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Torn Deftly Weaves a Story of Stitchpunk Magic and Class Warfare
In narratives of revolution, there tend to be two opposing sides, us and them, where us is the poor, and them is the ruling class. Very rarely do we hear the story of revolt from within the middle class: the shopkeepers and traders, the merchants and professors. (I think the word I’m looking for is bourgeoisie, not to get too Marx about it.) The middle of any conflict is not a desirable place to be—not trusted by either side, constantly forced to tread a narrow path between. This unusual perspective makes Torn, the debut novel by Rowenna Miller, very interesting indeed: it tells the story of a young shop keeper living in interesting times (as the old curse goes), divided in her loyalties and standing right where the weave begins to rip, as society is torn in two.
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Sophie and her brother Kristos were born in Galitha to immigrant parents from Pellia, a southern country considered by most Galatines to be a backwater. Most Pellians live in a rough and tumble ethnic neighborhood, but Sophie and her sibling have managed to claw their way into a posher Galantine enclave, though their position remains precarious—indeed, we first meet Sophie on her way to renew her business license, something all businesses must do every year, and woe betide those who mess up their paperwork. (As a small business owner who recently messed up her paperwork for licensure, this sequence rang true.) The Lord of Coin gives out precious few business licenses in a year, and the punishment for even minor infractions is placement on a blacklist.
Sophie runs an atelier, a small shop with two employees, though she is only in her mid-20s. She is the only couture charm-caster in Galitha City, having meshed the derided Pellian folk art of charm-casting with the stitching of fine garments, a quirk that has given her a slight edge in the trade. Traditional charm-casters work with clay or satchels of herbs, but Sophie learned to ply her mother’s magic into her work as a seamstress, producing charmed dresses that are not just beautiful, but magical. She is also keenly aware her clientele is primarily made up of minor nobility, the only people wealthy enough to buy beautiful dresses, let alone charmed ones.
Kristos is less lucky, economically speaking, and his is more typical of the average Galantine’s life. He’s a dock worker, when there’s work, toiling mostly as a day laborer, constantly hustling for enough scratch to make rent. He’s also a brilliant orator, smart and well read, but the Galantine university system only allows members of the upper class an education. There’s no good reason someone as bright as Kristos should waste his mind throwing fish on a dock, and he knows it. He becomes a vital member of the Laborers’ League, an organization of the disgruntled lower classes.
Sophie is well irritated with her brother’s politics—can’t you see that I’m the one who makes rent while you’re off in coffee shops talking economic theory?—but she doesn’t have a good counter to her brother’s valid critiques of the Galithan economic system. There are precious few paths out of the insecurity of day labor, even if Sophie has found one. The pair spars good-naturedly, though there is genuine heat to their disagreement. Still, Sophie loves her brother, and is willing to stitch him charmed red caps to protect him and his fellow League members during their rabble-rousing.
Sophie’s business takes her closer and closer to the aristocracy of Galitha, stitching fine dresses for petty nobility. One of her first assignments is for Lady Viola, a well-placed aristocrat who runs a salon of artists, scholars, and assorted hangers on. Viola is kind and warm, and an artist in her own right. Sophie feels a kinship with her, despite the class gap; she is a person with whom Viola can discuss the finer points of her own artistry. That Viola is allowed the time and money to pursue her artistry, while her own brother is denied the same privilege due to their common birth, is lost on Sophie.
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Yet Sophie does have a finely rendered relationship with her two employees, and her nascent apprentice, all of them women. Sophie feels keenly the apprenticeships that brought her to entrepreneurship at such a young age. She wants to give back as much as she is able to the young women plying a woman’s trade in a precarious economy. (Lest you worry that the story will get lost in subplots, one of her employees ends up romantically entangled with her brother, and by extension, his revolution.) Sophie’s apprentice is a young Pellian who still bears the marks, by dress and carriage, of their unwanted ancestry. Sophie isn’t just straddling economic classes, but ethnicities—while she might think of herself as Galatine, her dark skin and trade in charms marks her as other. There are aspects of the novel that feel unbalanced—the ruling class luxuriates in finery, and is understood to be noble in both sense of the word, while the rebelling workers are mostly villains, and not always particularly well tailored ones; perhaps even for the author, the finer things in life prove too alluring.
Torn reminds me a bit of Mary Robinette-Kowal’s feminist-minded Edwardian pastiche Shades of Milk and Honey, with its emphasis on the domestic arts, and on the finely graded, stifling strictures put on women’s work, both inside and outside of the home. Sophie may run her own business, but she’s well aware that if she marries, all she has built for herself will all be owned by her husband and his male kin. Her Pellian legacy may afford her certain perks (in that she’s able to bend a folk art to commerce) but she’s still perceived as either foreign rabble (by the ruling class) or as a turncoat collaborator (by day workers less successful than she.) She can be a bit frustrating as a first person narrator—often selfish and nearsighted—but she’s an unusual voice, firmly set within her specific milieu and articulated in her worldview. If revolution came to my own world, I’d probably be closer to a Sophie than an avenging angel like Katniss. May the odds be ever in your favor.