There is a princess in this book who can read and is not allowed to. She learned late and badly, and she was proud of it. Then she found a letter from her dead sister, carried it to her father in his private council, read it aloud to him and asked him for justice. He struck her, choked her and kicked her, and her brother had to pull him off. The penance he set afterwards was that she would give up letters altogether. She has observed it for years. She also keeps her mother’s books hidden and reads them in secret, and calls that a sin against her god. A Snake Among Swans by Hannah Kaner is being sold as a revenge fantasy about a hostage bride with a knife, and it is one. It is also a very careful study of what a family does to the daughter who tells the truth out loud.
The Daughter Who Spoke Once
Elise is the third daughter of a warlord who has conquered most of a continent, and she has been raised inside a faith that has a phrase for every stage of her diminishment.
She was a fighter as a child, practising forms with her brothers, roughly their equal. Then the rules changed. Her sisters left or died, her mother withdrew, and Elise learned to be the one who gathers everybody else up and makes it all right. She weaves. She waits. And she takes her father’s forgetting of her name as weather.
A Snake Among Swans by Hannah Kaner is unusually precise about how this gets enforced. It is not a single edict. It is a thousand small corrections, a penance here, a scripture there, a brother telling her not to speak out of turn, until the woman herself is doing most of the work of keeping herself quiet. Groups who want the historical rhyme will find plenty of it in the long argument over female education and who was permitted to be taught what.
Her self-harm belongs in the same ledger. She keeps a bone weaving shuttle, and she uses it on herself when there is nothing else to do with what she is feeling. The book does not present this as an aberration. It presents it as the logical end of a system that has removed every other outlet.
What A Snake Among Swans Says About Soft Power
Late in the book Elise tries to articulate what she has been raised to believe, and the sentence is worth the whole novel.
Women, she thinks, cannot rule and cannot change things. Their place is to accept, to manage, to mitigate and to mend. And then she adds, almost defensively, that this is its own kind of power.
She is not wrong, and A Snake Among Swans by Hannah Kaner is honest enough not to pretend otherwise. Elise’s soft power saves lives repeatedly. It calms a violent king. It keeps a frightened child from panicking while his arm is set. And it is the thing that stands between several people and a very bad death.
It also never once changes anything. That gap between being useful and being consequential is the book’s sharpest observation, and it is where a reading group should start.
The Woman on the Other Side of the Bed
The other narrator has drawn exactly the opposite conclusion.
Tilde has watched her siblings tortured, her clanlands burned and her people’s language and faith systematically dismantled, and she has concluded that nothing except power is worth acquiring. She is charming about it. She is often right. And she is also, page by page, becoming the sort of person who does arithmetic on other people’s lives.
The relationship between the two of them is the best writing in A Snake Among Swans by Hannah Kaner, and the reason is that neither woman is available to the other. One wants to run away together and live poor and free. One wants a throne and thinks the first woman is a child for imagining an alternative. They are both correct about each other, which is what makes it hurt.
Where A Snake Among Swans Overreaches
Not everything lands with that much control.
- The middle circles. Court slight, private rage, small recovery, repeat, several times more than necessary.
- The cast is very large. Six royal sons, four factions, a Synod, and allegiances tracked by the colour of a sash.
- The romance moves faster than the politics. Two women go from wary to devoted while the surrounding machinery is still warming up.
- Some of the brutality repeats itself. The book has an explicit content warning page and it is not decorative.
A group should also know that A Snake Among Swans by Hannah Kaner opens a trilogy. The last act resolves an enormous amount and then leaves one thing standing wide open, deliberately. Nobody should go in expecting the argument between the two women to be settled by the final page.
Questions Worth Bringing to A Snake Among Swans
Begin with Elise’s sentence about accepting, managing, mitigating and mending. Ask the group whether that is power. Then ask who at the table has been praised for exactly those qualities, and what it bought them.
The harder question is the choice the two women make between love and power, because A Snake Among Swans by Hannah Kaner flatly refuses to grade it. Tilde argues that love cannot shield anyone and hope cannot fight. Elise argues that a life spent surviving is not a life. Ask each person which of them they believed while reading, and then ask whether they would give the same answer about someone they actually know.
Third, and worth saving for the end of the session: at what point, if any, did the group stop rooting for Tilde? People will not agree, and the disagreement is the discussion. Some readers never stop. Some stop very early. Where a person draws that line tends to say something about what they think victims are owed.
Groups that finish A Snake Among Swans by Hannah Kaner should go to Godkiller, the opening of Kaner’s earlier trilogy, which asks similar questions about faith with a warmer set of characters. A Treachery of Swans by A.B. Poranek is the obvious companion for the folklore, and a much lighter evening. The Dark Library by Mary Anna Evans suits anyone who came away thinking about who is permitted to read. And The Lion and the Deathless Dark by Carissa Broadbent is for readers who wanted more of the romance and less of the council chamber.
What It Leaves Behind
There is a tapestry in this book. Elise has been weaving it for years: her family as swans, generation on generation, climbing. At its centre is an old story about a swan woman who came to a longhouse, took off her wings and was caught when a king pasted the windowsill with tree sap so she could not fly away. He burned her wings. She sat beside him on the throne afterwards.
Elise has always understood it as a story about how her dynasty began. Somebody else points out, gently, that it is a story about a woman who wanted to leave. A Snake Among Swans by Hannah Kaner hands a reading group that tapestry and asks it to decide which reading is correct, and then spends five hundred pages demonstrating that a woman who escapes the window can still end up on the throne, doing the pasting herself.