightshade. She is a witch who lives in a big boggy canyon, and is evil. Really, I have no idea what this witch is supposed to do all day: Her canyon is lifeless and she lives in an illusion castle, ostensibly waiting for Ben Holiday, Lawyer-King, to show up so she can double-cross him. Which she never actually does, because Holiday blows some dust in her face first and TAKES AWAY HER FREE WILL (but it's okay, we're told by fairies that she was planning on doing the same thing to him). He extracts all the information he needs from her and sends her to her doom. That takes care of that.
And that's not event he worst of it, since the good woman never has any free will of her own anyway. Her name is Willow and she is a buxom, green skinned fairy who turns into a tree. And, by the way, this is so disgusting to Holiday that, after he sees her do it the first time, he can barely look at her for half the book. Anyway, Ben comes across Willow bathing in a lake. When they meet she immediately falls in love with him, declares SHE BELONGS TO HIM, and spends the rest of the book following him around while he angrily rebuffs her, then mostly ignores her.
I'm sorry, let me repeat, Willow tells Holiday that she BELONGS to him because of some sort of prophecy that is never precisely explained. She is a blank slate. She has no character apart from fantastic beauty, mitigated by creepy transforming into a tree magic (which would be seen as awe-inspiring by any intelligent 40-year-old man), and an all-consuming love for a man she saw once and spoke to for a moment. She exists to be supportive for him, uttering only hackneyed 'believe in yourself!' dialogue. She has no past and no future. She is everything that's wrong with the way women can be portrayed in a fantasy setting.
Now, I admit that character interactions are...more complicated than I have portrayed above. But don't I know it? I spent three quarters of this book making excuses for Brooks and hoping he'd turn it around. But when you come right down to it, this book doesn't give a damn about women. And that's disgraceful!
Magic Kingdom for Sale was published in 1986. So my initial thought was, well it was the '80's? Fantasy was kind of a conservative genre? But when I finished the book, I turned the page in my Landover omnibus and there it was, a wonderful passage from Peter S. Beagle's The Last Unicorn, quoted in front of the next Landover book, The Black Unicorn. The Last Unicorn was published in 1968 (I looked it up) and features three strong female characters--the Unicorn, Molly Grue, and Mommy Fortuna--which is good for a cast of characters that small. And if we're going to go into numbers: I would be happy if MKfS had even two strong women, but the fact is, it has none.
This pisses me off (even more), because Willow and Nightshade could be sooooo much more awesome, very easily. If Willow rejected the prophecy, but felt herself compelled to accompany Ben for other reasons, say...to save the goddamn kingdom. And only fell in love with him after seeing what a good man and strong leader he was. Or if Nightshade unexpectedly helped Ben with the dragon, if she maybe had some minions to protect (ones the she might have human feeling for) or decided it wasn't so cool to hide out underground while the magic kingdom destroyed itself.
Christ, if ANY of the people in this book felt motivated by anything other than self-preservation it would be sooo much more fun. Instead it's just a slog about a bored rich man who doesn't want to die, trying to appease other greedy and cowardly men into helping him out, while wandering around the countryside blundering into danger and bludgeoning any magical creature that becomes an obstacle, whether it's intelligent or not. And I thought the fact that Ben Holiday was a lawyer was going to mean he'd be talking people into cooperating, making them see reason. Brooks does a lot of telling on that front, not a lot of showing and it made me madder and madder every time it happened. Nightshade was just the last straw.
So, after that tangent, all I have to say is: It seems to me like Terry Brooks hates women. So I won't be reading any more of his books, thank you.
Oh also, the kobolds who take care of the King's household are monkey men who can't speak. So, there's that.
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