Demon's Surrender (Sarah Rees Brennan)

4/5. Note that this will contain mild spoilers for all three books -- nothing big, but if you don't want to know who hooks up with whom, don't read under the cut.

I had a complicated reaction to sarahtales' Demon's Surrender, and because of this I expect this discussion will be a little more on the rambly all-over-the-place side that even my normal state. You've been warned! On the whole, I liked it quite a bit, although I preferred Demon's Covenant. (My sister liked this one the best, though.) This book didn't change my opinion that Brennan is head and shoulders above the vast majority of YA writers today -- she actually thinks about things, and her books have quite a bit more subtext than "REPRESSION = EVIL, ALSO TWU LUV!" (Not that I've been overexposed to that recently, with all these YA dystopias I've been fed...) In addition, she's not afraid to try new things, which (although not sufficient) is necessary for a writer to be really good; if you're not always pushing the boundaries and trying to do things that aren't safe, you aren't ever going to be a great, well, anything. (I talked more about this, and what I perceived as its failure in the Hunger Games books, here (spoilers for the HG books).)

One (just one!) of the overall themes of these books is an examination of love, and it's most obvious in this book. (And rather better done than the parallel discussion in Covenant, I thought.) The cost of love; love and performance; love of family; romantic love; love spread out over all these things. Along these lines, let me say that one of the things that really amazed me about this book was how Brennan completely changed my view of Alan. This is another thing that good writers do: they understand that people are three-dimensional, not two-dimensional cross-sections that one person sees. Another person, looking from another angle, is liable to see a completely different cross-section.

( Cut for length and mild spoilers. )

Oh yeah, and for those following along with now-I-am-getting-educated-in-Issues, Sin is black. I think Brennan handles this awfully well, by which I mean that she is true to what I experience as a non-white person in a white culture. That is, when I think of my identity, I'm... someone who does technical work, a parent, a spouse, someone who does music, someone who reads and writes ranty things about what I read, someone who messes around with shiny things, an agnostic Mormon... and somewhere down there we get to, yes, and I'm Asian, right. It's an integral part of my identity, but it's not what I first think of when I think of my identity. (Being female is a little different, since it's more mixed in with some of my other identities, but we can discuss that some other day.) BUT. When other people see me, they can't see the technical stuff and the music and the ranty book discussions. They see that I'm an Asian woman. And that's what they react to. And that's the way Sin is handled: it's part of her identity but it's not most what she identifies as (she identifies more as a dancer, a Market participant, a sister, a daughter), but it's an integral part of how people react to her (and how she then handles the reaction). And I'm not even going to get into the discussion of disability and reaction to such that is also happening in this book. Yeah. There's a lot going on!

(Also -- I couldn't find a good place to put this so I'm just sticking it here -- be warned that the first chapter is written in a somewhat more florid style than the rest of the book; if you don't like the first chapter, which is in the nature of a prologue and has way too many similes for my taste at least, don't give up.)

Anyway. In conclusion: watch Brennan. She takes the risks and she thinks about things, and I think that's totally awesome even when I don't agree with her.