WRITINGS

REVIEW: Damsel (2018) by Elana K. Arnold

I am what I like to call a "recovering adult YA reader". As in, I grew up alongside the solidification of Young Adult as a publishing and marketing category, and the concurrent rise of GoodReads, BookTube, Tumblr, etc. as sites of Young Adult fandom culture. When I was a kid and teen, I read lots of books, including YA, without really considering whether they were "for me". Then somewhere in the transition from late teens to early twenties I started mostly reading Young Adult fantasy novels, mostly because YA had by then grown to represent 'my section' of the bookstore and library. What I liked about YA novels is what many people, especially girls and young women, like about them - they're mostly populated by female characters, they're fast-paced and enjoyable as a break from dense high school or university readings, and they come with an enthusiastic, low-barrier online community to join. In other words, they're recreation, not work. There are lots of Young Adult fantasy novels that captivated me as a teen and lots I still consider lasting favourites. There are some I still return to (heyyy Kristin Cashore), some I revisit with mixed feelings (hiiiii Leigh Bardugo), and some I would rather leave as fond, misguided memories (yoooo Cassandra Clare). Even so, my most beloved childhood fantasy novels (Redwall, Earthsea, The Queen's Thief, Tamora Pierce's Tortall books) all predate the publishing industry's distillation of all literature for adolescents into our modern Middle Grade (ages 9-12) and Young Adult (ages 12-18) marketing categories.

In the last two years or so, I've drifted away from the YA community, but I still read YA fantasy. I mean, obviously, because here I am reviewing a YA fantasy novel (or at least I promise I will in a moment). Part of my falling-out with YA is no doubt because I'm getting to the age where I'm just an adult, and fine, I accept that. At the same time, I know from many years of being an adult YA reader that YA fandom has a nasty habit of declaring any adult who takes a critical stance towards the genre an outsider to the community. Even though adults write the majority of YA novels, when adult reviewers critique those novels and the culture surrounding them, we get hit with the "it's not for you!" card. The problem with this line is it's a lie. YA readership and fandom are not wholly or even predominantly populated with teenagers, especially online. Some YouTube reviewers of YA got started as teens, but most of the big 'BookTubers' are adults now. Same with the review blogs who get sent advance copies and promo materials. On Tumblr, the few YA fandom blogs I follow who still post actively are all run by twenty-somethings (though, hilariously, many claim to critique popular YA novels out of concern for imagined impressionable teen readers). On TikTok, unpaid teenagers talk about classic novels like Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre and adult novels like A Little Life and The Song of Achilles as much as if not more than they talk about YA novels (though YA authors and publishers are keen to make 'BookTok' another marketing tool in the image of BookTube). For as long as I have participated in the YA community, adults within it have been vocal about the unfairness of barring older people from participating - up until we express criticism of the community or its beloved works. Then we're intruding upon and misunderstanding a space meant for kids.

The true fact of the matter is that even as a grouchy 26-year-old I am the bullseye in the target market for modern YA publishing, more so than actual teenagers. Adult readers like me are to YA publishing what whales are to mobile games with microtransactions. I'm the one with the disposable income to spend on an endless parade of $30 new hardcovers and even more expensive special editions, and I'm the one with the space in my apartment to shelve them. I'm the one who can log onto social media and see people my age talking to one another about the writing, publishing, reading, and culture of YA. That was never the case when I was a teenager. When I was a teenager in YA fandom spaces I got very used to the disorienting experience of seeing myself reinvented through the lens of adults who yearned for and/or regretted their own teenage years. The 'I'm writing/reading this because I needed it as a teen' type.

For example, the queer YA fantasy writers who published books when I was a closeted teen near-universally championed queernormativity, or the creation of fantasy worlds where homophobia does not exist. Ten years later this approach is still deeply embedded in YA, and has crept into adult speculative fiction communities as well. What I remember most needing as a teen, even if I could not then express it, was authentic representation of my experiences with homophobia, through which I could come to terms with what was happening to me. My most beloved lesbian character from a YA fantasy novel has always been Felicity Worthington, a traumatized bully whose first love is doomed from the start because of the way society has shaped both her and her lover (thank u 5ever Libba Bray). But stories like that are "problematic representation", so instead most of what I read was the work of a bunch of adults who decided that my living reality was too painful to represent in stories meant to uplift me. Instead what I got was gay arranged marriages and gay princes and princesses living happily ever after. As if the pain of childhood homophobia can be erased simply by telling a happier story. As if gay readers can live in a homophobia-free world without the author ever building us a bridge to get there.

So the YA publishing industry lives off courting adult readers, writers, and reviewers, but only those who refuse to move past trying to rewrite our own teenage experiences. It's the perfect recipe for an entire genre of literature frozen in amber, where the tropes and themes that made it never get critically reexamined, only endlessly recycled and represented. Mainstream YA as it presently exists is less a coming-of-age bridge to travel between childhood and adult literacy and more a deep pothole to fall into. It's less a literature for and about teens and more a tool adults use to assert our ownership of the teenage experience in ways we were denied as actual teens. Often this self-assertion takes the form of an uncritical power fantasy; the girlboss protagonists of Sarah J. Maas are one excellent example. Of course, in engaging with YA this way, adults shut a whole new generation of real teens out of the conversation, and the cycle begins anew.

I'm going to review the book now. Elana K. Arnold's Damsel is a straightforward example of what the mainstream YA community is missing. Arnold is best-known as a middle-grade author, and I suspect that's where her respect for the perspectives and experiences young people bring to reading comes from. Compared to YA authors, midgrade writers generally understand their role as professionals writing and reading within a genre that does not and should not directly appeal to their adult tastes. I never read midgrade for escapist fun the way I sometimes read YA, because when I read midgrade I can usually tell it's meant for kids, not me. I had the same experience reading Damsel. Damsel is a book for teenagers. Damsel is a bridge.

The basic plot is painted in the broad strokes of the Sleeping Beauty story, a story most English-speaking children and certainly most teenaged fantasy readers are familiar with. A prince rescues a damsel from a dragon, intending to make her his queen. The first part of the book follows male lead Emory's perspective as this familiar childhood story plays out. Our POV character for the rest of the novel is Ama, the titular damsel. Ama is a blank slate, lacking any memory of her life before Emory came into it. She has "the prickly sensation of having walked into someone else's story - a story in which everyone but she [knows] their role and their lines." Even the reader has a role: unlike Ama, we can recognize her as the story's protagonist. We are invited to reconsider the conventions of a familiar story through the eyes of someone not already certain of its happy ending. Damsel assumes and requires the reader's application of knowledge and lived experience its protagonist does not have.

The other way Damsel invites its reader to assume a critical role is through its representation of animals. Early on, Emory kills a mother lynx and Ama adopts the orphaned kitten, naming her Sorrow. Sorrow is Ama's constant companion and anchor during her stay at Emory's castle. If you read that sentence two ways, you understand the kind of multilayered reading Damsel invites. So too can we read two meanings into the text when male characters suggest Ama rename Sorrow something more cheerful, when Emory calls Sorrow "a lovely accessory", when Emory's mother says "I believe your Sorrow finds in me a sympathetic friend", when Ama says "My Sorrow is all I have, all that is mine" or sees that "Emory would like to kill her Sorrow". Most characters in this book strategically choose when to acknowledge or ignore Ama's pain in order to manipulate her. Indeed, Ama's whole character arc turns on her ability to recognize and name her own pain. Understanding this requires us, the readers, to read beyond the literal, seeing both Ama's Sorrow and Ama's sorrow. From there, we can make the leap to understanding what it means for Emory's mother to have so many cats her chambers smell like urine, and from there follow any of the novel's animal metaphors, all the way through to the ultimate metaphor: the dragon. Sorrow is a beautifully simple extended metaphor for Ama herself, built to scaffold the comprehension of a reader transitioning from learning about critical analysis to independently applying it - so, a middle or high schooler.

In a final act of trust in young readers, Damsel does not attempt to soften the blow of its traumatic subject matter. This novel contains several instances of on-page sexual assault as well as multiple scenes where main characters and even Ama's thoughts normalize, downplay, and excuse these assaults. Key word here being characters, not the novel itself. Instead of putting her outrage at rape culture in the mouths of her characters, Arnold trusts in the narrative voice she's created and ultimately in the reader to recognize these acts for the violations they are. Damsel's readers are not meant to believe the lies of the characters, but use our own eyes to see through to the truth of the story. At the climax of this book, a character tells Ama, "I will show you." Ama says back, "Thank you, but no. I shall make the eyes on my own."

Damsel smashes apart the narratives of childhood and forges the shattered pieces into something new and intimately familiar all at once. No doubt I will continue to unpick my own relationship with the YA category for years to come. Probably I’ll keep reading YA literature, even if only as a critical exercise. I can't say I needed Damsel as a teen; I didn't read it then, and I have no idea what that version of me would have made of it. I can say the grown-up youth librarian version of me who exists now will confidently recommend Damsel to teenagers.