So, I’ve just read the ‘Caraval’ trilogy by Stephanie Garber, and while I don’t think it’s a bad series, I’m not impressed either; and I can say literally the same about most YA series. I wonder why it happens to me so often, and I’ll try to explain why.
So, the Caraval trilogy is a story of two sisters, Scarlet and Donatella Dragna, who get involved in the mysterious Caraval, a kind of carnival (of course, the naming isn’t very subtle) organized by the equally mysterious Legend. In the meantime, we’ll get Family Mysteries, Bad Fathers, NPC Fiancés, Love Triangles, Oracles, Non-Aging Love Interests, and Ambiguously PoC Love Interests. Yes, I’m trying to list down these things here as not to give you too much spoilers. Some of these elements have been emblematic to the genre for a long time, and some of them reveal certain things about our expectations we may not necessarily wish to realize.
So, let’s begin with descriptions of the brothers Julian and Legend, the two main love interests of the series. And you need to know that their descriptions are, well… ambiguous. Sometimes, their skin is described as brown, sometimes as tanned, and sometimes as golden or olive. Here, although one may not realize it off hand, we get a popular excuse in the genre. You want to leave the question of the character whiteness/being of colour up to debate? Leave your reader with those vague mentions which may indicate anything. Why do I think it’s not necessarily a good solution? Because we all have unconscious biases, and we may subconsciously not want to see people of colour as important characters in a novel. Descriptions like those in the Caraval series let us harbour such biases (no matter if it was the author’s intention). After all, you can always imagine Julian and Legend as white but tanned/olive-skinned.
Another thing, which has been discussed more often in the genre fandom, is this Non-Aging Love Interest trope. You see, Legend became immortal after, rejected by the sisters’ great-grandmother, he’d sought help from the immortal entities called the Moirai. His brother became immortal, too. It means that Legend and Julian are literally several generations older than the sisters. But this is not the end. One of the Moirai, Jack, appears in the sisters’ world to catch attention of Donatella, and a love triangle between him, her, and Legend ensues. We’ve seen it many times in the genre, haven’t we? From the ‘Twilight’ series to the ‘Grisha’ trilogy, it seems that a big (supernatural even) age gap is no problem, as long as an immortal vampire/sorcerer/circus manager looks young. I hope I don’t need to explain why this is hypocrisy, and why condemning age gaps only if partners differ in looks is jarring. A person living for centuries or a century is much more experienced than their (often teenage) partner, and no descriptions of one’s youthful and handsome looks will change that. I think we should realize that this is as problematic as all those old novels where relations with men several years senior than women were shown as something neutral.
So, you’ve got your standard But They Look Young excuse, and you’ve got three Love Interests who all, respectively have their moments of manipulating and cheating the heroines. And you’ve got the heroines who had to choose their True Love Interest and uncover mysteries and save the world from the Moirai… And guess what? In the end, I don’t care. I know how the series will end: The heroines will find love and the Moirai will be defeated.
I’ve seen similar patterns of writing about love and adventures in countless YA fantasy books. The vague setting wasn’t new to me either. Carnival atmosphere? Spanish- and Italian-like names and surnames? I’ve seen those things in better universes, truth be told. And I’d rather see it in the convention of magical realism than in a non-descript fantasy land where the Empress rules the Equatorial Empire and the heroines’ father is a governor of a ‘tropical’ island, and no one asks, of course, whether this has anything to do with colonialism. I don’t mean it’s a bad series. It’s quite entertainable, but it isn’t memorable. Just like most YA fantasy books I’ve read.
Left Hand of Fiction 