In which a scholar’s daughter learns much about the power of knowledge.

The telling of this story is interestingly done: it starts out like a fairy tale, but gradually shifts until the final scene is pretty much in the series’ usual mode. And there’s a related shift in the narrative voice’s selection of details: the story is set in a modern world, with computers and a thriving spaceport, but those details don’t really start getting mentioned until the latter part of the story, when the fairy tale gloss has already begun to slip away.

Much as I like this story, I’m uncomfortable about the way the authors have given Skardu’s fictional oppressive religion recognisable elements of the real religion of Islam. I suspect it’s at least partly done as part of the fairy-tale atmosphere, to add a bit of Arabian Nights flavour, but that doesn’t actually help; it makes it seem like the authors are saying that, because these cultural details have appeared in fairy stories, they’ve become a kind of exotic story spice that can be mixed into a new story without thinking about the real cultures and real people they came from. (This is not, regrettably, the only story in the Liaden series with this problem.)

On this re-read, I find myself comparing this story to Tamora Pierce’s story “Elder Brother”, which I read last year. It’s also set in an imagined culture with a religion that oppresses women (with, again, elements resembling elements of Islam), and the main female character’s arc is in many ways like Inas Bhar’s. One thing I get out of the comparison is that it highlights how much this is an outsider’s viewpoint of Skardu; the fairy-tale overlay makes it a story about somewhere far, far away, where people are strange and different, and although our protagonist was born there, she never really belongs. Skardu exists mainly as a place for the protagonist to leave. Pierce’s protagonist is also an outsider in her own culture (like Inas, she had one parent from somewhere with less restrictive ideas) who ends up leaving, but the depiction of her homeland is less distanced — and what really helps is that Pierce didn’t leave it at that; she returned to the setting later to explore the stories of the women inside the culture, who never had the chance to leave or who saw something in it worth staying for. Seeing Skardu fleshed out like that would make me feel better about this story; there’s a glimpse of what it might be like in Inas’s conversations with her sisters on the night of Humaria’s betrothal, but it’s not much set against the rest of the story, and more wouldn’t hurt.

Tomorrow: “Heirloom”