Bitterblue (Graceling) [Hardcover]

Kristin Cashore (Author), Ian Schoenherr (Illustrator)

Book Description

Release date: May 1, 2012 | Series: Graceling

The long-awaited companion to New York Times bestsellers Graceling and Fire

Eight years after Graceling, Bitterblue is now queen of Monsea. But the influence of her father, a violent psychopath with mind-altering abilities, lives on. Her advisors, who have run things since Leck died, believe in a forward-thinking plan: Pardon all who committed terrible acts under Leck's reign, and forget anything bad ever happened. But when Bitterblue begins sneaking outside the castle--disguised and alone--to walk the streets of her own city, she starts realizing that the kingdom has been under the thirty-five-year spell of a madman, and the only way to move forward is to revisit the past.

Two thieves, who only steal what has already been stolen, change her life forever. They hold a key to the truth of Leck's reign. And one of them, with an extreme skill called a Grace that he hasn't yet identified, holds a key to her heart.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Some authors can tell a good story; some can write well. Cashore is one of the rare novelists who do both. Thrillingly imagined and beautifully executed, "Bitterblue" stands as a splendid contribution in long literary tradition."

(New York Times Book Review )

"A story that transcends the genre with its emotional and philosophical weight."

(BCCB (starred review) )

"Devastating and heartbreaking...those willing to take the risk will--like Bitterblue--achieve something even more precious: a hopeful beginning."

(Kirkus Reviews (starred review) )

"Readers will gallop through [Bitterblue], eager to catch up on beloved characters and hopeful that the Seven Kingdoms can at last find peace. There are astonishing and sometimes heartbreaking discoveries...Buy all three volumes, in multiple copies."

(VOYA (starred review) )

"Cashore's imagined world is brilliantly detailed and brimming with vibrant and dynamic characters."

(School Library Journal (starred review) )

"Fans of...intricate political fantasies will relish this novel of palace intrigue."

(Publishers Weekly (starred review) )

About the Author

Kristin Cashore lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 576 pages
• Publisher: Dial; First Edition edition (May 1, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0803734735
• ISBN-13: 978-0803734739
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.8 x 1.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (279 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #14,784 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Kristin Cashore grew up in the northeast Pennsylvania countryside as the second of four daughters. She received a bachelor's degree from Williams College and a master's from the Center for the Study of Children's Literature at Simmons College, and she has worked as a dog runner, a packer in a candy factory, an editorial assistant, a legal assistant, and a freelance writer. She has lived in many places (including Sydney, New York City, Boston, London, Austin, and Jacksonville, Florida), and she currently lives in the Boston area. Graceling, her first book, was an ALA Best Book for Young Adults. Fire is her second book.

Amazon Author Rankbeta 

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#77 in Books > Teens

#77 in Books > Teens

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

173 of 189 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Three Books, Three Styles May 9, 2012

By Caitie

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

After reading the negative reviews on this novel, I wanted to set the record straight for those considering reading it.

First and foremost, this is Kristin Cashore's third novel, an extension of the stories begun in Graceling and Fire. These books tell the stories of two wildly different young women: Katsa, a Graced killer, and Fire, a beautiful human Monster. Each of these first two books differs greatly in tone, since Fire is a much more fragile girl than Katsa, who is wildly independent and self-sufficient. Bitterblue is named for the main character, Queen Bitterblue, who is yet another unique heroine. The books do not need to be read in order for readers to enjoy the stories, though this order does present some unique insights into the development of Leck's character.

Fans of Cashore's work (myself included) have been anticipating Bitterblue for a couple of years now, and I think that many readers, especially teens, were expecting Bitterblue to be as action-packed as the first two novels. These readers may find themselves disappointed, as this is the tale of a queen who (mostly) plays it safe, remains within her city, and has no special talent for fighting or mind control. Aside from having been born queen, Bitterblue is a normal human being, which is actually rather refreshing, since readers are not Gracelings or Monsters themselves. It gives us an idea of what it feels like to muddle through the Seven Kingdoms world without special, inborn talents. Though this change of character yields very different results from her first two books, it demonstrates Cashore's stylistic nimbleness and prevents her from following the same formulaic, cookie-cutter structures as other authors.... I think that many of the people who dislike this book do so because they anticipated a series like The Hunger Games or Harry Potter, in which the story is one continuous arc unified by a single main character. This is not Cashore's yarn and I, for one, love her for it.

On the other hand, one way in which all three characters are similar is their sexual freedom, which is refreshing and necessary for young women to see and understand. As twenty-something woman who has spent her fair share of time feeling that sexuality was for boys only, I can honestly say that the care with which Cashore treats the topic of young feminine sexuality is careful, honest, and liberating. Very few YA authors allow female characters to actively participate in their own sexuality, which is too bad. In our post-feminist age, the repression of women's sexuality serves as a patriarchal yoke under which women still struggle despite our supposedly liberated status. All of Cashore's heroines make active choices with regards to romantic companionship; both Fire and Katsa are presented with young men whom they could marry who are acceptable candidates in that they are rich, handsome, and friends, but the chemistry just isn't right, and so each young woman walks away. Meanwhile, Katsa, Fire, and Bitterblue all pursue matches who are men they truly respect and with whom they feel a compatibility of spirit, regardless of rank and convenience. Furthermore, marriage is not pressed as a required state for feminine sexuality to take place, but is offered as a possible state of being for couples who feel comfortable with that level of commitment. I know that this take on marriage and sexuality will be bothersome to some readers, but I feel that this is a conversation that in our Twilight-obsessed world is too often overlooked, to the detriment of young women the world over.

The other reason why I loved Bitterblue was because it is a mind-bender. It's like reading a Sherlock Holmes novel in some ways, because little hints and clues from the very first chapter carry over throughout the remainder of the novel. Bitterblue faces betrayal in the present and specters of her family's past, and Cashore does not shy away from these touchy subjects, even though it would certainly have been easy to do so. Yes, there are certainly moments in the novel which most readers will find uncomfortable, but Cashore is willing to take her readers into the dark recesses of the human spirit in order to shed light and prove that tragic histories are not prophecies of future doom. I think that many teens with troubled pasts will find Bitterblue's struggles validating and reassuring because the novel promises that there can be peace after terror.

Overall, Cashore is an author of incredible dexterity. Her work reminds me of Tamora Pierce's writing in many ways (an author she herself claims as a source of great inspiration), and I anticipate only great things from her in the future, whatever characters and universes she chooses to bring to life. Read more ›

84 of 101 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Ambitious, but ultimately disappointing May 13, 2012

By Dunyazad VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

I was very much looking forward to this book after reading Cashore's Fire and Graceling in preparation. I have to say, though, that I came away from it pretty disappointed, for a variety of reasons. (Warning: there will be spoilers here for the preceding books.) Cashore's concept is pretty ambitious: Bitterblue has grown up and is trying to rule a kingdom that had suffered under her evil, mind-controlling father for 35 years. Her advisors and many of the people around her still aren't in their right minds. Understandably, trying to function in this situation could be pretty frustrating, but I felt that Cashore brought that frustration a bit too close to the reader. It was hard to appreciate the story when many of the characters were so erratic and the protagonist was just caught in a bubble of confusion. I certainly don't mind a book that focuses on political intrigue rather than action, but the intrigues here just didn't make sense. Adding to that, I hardly recognized Bitterblue herself; she seemed like a quietly competent child when we met her last, but as an 18-year-old she seemed sort of clueless. I'm not sure what she was supposed to have been doing for the past 8 years, besides sitting under a mountain of paper, but I found it strained credibility that she had absolutely no idea about the layout of her own castle, barely remembering that her father had had an art gallery and possibly never having known the location of various more functional sub-buildings. Similarly, she had no idea who most of the people were, and had apparently been content just to sit around signing papers until the story began....

There were some promising parts, like when Bitterblue started sneaking out of the palace to interact with regular people in a way reminiscent of Disney's Princess Jasmine, because the regular people actually had reasonable personalities, unlike the palace staff. But eventually that ended, and we were back with all the crazy people in the palace. I just found the whole thing sort of frustrating, and read on because I wanted to find out how it all got resolved rather than because I was enjoying the experience. That made the book feel too long. And even the resolution wasn't particularly satisfying; it seemed anticlimactic after all the confusion and intrigues, and I didn't feel like I had really learned that much more about the mysteries of Leck's reign by the end of it. Details of the horrible things he'd done, yes, but not so much the psychology behind it.

I'll reflect on the story a bit more in the next few days, but I think my feeling of disappointment will remain.

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Updated to add further thoughts from the next day, with spoilers:

I think one of the problems may be that Cashore is more concerned with making comments about our world than about dealing with difficult issues in the context of her world. It's not that she doesn't face these difficult issues; characters often think about them, but I didn't really get a sense of satisfactory resolution. Here are a couple of examples:

There's a lot of focus on overthrowing monarchs who abuse their power, and on providing better systems of government for these kingdoms. Bitterblue herself reads from a book called "Monarchy is Tyranny" that her father had tried to destroy. But there's an obvious conflict here: Bitterblue herself is queen, and intends to remain queen. She realizes that this is a conflict, but doesn't really do anything about it. There's not even any suggestion of instituting a different system of government upon her death. This is in clear contrast to Fire, who sees that the power of monsters is too unpredictable and so takes difficult and decisive action to ensure that there won't be any more human monsters in the world.

In a similar vein, Cashore makes a point of emphasizing that homosexuality is okay. Bitterblue even suggests that Raffin may eventually be able to change the laws in the Middluns to allow gay marriage. But there's no real resolution to the much trickier question of what will happen when it's the king who's gay, and yet is expected to produce an heir. Of course there are various possible solutions, but these weren't really explored--and I couldn't help feeling that this was because the focus was really on our world, and not on the Seven Kingdoms. For us, it's enough to say that gay marriage should be allowed. But I'm more interested in exploring the political consequences of various decisions in their world than in listening to general moralizing, even when it's a point of view that I happen to support.

I don't know if I'm way off-base here, but there's a comment in the acknowledgements about Po's disability that really made me realize how focused Cashore is on political correctness. And when I started looking back at Bitterblue with the idea that Cashore was very concerned with political messaging, a lot of the less satisfying parts of the book seemed to make more sense to me. I think that Bitterblue isn't so much about taking a new world and seeing how it will develop on its own as it is about imposing certain attitudes from our own world into a fantasy setting, and I'm not sure that the result is entirely satisfactory.

I'd like to know what things will look like 50 years from now in the Middluns and in Monsea. There are some difficult political issues that will have to be resolved, and I don't think that the ending of Bitterblue really comes close to that resolution. The really hard decisions are left for the future.

I've seen some people say that the problem with Bitterblue is that there's too much politics and not enough action. I both agree and disagree. I think there's too much politics only because the politics isn't done very well; Cashore is stronger when she writes a more traditional quest narrative, like that in Graceling. Politics and intrigue require more nuance and shades of grey, and I didn't really see a lot of that here. There was plenty of confusion, yes, but in the end, every character was either purely good or purely bad at heart, regardless of what evils Leck may have forced them to perform. And I'd like to have seen at least the good characters making more difficult decisions: Will Raffin choose duty or love? What will happen if Bitterblue's heir turns out to be evil? (Because we saw in the prologue of Fire that Leck's evilness didn't come from childhood abuse or anything; he was literally just born that way.)

Sorry for making my additional comments longer than my original review. One thing I can say is that Bitterblue didn't leave my thoughts when I finished it: I'm still turning it over and over in my mind a day later, trying to figure out how a work that I was so excited about could have left me feeling so disappointed. I think it's a testament to Cashore's storytelling ability that I feel so strongly about this. I'd certainly encourage everyone to read Graceling and Fire. Read more ›

19 of 21 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Good, but with its faults May 17, 2012

By Laila

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

(SPOILERS!!)
I adore Kristin Cashore's first two books, and I, like many others, eagerly awaited the publication of Bitterblue. It wasn't a bad book, and I'm glad that I bought it, but when I finished reading it I was disappointed. I knew before I started it that Bitterblue would be a different kind of book than Cashore's first two. Graceling and Fire were heavy on the action, while Bitterblue has a much more complicated plot, almost more like a thriller or a mystery novel. Some people didn't like this change, but I thought the storyline was well done. I found the plot to be well-paced, intelligent, and page-turning.

It took me awhile to pinpoint exactly what bothered me so much about Bitterblue, and I eventually realized that part it was the characters. I think one of Cashore's greatest strengths as an author is creating wonderful, endearing, realistic characters who you can't help but fall in love with. Yes, some of my favorite characters popped up, and those were my favorite parts to read, but I just really couldn't connect to any of the new characters in Bitterblue. Teddy annoyed me because he was written as such a perfect, innocent, wrongly-punished nice guy that I sort of wanted to vomit whenever he appeared (and then there was that cringe-inducing line "he's only trying to teach people to read!"). Hava, Madlen, Bren, etc.... I couldn't care less about most of them. Bitterblue herself certainly comes across as intelligent and thoughtful, and I respected her a lot, but I didn't love her the way I loved Katsa, Fire, Nash, Po etc.... or even as much as I had loved Bitterblue's younger self in Graceling. And Saf? I was completely uninterested in his character.... If someone can give me any qualities of his that were supposed to make us really care about him, I would honestly love to hear them. He meets Bitterblue, is sort of nice to her, gets angry with her, steals her crown, spends the majority of the novel making her beg for forgiveness, sleeps with her, then leaves her. Soooooo when was I supposed to like this guy? It's definitely a downer when you couldn't care less about the romantic arc of a novel, especially when I loved both the romances in Cashore's previous books. There were some glimpses of wonderful new characters, basically Death (and Lovejoy), and the villains in the book were truly and horrifyingly villainous, so I know Kristin Cashore hasn't lost her knack for creating some of the best characters around. However, on the whole, I feel like she sacrificed memorable characters in order to focus on a more complicated plot.

Another thing that bothered me was Cashore's rather heavy-handed attempts at being politically correct. She obviously cares a lot about showcasing different races and different sexual orientations. Now you'd be hard-pressed to find another straight, white girl who supports gay rights/racial diversity more than I do, but I felt that Cashore tried a wee bit too hard to insert them into the book. I like that Raffin's gay, and I think that works, but then she just brings in two random female characters, doesn't have them do much, informs us that they're lesbians who hope the brother of one of them will impregnate them so they can have a kid, and then basically remove them from the plot. It just felt fake, like maybe she had a homosexual character quota to fill. Also, now Fire and everyone else from the Dells has brown skin? Again, this was just sort of thrown in there, after not being mentioned at all in Fire. I've seen racial diversity done way better, particularly in Ursula K. Le Guin's "A Wizard of Earthsea" series. This just felt like Kristin Cashore was flipping through her books, realized "oh crap everybody's white!" then randomly decided to change the race of numerous characters after she's already written a book about them. It didn't feel real, and I while personally think that ignoring racial and sexual differences is bad, so is awkwardly forcing them into a storyline just to "prove" how much you care. Read more ›