Originally reviewed on The Book Smugglers Trigger Warning: Rape, abuse, incest.Princess Lissla Lissar is the daughter of a heroic and handsome king, who won the hand of the most beautiful woman in the Seven Kingdoms. Every night, Lissar listens to her nursemaid spin the same tale - the story of her father, winning her mother's hand over the other six Kings by completing an impossible, superhuman task. Every day and every night, Lissar hears the story of her mother's incredible beauty and her father's heroic deeds, and how much everyone in the kingdom loves their royal leaders. On the rare occasions that Lissar gets to see her parents, or even interact with other children, she is always in the background, neglected and forgotten in the face of the stunning beauty and splendor of her parents. But one day, the beautiful queen is not quite as beautiful as she once was, and loses her will to live. Before she dies, she commissions a great and terrible painting of her unparalleled beauty, and with her dying breath she makes her husband promise that he will only marry again if his bride is as beautiful as she. Racked by his grief, the King agrees, driven mad by his grief. As the kingdom mourns, Princess Lissar withdraws further away from the prying eyes and games of the court - her only true friend is her beloved hound, Ash, and together she and Ash spend the next quiet years in a secluded part of the castle, away from the eyes of Lissar's father. When Lissar turns seventeen, however, everything changes as her father's feverish gaze seizes on Lissar's blooming beauty and her resemblance to her mother. Following a nightmarish birthday ball, the King declares that he will marry Princess Lissla Lissar in three days. Horrified and alone, Lissar tries to lock herself away from her father, but to no avail - he breaks down her doors, beats and rapes his daughter in the night. Battered, terrified, but with a stubborn will to live, Lissar stumbles away from the palace with only the company of her loyal dog Ash, and makes her way through the cold, cruel woods. After a long, cold winter, Lissar is able to heal, though she blocks out all memory of her past. When the weather warms, she leaves her isolated home in the woods for a new kingdom and earns a job in the palace kennels. Here, Lissar makes a new life for herself - but she will be forced to confront her past once and for all, with a future of hope and happiness waiting for her.Deerskin is not an easy book to read. Incredibly disturbing, painful, and triggering, this is NOT a book for everyone. That said, as horrific and raw as this book is, Deerskin is also a resonant, powerful, and empowering read. From a writing perspective, Robin McKinley tends towards the verbose and the ornate - sometimes this works for her books, and sometimes (in my opinion) it does not. I am happy to say that Deerskin is one of the successful endeavors, with its beautiful, languid prose, vivid images and descriptions. McKinley is retelling a fairy tale, after all, and Deerskin is a decidedly dreamlike book with heavy folklore overtones. As Philip Pullman discusses in his version of the story "Thousandfurs" (and in general for Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm), the magic of a fable lies in its telling, and Deerskin excels in this regard with its lush turns of phrase. Even when describing something as simple as cleaning a hut in the middle of winter, or the techniques to feed ailing puppies (both events that occur in this text, mind you), McKinley makes the story effortlessly interesting and surprisingly ethereal. But beyond the setting, the telling, and the world, Deerskin is really a book that comes down to a horrific story, and a young woman's stubborn will to live. Heroine Lissar, who becomes Deerskin and Moonwoman, is the sole figure at the heart of this book, and on whose shoulders the tale's success or failure rests. And let me say this once with feeling: Lissar is an amazing, gut-wrenching, awe-inspiring heroine. I loved her character, I cried for her character, I rooted wholeheartedly for her character. Lissar's growing dread defines the first part of this book, as she looks into her father's eyes for the first time and sees something she cannot name, but something that frightens her deeply. Like a nightmare, the next years of her young life unfold with her always pulling away from her father's notice, until it comes to a crashing, horrific climax following her seventeenth birthday. This, for me, was an incredibly challenging read - I had to keep putting the book down because it was so disturbing - but Robin McKinley does a phenomenal job of building this terror and claustrophobia, and then segueing the book from one of fear to one of hope. Because as dark and horrific as the first part of the story is, as Lissar flees her old life and begins to heal and gradually comes to confront her past, it's an amazing and empowering arc. And, it has a happy ending - one where Lissar is able to confront and defeat the monster of her past, and have a future of happiness and life.I could wax on about Lissar and Ash (the most touching, wonderful relationship between a woman and her closest animal companion that I have read probably...ever), about the folkloric elements with the Moonwoman that helps Lissar find her way, about the slow simmering relationship between Lissar and Prince Ossin...but perhaps those are all things that are best discovered by the reader. Suffice it to say, I loved all of these different threads and Robin McKinley's skill at weaving them together into a complete story. I don't know if I'll read Deerskin again in the near future - most likely not. But I feel stronger and smarter and alive for reading it, and I absolutely recommend it.
Having just read and adored McKinley's Sunshine and The Blue Sword when I started this book, I was full of love for the author and expecting great things. This book is a re-telling of the Donkeyskin fairytale, which I actually do remember from when I was little, though I have to say the incestuous subtext did go completely over my head when I was 5. Princess Lissar Lisslar is a lonely and awkward child who grows up obscured by the shadow of her glorious parents who are so completely obsessed with each other that they do not seem to notice that they have a child at all and are so totally fantabulous that everyone around them only has eyes for them and is blinded to Lissar's existence. Throughout her childhood Lissar is told stories of the magical fairytale wooing of her mother, the most beautiful woman in the seven kingdoms, by her father, one of the seven suitors who had to go to the ends of the earth to win her.But then one day, the most beautiful woman in the seven kingdoms falls ill and, because she cannot bear the fading of even the tiniest fraction of her beauty, confines herself to her bed and covers herself up with a veil, so that no one can glimpse her, not even her devastated husband. The queen also orders a portait to be painted, depicting her at the apex of her glory and, as her dying wish, extracts a promise from her husband that he would not marry again unless his new wife was no less beautiful than herself. The king, as they do, goes mad with grief after the queen's death and, on Lissar's 17th birthday, announces his plan to marry his daughter, for she looks so much like her mother. I knew this book was about rape, incestuous rape at that, going in and I thought this aspect of the story was handled with great understanding and sensitivity. The way McKinley deals with blaming the victim syndrome (what has she done to this wonderful glorious man to make him behave like this? she must be evil and amoral, she must have asked for this and enticed him with her wiles... it is astonishing and disheartening how prevalent this thinking still is in real life, how ready we are to blame victims of sexual assault for what happens to them) and the devastating impact the rape has on her feels genuine and heart-breaking. So why three stars? Well, I'm just going to put it out there (although I do feel like there must be something wrong with me for not liking the book more) I found this story pretty dull. I don't know if it was because I knew exactly what was going to happen from the very start (but what did I expect, this is a fairy tale retelling?) or if it was the deliberately languid quality of the prose in which McKinley chooses to tell her tale that didn't quite work for me. It also didn't help that I found Lissar to be a complete blank. She is like a bud that is stamped out before it really gets a chance to bloom, before she really finds herself as a person and after, it is all about coping and survival and pushing out the horrific memories and avoiding being herself. And I know that this is exactly how it would be, that it couldn't really be anything else, but it was dull for me to read about a person who is simply pulled like a puppet on a string without any rhyme or reason throughout most of the book. I wanted Lissar to take control of her life and choose to do something because that is what she wants to do, because she is ready for it and for me, that never really happened, though other readers may disagree with me on this. Even the final resolution, when Lissar finally faces her father again, seemed baffling to me because, again, she seems to be simply pulled into it by the mysterious magical force that has been guiding her steps ever since she left her home, and it is not something that she consiously chooses to do. Also the imagery of the climax was pretty disturbing with Lissar seemingly re-living her rape in order to condemn her father. While this is probably inevitable in this context, it also left me feeling perturbed. Yes, I realise that this is the reality of every rape case, that in order to bring to justice the perpetrator, every rape victim has to re-live their ordeal in front of the police, relatives, lawyers, jury (that is, after all, why so many choose not to report). I just wish there was another way.
What do You think about Deerskin (2005)?
Compelling and disturbing, a Fairy Tale that confronts Reality: do not make the mistake of assuming "Deerskin" is a typical fantasy... yet its value lies most in what makes it atypical.First, and in a lighter vein, it shows how near-isolation of a child can inhibit that child's understanding of humans and human interactions. Lissla Lissar grows up the neglected and ignored child of parents so enamored with one another that they rarely see her, and even to her nurse, she is of value only as her mother's daughter. Her royal parents' glamour (made of extreme physical beauty, of the myth of romance, and of the unrecognized powerful magic of personality her mother wields, which overwhelms everyone) occupy everyone's attention---Lissar is almost completely ignored. Along with this is a subtle point on how people, even societies, can choose the wrong criteria for what is "good and admirable." Two societies contrast in this book: one which puts conventional beauty, social strata, and what one wishes to believe as paramount---you can follow how they lie to themselves, and are unable to recognize truth, unable to see and believe in their Princess; and one society that puts Love and Life as paramount, where people are judged by who they are and how they act, not what they are or how much they glitter.The second, and pivotal point of the book deals with the twin traumas of rape and incest. It is here that McKinley puts forth her most compelling writing, for to read this book is to understand, at least a little, the wounds such victims suffer all their lives. As one real life male victim once put it [paraphrasing], "It's not like a scar that eventually heals and stops hurting; instead it's as if you've lost part of your leg and limp forever afterward. It is psychic murder, for you will never again be the person you were before it happened... the damage is that fundamental." Survivors don't "get over it": like a person missing a foot, they learn to live and move despite the damage that can never be repaired, damage that will always impair them in some fashion. Their courage is in going on to live anyway, as best they are able. Many write of the initial trauma in a way that one feels great sympathy and pain for the victim; few are able to write of the ongoing, permanent damage in such a way that non-victims can understand it---McKinley has, and I thank her for it.Lastly, the bulk of the book deals with healing, with learning to love and trust, with dealing with the damage and choosing for Life and Love---despite and around the damage and dismemberment of the psyche. It also clearly shows the kind of courage it takes to do this, the kind of strength it takes to admit and express weakness, the fierce strength of heart where one can openly face the painful past in order to protect another from similar ravages. It ends not in a "happy ending," but merely in hope, in a choice to try for happiness---which is in itself courageous, because it is a choice for Life, not Death. Sometimes the choice to go on trying, to make room for love and life despite such wounds, is the most courageous of all.
—Chris
I have hit page 92 and I am officially done reading this book. My spidey-sense was telling me all along that something was not right, but I clung to the naive hope that I was wrong about where it was going. Not so. I am not in any way averse to dark themes, but this whole incest/rape thing just seemed gratuitous. I understand it's based on a creepy old fairy tale, but neither the main character nor her father were believable. I didn't really see overarching reason for their actions at any point.
—Isabel
This is a story based on Charles Perrault's darkly adult fairy tale, Donkeyskin. It's the tale of your usual most-beautiful-princess - with a twist. Her father decides to marry her after her mother's death, the tale has a rather graphic assault scene to end Part One, and a weak ending to indicate happy ever after. I found Part One (84 pages) very tiresome and tedious, with the language very 'fairy-tale-like', which is great in a short fairy tale but not so fun in a book. However, I slogged through and found that Part Two was much lovelier and worth the wait. Part Three was good, but not the rousing conclusion that Part Three merited. As much as I like McKinley, and as much as I enjoyed Part Two of the novel, I have to rate it lower since the beginning and end weren't as pleasing.
—S.A. Parham
