Jane Yolen and Midori Snyder, Except the Queen (Roc, 2010)
Meteora and her sister Serana are young and beautiful fey whose days and nights pass without a care other than which lovers to choose and whatever happens to be the latest and juiciest rumor.
This carefree existence is abruptly ended when a single thoughtless act results in their exile from Fairyland.
Yet this is no mere exile, for it is compounded by the sisters' transformation into non-magical, middle-aged women who must not only learn to make their separate ways in the human world, but discover the secret which threatens to destroy both the fairy and human worlds.
It's refreshing to find a fantasy novel which opts to make its protagonists something other than nubile teenagers, reflecting some of the reality of fantasy's older readers and writers. For, while many fantasy stories refer to the archetypal triad of maid, mother, and crone, few fantasy writers seem to actually include older female characters as protagonists. Even Baba Yaga seems to be in the process of being reclaimed -- if not precisely domesticated -- to echo the hard-won knowledge and experience from which many older women find a sense of empowerment. There is also a notable attempt to include a multi-racial cast of characters to reflect the real-world diversity of the cities in which the sisters find themselves.
Ultimately, however, despite the inner growth which the sisters undergo and the references to how middle-aged women are overlooked in our youth-obsessed culture, such messages are severely weakened by the fact that, at the end of the story, Meteora and Serana, along with all the other characters, are still ruled over by the Queen. More disturbingly, the Queen's main qualification to rule over everyone else seems to lie in her much-referenced pale white skin and golden hair. Leaving aside the extremely narrow portrayal this gives for physical beauty, it is true that such a portrayal, with its emphasis upon beauty as white, without mark or scar, allow for the villains of the story to be recognizable (even before they commit any evil acts) by their ugliness and physical disfigurement.
Certainly Except the Queen is not the only fantasy story which I have read in the last year or so which perpetuates the "beauty = good, ugliness/disfigurement = evil" equation -- I remember being quite shocked at how blatantly the villain in Patricia A. McKillip's The Bell of Sealey Head was marked by physical disfigurement -- and I have begun to wonder if fantasy as a genre is even capable of working without this cliché which renders it so easy to characterize and recognize individual morality through exterior appearance. In a story such as Except the Queen, however, a story in which the idea is to challenge assumptions regarding physical beauty and personal worth, such clichés can only weaken -- if not actually contradict -- the very meaning of the story.
