How many sides should a story view a conflict from?
I’ve just finished reading one that takes a challenge as simple as winning freedom, and spins out a whole set of different viewpoints—Between Two Thorns by British Fantasy Society Award winner Emma Newman. The book’s had me scratching my head a couple of times, about what it takes to make a single conflict feel like a larger, perilous society.
It starts with a fine hook: a woman in hiding from her family, whose knows her escape is over at just the sight of their fairie patron. When the creature casually mentions that Cathy will have only a few days to impress him or he’ll pull that independent spark out of her head, we know how high the stakes can get.
Then there’s the rest of the ancient families, humans that live between worlds on the whim of those fae. Cathy’s family can’t understand why anyone would want to leave, and they’d beat her if it didn’t leave so many marks before the next ball; her arranged fiance Will seems nice enough but can’t wrap his head around it either. And then there’s the sorcerous Arbiter who’s investigating other mischief the fae-touched have inflicted on us mundanes, and the poor computer programmer who’d be a witness to it if his memory hadn’t been wiped.
All those views do give the story the full sense of being a true hidden world. And Cathy stays an appealing main heroine, trying to save the human boyfriend she stayed too long with, and only sometimes swallowing her regret at all she’s pulled back into. And she plays Mass Effect (would Dragon Age hit too close to home, even though the elves are refugees there?).
And you have to love the world-building in just family names like “Gallica-Rosa” and “Alba-Rosa.” Their fae patron herself is the timeless Lady Rose, but the family keeps the older phrasing “Rosa” and what seems to be the family’s French-based and English-based branches. Elegant.
I have to say there’s one thing I would have liked more of: more sense of the good side, or at least the appeal, of life in the Nether. On the one hand their schemes mean a polite enslavement for Cathy, and murder for some mundanes in their way. But what’s placed beside that is most likely to be only patriarchs and petty sisters sniffing at anything that reduces their social standing—with less sense of what that actually means to them. An Anne Rice would have made these nobles conflicted, compelling figures that are just as dangerous; a Seanan McGuire would have given us moments of the sheer glittery joy of fae-charmed Society that make us all the more leery of its seduction.
Of course to Cathy, all it is is a prison. Will and some of the other nobles do show some kindness to each other, and even to her, but it would be nice to get a more revealing reaction than “you embarrassed us” from someone. What’s behind those barbs that makes people cluster press up against them?
It’s a constant question for any writer: how much to stick to a single viewpoint and the threat to that, and how much more of the world around that peril show—and how to do that larger canvas justice.
So I wonder what I’ll find in the next Split Worlds books.
Photo by Elsie esq. 
On Google+
The post Review: Between Two Thorns appeared first on .