“Real education doesn’t make your life easy. It complicates things and makes everything messy and disturbing. But the alternative, Elloren Gardner, is to live your life based on injustice and lies.” [loc. 5397]
Elloren Gardner has been brought up in seclusion by her beloved uncle. She's the spitting image of her dead grandmother, a national hero, and although she has shown no signs of magical ability, her relatives seem sure that it's only a matter of time. Then her Aunt Vyvian arrives unexpectedly, and whisks her off to the city and thence to Verpax University. Aunt Vyvian has an agenda: she wants Elloren to 'wand-fast' to attractive and powerful Lukas May -- and she's not afraid to fight dirty when Elloren protests that she barely knows the man. Elloren ends up in squalid university residences, sharing with winged Icarals ('demonic, monstrous, winged'), studying with Lupines ("savage" and lewd) and working in the kitchens with Kelts ('accepting of intermarriage ... mixed'). She is bullied mercilessly, both by members of the 'impure' races (everyone who isn't Gardnerian: selkies, werewolves, elves, Fae) and by fellow Gardnerians, such as her aunt. She's grown up believing that the Gardnerians have been oppressed for centuries, until the time of her grandmother: brought up to regard herself as a deserving member of a pure-blooded elite, and to require ritual cleansing after meeting the eyes of an Icaral. But gradually Elloren begins to question her perspective and her culture...
I was discussing various fantasy-academia novels with a friend, and she mentioned The Black Witch, which it turned out I'd purchased a while back. I decided it was time to read it -- and after a few chapters I remembered / realised why I'd bought it: because it was targetted as toxic, racist, homophobic and elitist on Twitter a few years back. In general, I prefer to make up my own mind about such accusations, and my conclusion is that this is indeed a novel about toxic, homophobic, elitist, misogynist racists, at least one of whom -- Elloren, our viewpoint narrator -- is capable of overcoming her prejudice. This level of cultural baggage isn't easily or quickly overcome, but Elloren and her brothers are on the path to redemption by the end of this novel, first in a series. The Black Witch depicts bigotted behaviour: it does not endorse it.
Controversy aside, this is a very readable YA novel that reminded me in places of L J Smith's great unfinished Night World series: the pairing-up of unlikely couples, the diversity, the sense of world-views being adjusted to fit a wider reality. I didn't find Elloren very relatable, and for at least a third of the book she was really quite whiny (as well as racist, elitist, ignorant et cetera). But she changed: people do.
On Disagreement
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