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.

WITMonth Day 13 | Maresi by Maria Turtschaninoff

There was something instantly familiar and comfortable about Maresi.

I can't say what it was. I went into Maria Turtschaninoff's young adult fantasy (tr. A. A. Prime) knowing that the book was ostensibly a feminist-minded novel, and I couldn't help but be intrigued right off the bat. I also knew that the story takes place on a woman-only island, a sort of feminist utopia.

I didn't think of it at the time, but it seems that my mind must have subconsciously begun to call back to older feminist fantasy novels I read as a teen. Books like Marion Zimmer Bradley's novels (particularly The Mists of Avalon series) or Tamora Pierce's Tortall books. This, at least, is what happened once I started reading: I was instantly sucked into Maresi's world and found myself completely emotionally invested. Maresi - despite a fairly simple, at times more childish writing style than I was expecting - is exactly the sort of fantasy book I used to drink like water as a preteen. The characters are sharply drawn, the world is rich and easily called to mind, and the magic is present but lurking just beneath the surface.

Suffice to say: I really enjoyed Maresi.

It's not just nostalgia. Sure, there's a healthy heap of that too (who doesn't want more Tamora Pierce-like feminist fantasy novels?!), but it's mostly about the story that Maresi herself tells and the powerful message Turtschaninoff conveys about women and women's place in the world. Not only does The Red Abbey Chronicles create this pleasantly evocative little utopia, it also addresses why it's needed. Unlike many gritty, masculine fantasies that reference the subjugation of women as an afterthought, Turtschaninoff explicitly references the struggles that women - and more specifically young girls - go through. Women are abused, attacked, raped, sold off... and the Red Abbey provides a safe haven for them. Other women provide a safe haven for young girls.

In this sense, this is honest YA. The story is bluntly uncomfortable in parts, but it's never dark for the sake of being dark, and it's never painful. Maresi as a narrator frequently highlights the good moments, even as she struggles with the darkness that has come to invade her home. There is a warmth and strength in her voice that I immediately connected with, though again, I did find the writing to be a tad bit simplified in a way that didn't always match the story. The story is fairly predictable, but it also isn't really trying not to be. It works, somehow, in the same way that Tamora Pierce's early books (specifically the Lioness quartet) don't really need overly complex plotting in order to feel wonderfully rich and interesting.

This probably won't be the book for everyone. While the fantasy elements are relatively limited (mostly through a religious lens, with the three-part Goddess effectively contributing to all of the magic), it's still very much a YA fantasy. That's part of what I loved about it, but I recognize that fantasy YA is not exactly a universally beloved genre. And yet. For those readers who do love fantasy, who want to explore diverse YA, who want their historical fantasies to have just a bit (or a lot!) more feminism to them, Maresi is the way to go. It's a great little book, the sort that left me hungry for more books from this world.

Luckily, the next book in the series has already been released...

WITMonth Day 12 | Comet in Moominland - Tove Jansson | Mini-review

It didn't take me long into Tove Jansson's Comet in Moominland (translated by Elizabeth Portch) to figure out that I had perhaps chosen the wrong book. The characters were never introduced, the plot seemed to bounce just a little too quickly, and the vibe was quickly that of... a sequel. Oh dear.

Of course, this being a children's book, the order of the stories doesn't seem to have mattered all that much. Possibly because the plot doesn't really make much sense anyways. Comet in Moominland is more of a silly romp than a complex narrative. I was, however, surprised by how text-heavy the story is. For some odd reason, I'd always assumed the Moomins stories to be mostly in comic form. This being my first foray into their baffling world, I'm still not really sure.

It's always hard to review children's books as adults, but I try to read them through the eyes of childhood me. And I realized pretty quickly that childhood me would have probably rolled her eyes very early. The book didn't make me laugh enough to justify its silliness (a comparison that popped to mind was the absolute absurdity of Penguin's Progress, one of my childhood favorites), but I couldn't help but enjoy its lighthearted tone and the playful drawings. There's a reason this one's a classic of the genre.