The Sapling Cage: A Novel (Daughters of the Empty Throne Book 1) by Margaret Killjoy
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Secondary World Fantasy, Queer Protagonists, YA
Representation: Trans bisexual MC, sapphic love interest, minor ace-coded character
Protagonist Age: 16
PoV: 1st-person, past-tense
Published on: 24th September 2024
ISBN: 1558613331
Goodreads
In the gripping first novel in the Daughters of the Empty Throne trilogy, author Margaret Killjoy spins a tale of earth magic, power struggle, and self-invention in an own-voices story of trans witchcraft.
Lorel has always dreamed of becoming a learning magic, fighting monsters, and exploring the world beyond the small town where she and her mother run the stables. Even though a strange plague is killing the trees in the Kingdom of Cekon and witches are being blamed for it, Lorel wants nothing more than to join them. There’s only one all witches are women, and she was born a boy.
When the coven comes to claim her best friend, Lorel disguises herself in a dress and joins in her friend’s place, leaving home and her old self behind. She soon discovers the dark powers threatening the a magical blight scars the land, and the power-mad Duchess Helte is crushing everything between her and the crown. In spite of these dangers, Lorel makes friends and begins learning magic from the powerful witches in her coven. However, she fears that her new friends and mentors will find out her secret and kick her out of the coven, or worse.
I received this book for free from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.
Highlights
~only wild meat for witches
~Chaotic Good (or just chaotic) knights
~five and thirteen are the best numbers
~anarchist witches
~in a fight with two sides, trust neither
This is one of those times where I don’t think you should pay much attention to me.
Mostly because this book isn’t for me. Literally, not intended for me. This is a fantasy novel that is noteworthy in the ways that it depicts being trans, and groundbreaking in its explorations of non-capitalist forms of society and power.
The problem is that it’s a bit of an introductory class to these things – gender/being trans and capitalist alternatives. It doesn’t really dig into them, and its depiction isn’t very complicated. And I, personally, am a while past the need for a Trans/Anarchy 101 course, so none of it felt noteworthy or groundbreaking to me – this is all stuff I take for granted.
But it will be noteworthy and groundbreaking for a lot of other readers.
(See why my opinion isn’t super relevant to this one?)
It doesn’t matter what’s in your heart. It doesn’t matter your intentions. It matters what you do.
Overall I was pretty disappointed with Sapling Cage; I’ve adored Killjoy’s novellas and short stories, and I was so excited to see her taking on (what she called) epic fantasy. But this fell pretty flat for me; not just because the meant-to-be-groundbreaking bits were all very obvious to me – I take it for granted at this point that gender is complicated, and that nobody should have power over anybody else – but because I didn’t find the story very interesting. Trans girl swaps places with her bestie so she can train to be a witch (only women can be witches), but there is no studying magic because baby witches don’t learn magic for their first year. Something bad is happening to the trees; bad guys are uncovered; bad guys are dealt with. The prose is very straightforward, with very little description, and while Lorel is a very convincing, realistic teenager, I didn’t find her an interesting character at all.
The worldbuilding has some great details – like the various, and very different, Orders of knights, and that magic is wildly different depending on which school of thought you train with. Other than that…it’s a Medieval-esque setting? Lorel mentions that her home functions as a collective but that doesn’t seem to be the default and we don’t get to see it in action; her mother has two husbands, but we don’t see any other more-than-two marriages (or the husbands, who are off-page travelling).
The world wasn’t fair, to be sure, but believing the world wasn’t fair always seemed like a terrible excuse for never trying to make anything better.
I finished the whole thing, rather than DNFing it, because it’s Killjoy. But I can’t say I really enjoyed myself; it was kind of a slog for me.
But I’d still recommend it to many readers – Killjoy deliberately subverts a fair few genre expectations, and if you like Medieval-esque settings, then Sapling Cage might feel like a fresh take on it. I think Lorel’s uncertainty about her gender – about what she wants to be called, how she wants to be perceived, whether she wants any kind of bodily transition – is important to have on-page and is executed really well.
Was it easier to change my body or change how the world viewed it? Did I want to transform my body because I wanted people to see me as a girl? Or did I want to transform my body because I wanted a different body?
We have teenagers actually acting like teenagers, which, we’ve all read stories where adult authors have clearly forgotten what puberty was like. There’s a good amount of nuance, and the book is clearly meant to introduce radical topics to readers unfamiliar with them, to get people thinking and asking questions. I’m not really clear on whether this is meant to be YA or Adult, but it’s a fair bit more nuanced than most YA Fantasy I come across.
If that sounds good to you, then you should DEFINITELY take a look at Sapling Cage. I will be showing up for the sequel – and that should say a lot.
This is a book that deserves to be loved, and I genuinely hope you love it.
You can read an excerpt of The Sapling Cage here!
I borrowed this book from the library and I’m really struggling to get into it so I’m glad for your review. What I find off putting is it’s written in this simplistic style, not even YA more like tweenlit intended for the precocious 8 to 12s, but doesn’t have the fast paced action that those books normally have. I’m in the first chapter and it feels like a direct reference to the first Alanna book by Tamora Pierce (before we knew she was problematic) with the roles reversed (there men can be both knights and magic users). But in the first Alanna book you get a scene where the twins decide on their scheme and immediately they consult like a seer and then they’re off on their respective adventures. In Sapling Cage the main character has to talk to everyone in her life before she can do a single thing, which is what an adult book would do, but the simplified repetitive style doesn’t support long scenes or conversations so it comes off as very boring. Who is this for? Podcast hosts who haven’t read a fiction book in two decades and need to be eased in? This book got so much hype, what an utter let down, because I do feel like the Alanna books could do with a modern update. Also the library edition is so nice, beautiful cover, high quality paper, excellent page formatting, you hardly see attention to detail like this in print books any more.
The prose being so simple was, yeah, an issue for me too. And a surprise because I don’t remember thinking it was simple in her other books… I think it was down to aiming this at a YA or maybe crossover audience? (Not that that’s an excuse, YA doesn’t HAVE to have boring plain prose!) But if you’re only on the first chapter, maybe you’ll start to enjoy it if you get a little further with it? It COULD happen…
(Not quite related, but would you believe I’ve never read the Alanna books???)
I do we’ve all got things we haven’t read. I haven’t read a lot of the classics. I sat down with the book and tried to really give a chance last night because sometimes it does take awhile. I was just reading a kids book (The City of Stolen Magic) that I was bouncing off of until I got to like chapter 4 (I really didn’t like one of the characters but I think that character is maybe going to turn out to be the secret antagonist so not liking him is okay). The reason I think the style is a reference to Alanna (which I only read the first book of myself, I came to Tamora Pierce late and didn’t really dig her settings or characters) is that there are lines and scene descriptions that I’m pretty sure are word for word callbacks. I’d have to dig out my copy of the first book to be sure. It could be coincidental but to me it’s cooler if the author is doing some literary references. If anything I think this shows how hard writing in that children’s lit style really is. It takes so much work to not come off as condescending or repetitive.
I don’t recall seeing Killjoy SAY anything about a deliberate homage/call back to Alanna, but I do think it would make sense to do that deliberately, because (even though I haven’t read them) I do know that those books were a very big deal for a lot of queer readers, including trans and nonbinary readers. So the idea might have been to try and write a modern Alanna, or an Alanna for a new generation? I can kind of see it.