Review: THE BRUTE OF GREENGRAVE by Jemma Topaz
There’s a sense as you open the pages of The Brute of Greengrave that you’re reading cozy fantasy—low-stakes, domestic, comfortable—until you remember that this is set in a world where an aristocracy of witches rule society and turn people into dolls: beings that can be servants, bodyguards, soldiers and more, and whose creation doesn’t exactly care about the original human’s consent. Then it’s not so cozy suddenly. In this regard Brute is a break from Topaz’s prior work in that, while it has her signature humor and smut, it brings her touch of social commentary to the fore: class, trans femininity, the conditions of the queer body.
The titular story itself is about pushing back against this social order, told from the perspective of a daughter of said aristocracy. Despite the setting being trans-normative, “Brute” deftly engages with the experience of being othered:
Long before I was—by choice—a traitor and—mostly by choice—a murderer, I was an unhappy child. Among the noble witch families, there are some who take the noble part seriously, and some who take the witch part seriously. Mine was definitely the former. Neither of [my parents] had found enough time, among their important activities, for anything as trivial as raising a child.
[…]
Fortunately, I was packed off to boarding school as soon as was practical. For most children of my class this was an awful time. Their parents might have been terrible, but they were at least present; so now they were homesick and lonely. I thought I was not; in fact, I was, but loneliness was like the water I swam in.
This is a riff, of course, on the private boarding schools attended by the British upper-class, but it’s also a story of how the narrator—Verity—doesn’t belong, in more ways than one (‘the fact that I was uncommonly tall and wide for a girl meant that bullies were likely to try elsewhere’). While not written as such, it’s a fantastic alternative to the infamous wizard school books: “Brute” functions as a ruthless critique of the magic boarding school sub-genre, chronicling the life of a daughter of privilege who grows increasingly alienated from the cruelty of her class, and in the end subverts the power she inherited.
In spite of the existence of magic transition, Topaz makes depiction of transness explicit and effortless… and access is, naturally, not equal; in “With Anguish Moist and Fever-Dew” the narrator is looking to serve an aristocratic witch as a maid specifically so she’ll get access to gender-reassignment rituals (though she didn’t account for her new mistress being—even for a witch—unusually eccentric). “The Scent of Witches and Hellhounds” features a male narrator, but naturally “he” doesn’t stay that for long. Many of the stories, too, have intriguing mysteries to them that will often surprise you—and some will break your heart while at it.
Stories in this collection combine whimsy with a sense of unease, that underneath all this pastoral witching fun—and all the BDSM—there is something rotten in this society, and that rot must be dealt with. Even deceptively simple stories like “The Witch of Artemisia’s Doll Boutique” have their own twists (which connects with a later story, “Investigations”, in a very satisfying way): this is core to Brute, that the appearance of cozy comfort exists as a veil for something else. Social commentary, of course, but also unflinching depictions of transgressive queerness. In that regard and more, it makes Jemma Topaz a highly unique and unmissable author.