Dressed in all black down to her ankles, dark hair in two braids, Margaret Killjoy let me into her house in the forested mountains, where she lives a hermit-like life with her companion, her dog Rintrah. A transfeminine musician, podcaster, and author of multiple fantasy books, Killjoy lives in the mountains of Appalachia in a home filled with instruments, books, art, and medieval weaponry. For an author who wrote an upcoming novel described as “an own-voices story of trans witchcraft,” her home met my expectations and then some.
Killjoy’s first young adult crossover fantasy book, The Sapling Cage, comes out on September 24 and is described as a novel that hearkens back to gender-bending fantasy and speculative fiction works by women like Ursula K. Le Guin and Tamora Pierce.
I snuck in the interview just before the east coast book tour for The Sapling Cage. Killjoy tells me there has never been so much pre-publication buzz for one of her books before. But given the evil deeds in the book center around resource extraction and power hoarding, and the trans girl protagonist who is not only exploring her identity but training to be a witch, and the collective Millennial and Gen X longing for something like the fantasy stories of our youth, it’s easy to see why the moment is right for this book’s release.
We can look to Tamora Pierce as an expert world-builder and fantasy writer, but we also must acknowledge the shortcomings of her multiple series, especially when it comes to gender. Her book The Song of the Lioness Quartet was innovative for its protagonist, Alanna, a girl who disguised herself as a boy in order to train as a knight in a system and world where girls were not allowed to do so. In a subsequent series in the same world, Kel follows in Alanna’s footsteps. This time, she’s legally able to train as a knight openly as a girl, but she faces unrelenting sexism while doing so. The series exchanges the stresses of secrecy for the barbs of resentment Kel faces and overcomes. While Kel is notably burly, tall, and level-headed, much quieter and less romantically inclined girl protagonist in contrast to the petite, red-headed and violet-eyed, love-triangle-having protagonist of the first series, these two series of Pierce’s works still keep to gendered expectations in a lot of ways, rarely venturing into discussions of queerness or anyone who isn’t cis. In recent years, it can seem like we’ve seen fewer stereotypical and cliche ideas around femininity permeating the young adult fantasy and speculative fiction genres, but a lot of tropes still persist, and despite a genre that contains infinite room for expansive thinking and reimagining of cultures, roles, and genders, we often still see cishet normativity win out in young adult books. Still, I know that Pierce’s works, which many queer adults read as kids, left us wanting when it came to representation that felt more direct, where we wouldn’t have to stretch to see reflections of who we were growing up to be in the text.
