I hope you guys are all hanging in there and continuing (or starting) to take care of yourselves. For me, that has meant declaring “Holiday Law!” and eating like it’s Christmas morning every day of the week. Stuffing myself irresponsibly full of Green Bean Casserole felt just as good this year as it has every other year. I basically ate an entire pan of it at Thanksgiving and it was really nice to know that even with everything going on, I’ll always have Green Bean Casserole.

True Fact: I didn’t dye my hair green. It’s simply sprouted green somewhere in my second pound of bacon-onion-bean magic. One of these years I’m going to turn into a green bean like I’m Violet Beauregarde turning into a blueberry.

This week I’ve been reading…

The Hero of Ages by Brandon Sanderson, Parts 1-3

Book 3 of the Mistborn series, the Hero of Ages, starts a few years after book two ended. Vin and Elend rule as Emperor/Empress, though their power is still highly contested. Elend had been honing the Mistborn powers he gained at the end of book two, and in terms of sheer power he is much stronger than Vin, though he lacks her training and natural talent. They lead their army across the final empire, conquering cities that have been under the rule of rogue/unsanctioned kings and chasing after the clues and supplies left hidden by the Lord Ruler. One of the things I loved about the first book was that it starts out as a fun heist. 

Book three brings some of those elements back as Vin and Elend search for clues and try to unravel the mystery of the massive underground bunkers the Lord Ruler had secretly built during his reign. In some ways, book three is sort of like when Netflix does a gritty reboot of a 90s classic: You’ve got all the same characters you loved the first time around, but without the idealistic glint in their eyes. 

Like all of Sanderson’s work, The Hero of Ages is character driven. The plot is exciting, and I love that he’s willing to tackle topics like racism, classism, institutional religion, and sexism. I think sometimes authors or editors or publishing houses let fear of upsetting people keep them from speaking on those. Sanderson addresses them through the eyes of accessible, believable characters, and today I want to talk about Spook. 

We first met Spook in book one as a shy kid who had joined the crew more or less by default on account of his Uncle Clubs being one of Kelsier’s chosen allies. Spook was given his name by Kelsier, but always questioned his value on the team, wondering if they were only putting up with him because he was “part of the package” when they recruited Clubs. He spoke in an incomprehensible street slang and, because those around him could rarely understand what he was saying, he remained silent more often than not. He pined after Vin, and was deeply jealous of Elend. Spook is a Tin-Eye, which means he can burn Tin (but not the other allomantic metals) gaining the ability to enhance his senses. He was more talented than most at using this gift and was regularly used as a look out for the party. He saw this as a slight, but it was actually a major vote of confidence in him from the rest of the group who could have easily assigned the task to a more experienced (and older) allomancer. 

In the years since Kelsier and Clubs died, Spook has retreated more and more into himself. He wants to be a valuable part of Elend’s new government and army, and he desperately wants to prove his worth to the remaining members of Kelsier’s crew, but he is crippled by a deep seeded sense of worthlessness. It’s easy to write him off as a moody kid, but that would be a mistake. In book three, he has been assigned to spy in a town that Elend may soon come to conquer and while there he has begun to abuse allomancy as a drug. He burns Tin constantly, to the extent that he cannot bear to go outside without wrapping a cloth around his eyes as the constant Tin burning has made them so sensitive he is unable to withstand normal daylight. He believes this is making him more powerful or useful to the group as an extreme Tin-Eye, but in reality he’s become addicted to the Tin. 

Over the course of the book, we are shown flashbacks of Spook’s upbringing and how he came to live with his Uncle Clubs. When his father discovered he was an Allomancer, he tried to kill Spook. As Skaa, it was against the law for Spook to exist as the only way he could be an Allomancer was if he had noble blood in his ancestry. While nobles were allowed (even encouraged) to bed Skaa women, they were required to kill the women afterwards to prevent such a child from being born. Clubs, (Spook’s uncle on his mother’s side) arrives just in the nick of time and saves Spook from his father. That moment shaped Spook’s psyche in an irreversible way. Here, you have to look not just at the actions of Spook’s father, but rather at the system that created this scenario in order to really understand the impact it had on Spook. Centuries of oppression and systemic racism created a world in which not only did Nobles not value the lives of Skaa, but Skaa frequently didn’t see themselves as worthy of anything else. That ingrained racism went hand in hand with a culture of socioeconomic inequality so vast that it was incredibly rare for a Skaa to ever leave the slums. This wasn’t a reflection of a lack of ambition or hard work, though it was a standard belief that Skaa were lazy (because obviously they wouldn’t be so poor if they worked harder!). Rather, it was a system that never allowed Skaa to accumulate enough wealth to rise above what they were born into. 

So you roll all of that together and in that moment, Spook’s sense of self worth was essentially erased. He felt unloved, unworthy of love, and more than that he felt unworthy of life. He was far more confused by Clubs wanting to take him in than he was of his father wanting to kill him. With that kind of trauma, and without Clubs or Kelsier to guide him, Spooks eventual substance abuse and penchant for crime were basically inevitable. What Sanderson does here that really sets him apart in his writing is create a system where we can talk about institutionalized racism and inequality from the safety of a fictional world. Especially right now, the messages in the Mistborn books are a stark reflection of the world we live in today. 

Currently on my needles…

I’ve been focused more on dying than knitting the last couple of weeks and we’ve got some big shop updates coming! We made 30 amazing new colors on minis and have a treasure trove of new mini sets coming. We’re also restocking Interlude, Vacation, GAL and BeefCake so stay tuned for shop updates! We’ll start getting things listed in the store next week.

That said, my iKnitiative sweater is SO CLOSE to done!

I’m 1/2 done with the second sleeve, then it’s just blocking and buttons and it’s off to testing! I’ve got more sweater patterns rattling around in my noggin than I can knit and I’m looking forward to doing some late knit nights in the next few weeks to work on new stuff.

Mabel the Merciless’ blanket is a little more than 1/3 done, and I should be able to finish in time for Christmas. Then again, it’s probably good for her to get used to getting 3/4 of a WIP wrapped up under the tree at an early age so I don’t set the expectations unrealistically high.

~Megan-Anne

Beans. Beans! BEANS!

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