The Sapling Cage Struggles to Grow Beyond Its Premise

In a creative work, what comes first: the concept, or the form? In really good art, the two seem inseparable. The best graphic novels, for instance, make it hard to imagine not seeing the images they contain. Hearing a great speech can make the written word seem insufficient. This cuts the other way too, though; sometimes the genre of a piece of art doesn’t feel like a match for its content. This was my experience with The Sapling Cage, a fantasy story with ambitions to expand the genre that unfortunately leaves plenty of what’s best about fantasy on the table, ultimately resulting in a disconnect between its form and its message.

The Sapling Cage, the newest novel by author Margaret Killjoy, follows Lorel, a trans girl who volunteers to stand in for her childhood friend and become a witch. Witches in this world are powerful members of covens who are in tune with natural magic, and when Lorel joins them she begins to learn magic at their hands. When the witches are blamed for an environmental disaster called the colddead, she becomes partially responsible for clearing their name and finding a solution. At the same time, because only women can be witches, she also has to keep her assigned gender a secret.

One of the reasons I wanted to review this book was because the premise reminded me of another fantasy series, Tamora Pierce’s Alanna books. Killjoy mentions the series, whose title character Pierce once said she’d make genderfluid if she wrote them today, as an inspiration for The Sapling Cage. Having enjoyed them as a kid, I’m glad that there’s now a series where a character in a similar situation is openly trans. Lorel’s transness and her attempts to keep it a secret are not only the premise of this first book, but an invitation to other fantasy novels to have explicitly trans characters who are more than just a bit part.

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All that said, I was disappointed to leave this book feeling like Lorel was missing any interiority not related to her secret. Part of the reason for this is how quickly the story moves. We get into Lorel’s departure so fast (within 15 pages) that there’s little time to get to know—or care about—her hometown or the problems she faces there. Once she’s with the witches, there’s little time to catch up with the story and get to know her. In the slice-of-life moments we do get, Lorel’s personality can feel like an afterthought. She is a pretty regular fantasy hero in that she’s brave and (a little too) nice and trusting. These are fine character traits to have, but as the main tentpoles of her personality, they’re not enough to hold her up. And it’s worse when many major characters share these traits. As with the start of the book, it often feels like Lorel is speeding into her relationships with other characters without much basis for them. Her rival hates her on sight, her new friend immediately loves her. Suspicion and guardedness are mostly foreign qualities.

The upside of this is that the plot zooms along, and I always felt compelled to read more. However, much of what I found felt unearned. Each character sounds a lot like the others, meaning that, although we’re told differentiating facts about each of them, most don’t feel distinct. They also— especially Lorel— add sentences or asides when a scene could more elegantly be moved forward by silence or nonverbal description. All these are emblematic of a larger issue, which is that the novel prefers to tell rather than show its characters’ development and motivations, almost as if it’s afraid to give the reader too much control, lest they not understand the subtext. We’re also told about (rather than shown) Lorel’s romantic feelings for both men and women and the details surrounding her choice not to date previously. Her crushes are described in a decidedly detached manner, and her inner monologue often sounds like an omniscient descriptor rather than her own voice, such as when she’s describing her unreciprocated crush on her best friend. It’s worth noting that her dating life is a nice step toward diversity in fantasy media: it’s great to see a bisexual main character, especially one who isn’t overly sexualized. But much like her transness, her crushes on fellow witches are initially described as secrets she needs to keep hidden rather than romantic feelings for her to explore. This just made me sad; she’s suffered enough without having to conceal even more parts of herself in a community that’s supposed to accept her.

It’s a shame I was so cool on Lorel, because I find her descriptions of the places she visits the most well-written parts of the book. At one early point the witches come across a manor house from the old kingdom, with “spires of white marble jutting above the canopy… with grey stone walls that wove through the trees of the forest, broken by mismatched glass windows.” The story’s largerworldbuilding and lore is also fascinating, especially the rules of natural magic. Its portrayal of magic as something helpful but not all-powerful, and the importance of balance, reminded me of the Witch Hat Atelier manga series, which is similarly interested in how magic can help make the world more equitable. When the older witches in Lorel’s coven are initially described as terrifying masters of their craft, it’s surprising to see them struggling with regular human tasks; and it’s refreshing that magic, while helpful, isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution to problems like it can sometimes be in fantasy.

The Sapling Cage also avoids the voyeurism that can drag fantasy fiction down, whether it’s scenes about Lorel or others. Her body is never described gratuitously, and her observations about people she finds attractive are usually musings about her own feelings rather than overly graphic physical descriptions. This was refreshing and I hope other fantasy moves in this direction.

As I was reading The Sapling Cage, I found myself wondering if it was classified as a young adult novel. I didn’t look this up until I finished, because ultimately it’s mostly a marketing term– plenty of adults read teen books, and vice versa. But I thought the designation, if true, might explain some of the choices when it comes to how Lorel’s secret is presented. YA fiction can be complex— Witch Hat and the Alanna books (depending on who you ask) are great examples—but it often relies on romance, secrecy, dramatic irony, and spelling things out super clearly, all because of the (assumed) developmental age of its readers. An older audience can see a story as cheesy or obvious whereas a younger one sees something inventive and new.

As it turns out, The Sapling Cage is not specially designated as YA, though it is marketed as a coming-of-age novel and I would give it to a teen reader without hesitation. But I think my questions about its genre come from the fact that the book’s central themes, the “big picture” stuff you’d want to make sure a reader takes away, overpower its characters, who often linger in scenes designed to push the plot forward rather than reveal more about the people in them. I find the book’s concepts of self-made identity and non-hierarchical community so much more compelling in isolation, and in retrospect, than I did in the moment-to-moment experience of reading, when they were tied to characters who felt like lessons to drive home those concepts rather than full people.

The best works of fantasy are full of details that seem unimportant, yet breathe life into the world by their inclusion. The Sapling Cage feels like a sketch before there’s color; it feels too rushed to take on a life of its own. In its vibrant and well-described setting, there’s little time for quiet moments that are solely for character development or atmosphere. Since it’s the first book in a trilogy, I hope that the sequels will get some more love in the character backstory and personality department. The lore of this world could create a good foundation for a stronger follow-up. For now, The Sapling Cage is an easy read with great momentum, but its content is like a magic trick: if you look at it too closely, the whole thing threatens to fall apart.

The Sapling Cage is available now wherever books are sold.

Emily Price is a former intern at Paste and a columnist at Unwinnable Magazine. She is also a PhD Candidate in literature at the CUNY Graduate Center. She can be found on Twitter @the_emilyap.