The Sapling Cage by Margaret Killjoy: Review by Alex Brown
The Sapling Cage, Margaret Killjoy (The Feminist Press 978-1-55861-331-7, $17.95, 336pp, tp) September 2024.
The trope of gender-based magic is an old one in fantasy fiction. It never fails to annoy me, and not just because I’m genderqueer. Besides the whole gender essentialism thing, I just find it to be lazy and uninspired. At this point, the only time I’ll read a ‘‘girls do this magic and boys do that’’ is if the author is intentionally deconstructing and dismantling that trope. With The Sapling Cage, Margaret Killjoy does a solid job at just that.
Lorel is 16 years old and desperate to leave her village. She knows she’s a girl, but everyone at home treats her like a boy. Her best friend, Lane, is promised to the witches, but all she wants is to be a knight – the mortal enemies of the witches. So the girls make a plan: Lorel and Lane trade places, with Lane running off to join the knights and Lorel disguises herself and takes Lane’s witch apprenticeship. Thus begins her great adventure.
Unfortunately for Lorel, most of her adventure involves trudging around the countryside on foot, camping in the woods, almost getting eaten by supernatural beasts, getting the stuffing beaten out of her every day during training, and being bullied by some of her fellow whelps. The witches are women-only, and rumor has it they did terrible things to the last man who tried to join. Lorel is so busy trying to keep her body a secret that she keeps everyone at a distance. At the same time, she’s also trying to figure out what she actually feels about her body and gender, both as a social construct and as a personal identity. This experience was hauntingly familiar. It’s a strange sensation to go through the world being externally gendered as one thing while internally feeling like a tornado is raging in your brain and everything you thought you knew about yourself is kind of wrong but also kind of not wrong but just different and you can’t tell anyone because you don’t even know how to explain it to yourself. I appreciated the way the book evoked this.
While Lorel expects to spend her time doing witchy stuff, instead she finds herself smack-dab in the middle of a massive battle that could lead to the extermination of the witches. A power-hungry duchess is scooping up settlements and baronies and tormenting the locals with her tax knights. Witches and knights famously hate each other, but when a new magical threat blights the land, they must set aside their mutual distaste and work together. Someone is killing people and using their bones to power dangerous, unpredictable magic. The act of using that magic leeches life from the forests, leaving behind a blight of frozen, dead trees in a barren landscape. The more the sapling cage magic is used, the more the blight spreads. Lorel may be the key to uncovering the culprit, but without any of her own magic, she may not be strong enough to save the day.
There were some narrative and structural choices Killjoy made that didn’t quite work for me. Much of the book is Lorel describing an event with few details. Whole days and weeks pass in a couple of sentences. I’m still fairly unclear how much time passed over the course of the novel, how much distance was traversed, and even how big this kingdom is supposed to be. Characters appear for a few scenes, then disappear or die, but because we barely knew them, their deaths have little emotional resonance, at least for me.
For me, it’s an odd sensation to talk about a novel written in first person and from the perspective of a teenager as being distant and emotionally flat. This may not specifically be a young adult book, but it does feature a teenager; and of course one person’s experience as a teenager does not have to be the same as another’s. That said, I read a ton of young adult speculative fiction, and most YA is written in first-person POV. But there’s an immediacy and personalness to YA that felt lacking here to me. Nothing gets touched on enough to build any momentum, and when a conflict or climax happens, it’s resolved so quickly that it’s a bit of a letdown. Lorel’s thoughts are centered, which makes sense given how much of this story is about her journey through gender, but for me it backfires into the plot. Lorel’s inner thoughts are compelling, but I would have liked more air for the plot to breathe.
Killjoy also often seems to pull her punches, opting for the happy or tidy resolution; I would have liked to see something more dramatic or fraught that could push the narrative and characters into unexpected territory. Even when the whelps faced down monsters, knights, and other witches, I never really felt like they were in life threatening danger, at least not Lorel and her closest friends. I’m also not convinced making Lorel and the other whelps 16 worked for the plot. I would have liked more tension, and aging Lorel up to even 18 might have added some of that, by giving Killjoy more room to push the intensity of the plot.
I’ve thoroughly enjoyed Killjoy’s other work, especially the Danielle Cain novella duology, so I went into The Sapling Cage expecting to love it as well. Overall the book is entertaining; however, I wish I found the execution as exciting as the premise. That said, this is supposed to be the first book in a series, the Daughters of the Empty Throne, and I’m still looking forward to reading whatever comes next. The world she created is interesting enough that I’d like to see what other kinds of trouble the witches of the Kingdom of Cekon get into.
Interested in this title? Your purchase through the links below brings us a small amount of affiliate income and helps us keep doing all the reviews you love to read!
Alex Brown is a librarian, author, historian, and Hugo-nominated and Ignyte award-winning critic who writes about speculative fiction, young adult fiction, librarianship, and Black history.
This review and more like it in the November 2024 issue of Locus.
While you are here, please take a moment to support Locus with a one-time or recurring donation. We rely on reader donations to keep the magazine and site going, and would like to keep the site paywall free, but WE NEED YOUR FINANCIAL SUPPORT to continue quality coverage of the science fiction and fantasy field.
©Locus Magazine. Copyrighted material may not be republished without permission of LSFF.
