Maria Turtschaninoff's feminist fantasies

I wrote about Maria Turtschaninoff's Maresi many years ago (almost a decade!), not long after I first read it. Like many books, my impression of Maresi has changed somewhat over the years. After reading its sequel Naondel, I remember thinking how Maresi had been a little childish compared to Naondel's dark story. The basis for this was mostly because Maresi reminded me of Tamora Pierce's works, which I had read as a preteen, and I had felt that I would have loved Maresi as a teen. And somehow this morphed into a perception that Maresi was only a "good" book, not much more. That somehow cemented in my mind when I read and adored Maresi Red Mantle (or just Red Mantle), the third and final book in the series. The leap to no-disclaimers-needed love retroactively turned Maresi into a lesser work in my mind.

I carried this wrong perception with me for years, until a couple of weeks ago, when I decided to reread it.

But let's take a step back for a moment. I decided to reread Maresi not out of simple curiosity, but because I'm currently reading Maria Turtschaninoff's more recent book - Tangled Roots in its English translation (though I'm reading the translation to Hebrew). This novel is quite different from the Red Abbey Chronicles, with its feminist YA framing. Tangled Roots is instead a more mainstream sort of work of fiction. It's not quite a novel, comprised as it is of snippets from the lives of one(ish) sprawling family over several hundreds of years, specifically rooted to a particular patch of land. On the one hand, there are leaps and jumps between characters and eras, and each story is typically distinct. On the other hand, there are clearly threads that tie between the stories such that it's more similar to a family epic than just a discrete collection of short stories. It's less overtly feminist than the Red Abbey Chronicles (to begin with, it centers some boys and men, though most of the protagonists are women), and only less fantastical if you decide to ignore the actual text. It somehow feels like something about its more mature style makes it easier to pretend that the book isn't just as much a feminist fantasy as Maresi.

Tangled Roots - novel, epic, story collection, whatever you want to call it - is a good book so far. I read half of it fairly quickly, and then felt like I needed a short break, not because it's a bad book, but because it was shifting gears a bit as it leapt through the 19th century. I wanted to give it space. But I didn't want too much space. I kept thinking about Turtschaninoff's writing, about that love that I felt for Red Mantle, and the way I'd hunted for any news of a new book from her before learning of Tangled Roots. I wished I had my copy of Red Mantle with me (it's on the other side of the world), but I instead found that my library carried Maresi as an ebook. So I reread it. And reader, I'm sure you'll be shocked, I loved it.

I remembered little more than a sort of stereotypical "dark feminist fantasy", but Maresi has a lot more depth than that. The story is certainly dark in many parts, but a lot is also just about the communities that women build to support each other. This is a theme that appears in Tangled Roots as well, though to a lesser degree. Maresi also lingers on faith more than I remembered, where there is little outright magic in the world rather than the power of the goddesses. This too appears in Tangled Roots, with the magical qualities of the land tying into questions of faith in the "old ways" versus Christianity.

The one thing that surprised me is that I haven't managed to feel a connecting thread between Turtschaninoff's writing itself in Maresi and Tangled Roots. Part of it may be that I'm reading the books in different languages, but I think it's more than that (especially considering how many authors I have felt as having a continuous voice, regardless of the language in which I read their book). Tangled Roots feels a lot more confident in its writing, with a sort of depth permeating its different stories and the sinews that connect between them. Could Tangled Roots work for younger adults? Certainly. I have yet to encounter anything in it that doesn't work for teens. But its tone and its atypical structure just feel fundamentally different from Maresi, for all the other similarities.

There is no consensus about what happens when authors make the jump from YA to adult fiction. Sometimes, the more "mature" book is lauded even when there's little actual difference between the author's YA work and the newer, "adult" book (other than maybe the age of the protagonist, and sometimes not even that). Sometimes, the author is dismissed for trying to elevate themselves inappropriately. Maria Turtschaninoff should surely fall into the previous category, with her tangled tale of men, women, and children (young adults included!) who live and breathe on a particular patch of Finnish land. The feminist fantasy may be more muted, more "appropriate" for a wider audience, easier to generalize, but it's not really so far removed from the Red Abbey Chronicles. And ultimately, I continue to hope that all of her books find more readership and look forward to whatever she writes next.