The Sapling Cage

A plague is killing the trees of Cekon. Blaming witches for the blight, a duchess moves her knights to take control of the kingdom and eradicate the last order of witches. So, bad time sign up to be a witch. But Lorel is a closeted trans girl who dreams not of joining one of the orders of knights but being a part of the sisterhood of witches. They gender segregated of course because cis people be weird about career paths. So when Lorel's friend wants to get out of her commitment to the witches and join the knights instead, Lorel switches places with her.

I enjoyed Lorel and her very emotional journey with members of her coven. It felt very YA vibes in some areas, almost scoobydoo in others, but not excessively so. It's an interesting foundation the book establishes for the world & magic, and Lorel's future. Though in that it is clear this is an intro for a book series and as such feels a little weak on its own. The pacing certainly feels rushed and could have benefited from slowing down and sitting with the characters and world a little longer. As it happens, we jump through locations and events at breakneck speed which I think does it a disservice but would likely aid binge reading it as part of a longer series.

What I did find to be a great strength is Lorel's own internal conflict over her identity and how others perceive her. Notably over whether her desire to change her body is for herself, or for the benefit of those around her. I can imagine a trans person, especially kid, who has just come out would find some of the exchanges in this book to be very comforting and prompt some valuable self reflection.

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.