Sapling Cage

I'm uncomfortably well versed in the Margaret Killjoy Extended Universe. I listen to most of her podcasts and have done so for a while. I've read (and own) several of her books. This book may be the most Margaret of all the ones I have read. That's neither warning nor endorsement; it's a statement of fact.

The Sapling Cage intersects the strictly controlled genres of young adult coming of age fiction and what I'd call low fantasy, with some of of the obligatory Killjoy eldritch horror elements. Both of these genres are laden with tropes. Fantasy as a genre usually handles the battle between good and evil, where good and evil are well-defined teams. It supplies two components: a mapping from moral alignment to aesthetics (good knights/evil orcs), and a theory of magic. How these are defined usually structures the rest of the story and setting. For YA fiction, the equivalent is the emotional and sometimes physical maturity of the main character and their relationships to friends, frenemies, enemies, and their collective struggle against authority, almost always adult authority, which is usually delusional compared to the young adults'.

Killjoy blends these tropes to produce an anti-authoritarian fantasy that feels thought through and realistic without going all the way into grim dark. The world of The Sapling Cage is gritty and cruel for sure, but there is also hope. Margaret positions this hope strongly within bounds of solidarity, friendship, and love.

The sapling cage also has a much richer theory of violence than most books in general and most fantasy books in particular. Violence is never aestheticised the way it usually is in fantasy, nor is it really heroic. It's sometimes necessary, but it's never cool.

This is a young, trans fantasy story that begins with teenager Lorel switching places with her friend Lane to go join a coven of witches, trying to keep them from discovering that she's not a girl. It's not billed as YA, but I would give it that label--although there's a good bit of physical violence on the page, this is a coming-of-age story with a large focus on peer relationships inside a larger adult structure.

Unsurprisingly for a Margaret Killjoy book, this is a very trans story. Lorel spends the majority of her mental energy worrying about being found out, and even after her secret is partially revealed, there's still terfy antagonism and fears of acceptance. In a world with magic, I also quite appreciated the trans nuance of "do I want to change my body because other people would accept me more or because I want to change it for myself (and maybe I don't)".

There's a lot of neat smaller worldbuilding details here that I really enjoyed. Magic in this world is grasped through metaphor, and depending on the metaphor used there are different perspectives and tradeoffs. I like that the fantasy political landscape is a bit of chaotic feudalism, full of different groups of knights with different loyalties and values, rather than clear cut countries with rulers.

My real disappointment with this book is that I wish the characters had more depth. The protagonist Lorel doesn't really get much time in her home town before joining the witches, and we only get scraps about who she is or where she came from. The reader hears more about Araneigh's family than they do about Lorel's. It's also hard to know much about Lorel's self that isn't explicitly a response to being trans; she doesn't talk about herself much (because she's hiding her past), she volunteers for cooking (so as not to reinforce gender roles), and she works incredibly hard (and so that people look kindly on her if her secret ever came out). The dynamics between Hex and Lorel are the most interesting character bits, and there's a moment of tension about Araneigh's feelings around Lorel's body, but on the whole most characters feel fairly one note.

This is book one of a trilogy, so there's certainly room for the future. It also didn't end with a lot of hooks for the sequel, so I'm quite curious where it will go.