psocoptera

Shatter the Sky, Rebecca Kim Wells. Solid, enjoyable YA fantasy - in my cynical middle age I'm pleased now whenever I find YA that doesn't fuck up the pacing and emotional beats, and while nothing here was super innovative, there were some nice turns of plot and details in the worldbuilding. This has dragons and an oppressive empire and might appeal to fans of Yolen's Pit Dragon Chronicles or Karen Healey and Robyn Fleming's Empress of Timbra. I'll read the sequel, and I'm pretty sure Wells works at Porter Square Books, so yay local authors.

However. I want to talk about some stuff related to shipping and queer content, which I'm going to put behind a spoiler cut, although, for me personally, I think I would have liked to have had more of an idea about this going in.

So, the shipping. The (girl) protag is in an established relationship with another girl at the start of the book, and the motivating event for the plot is her girlfriend being taken by the empire's creepy nuns/secret police, and the protag concocting a desperate plan to try to get her back. This is all blurb information, this is the premise of the book, that's the book I thought I was picking up. Unfortunately (from my perspective), with the kidnapped girlfriend absent for most of the book, we end up spending a bunch of page time with the protag having romantic tension with someone else, who was in fact A Boy, and as of the end of the book the situation is more or less an unresolved love triangle that I could imagine resolving as any of the original f/f couple, the new f/m couple, or some sort of polyam f/f/m arrangement.

And, like, that's all fine. Any of those would be a fine story for Wells to want to tell, I support bi representation. But, *for me*, I am sometimes looking for particular vicarious experiences in my romantic narratives, and when I pick up a book that's being promoted as f/f YA, one of the things I may be personally looking for is a romantic storyline between girl characters. Like, reading fanfic, I really appreciate AO3-style tagging, where you've got the Category and the tags for the major Relationships and often additional tags indicating which ships prevail at the end. I know that's not the culture in profic, and I know that YA especially loves the love triangle tropes, but, I don't know, *for me*, I am generally pretty excited to be surprised by unexpected queer canon content (Korrasami was real!!) but less happy when queer works decide to focus on het ships. (Character is still queer but ship is het, can we use that terminology?) I complained about this before with respect to the YA book Inkmistress here, and it's also probably part of why I wasn't thrilled with Bujold's Gentleman Jole, where she elided the m/m half of the backstory in favor of getting to the het part. And, I don't know, I think having this same experience with Inkmistress and now this book makes me worry that it's a new YA trope, where the protag is in a relationship with a girl but then she grows beyond that relationship and ends up with a guy. Which, put that way, sounds pretty gross to me. I don't want to overreact before we've even seen where Wells is going with this. But I'm not enjoying the uncertainty. The tension was not delicious. And so I don't want to rec this for people who are particularly looking for f/f YA, despite the f/f right there in the premise. :/