Charlotte Kersten

So What’s It About?

A powerful feminist fairy tale of four women each cursed by the same abusive man. Gripping and essential, it will captivate readers of Jennifer Saint’s Ariadne, Heather Walter’s Malice and Menna van Praag’s The Sisters Grimm.

Four women. Four enchantments. One man. But he is no handsome prince, and this is no sugar-sweet fairy tale. Jo, Abony, Ranjani, and Maia all have something in common: they have each been cursed by the CEO of their workplace after he abused his power to prey on them. He wants them silent and uses his sinister dark magic to keep them quiet about what he did. But Jo, Abony, Ranjani and Maia are not fairy-tale princesses waiting to be rescued. They are fierce, angry women with a bond forged in pain, and they’re about to discover that they have power of their own.

In this sharply written, bitingly relevant modern fable, the magic is dark and damaging, and the women are determined to rescue themselves.

What I Thought

I heard about this via the AMA that Ann Claycomb did on r/fantasy earlier this year, and I’m very glad to have checked it out. The description of a #MeToo fairy tale retelling pretty much fits the bill 100%. Each woman in this story is cursed by their rapist CEO with a particular fairy tale curse that she must overcome in order to live a free life after her assault and stop the perpetrator from continuing his assaults. What I like most about this is how each fairy tale curse is essentially one of the traumatic effects of assault or one of the barriers that survivors face when trying to speak out about their experiences. At the same time, each woman’s curse is broken as she turns an inner struggle to a strength.

Rani’s Bluebeard curse represents the fear of retribution or negative effects against loved ones, and she uses her mother’s skills and knowledge to free herself and her mother from the curse’s harm. Jo is quite literally silenced when she tries to speak about the assault with her Toads and Diamonds curse, but she learns that speaking openly about her feelings for her loved ones and being vulnerable empowers her.

With her Thumblina curse, Maia is belittled and made small and fragile. Her story doesn’t work quite as well for me as the other two, because her relationship with her boyfriend is the linchpin of several important decisions she makes and it never feels quite fleshed out enough for those decisions to feel justified. Abony’s story also feels a bit vague to me – her curse is based on The Red Shoes in that she is forced to buy extremely expensive shoes every time she tries to speak out. It represents the costs, both financial and otherwise, of divulging trauma publicly, as well as the perpetrator’s sexist and victim-blaming beliefs about her dressing well. Her character arc feels the least coherent to me – in the moment where all of their “flaws” are listed, hers is said to be her pride in refusing to ask for help, which is not something I really picked up on throughout. This could have just been poor reading on my part, however.

I always enjoy stories like this where the magic is richly symbolic. This is true of the CEO perpetrator’s power as well as the women’s curses and character arcs that I described above. He taps into collective sexist beliefs to create his magic and uses violence against women to fuel his own ego, financial gain, and power. This makes the ultimate solution of our protagonists reclaiming power over their curses/stories by challenging sexist beliefs even more satisfying.

I do think that it feels a bit too convenient that the four women are able to rely on the witch Chantal for so many explanations and answers about what to do, although Chantal points out how important it is that they are the ones who find each other, support each other, and each come up with the ways they can take back their power. A lot of the book’s dialogue is comprised of the characters working through the magic and debating what to do about the curses, which leaves less room for introspection. I think I would have enjoyed slightly more interiority for the four women, which would have made them overcoming their individual curses even more powerful for me.

Each chapter is book-ended by an excerpt from a fairy tale Discord channel where users discuss different fairy tale tropes, how they demonstrate historical/ongoing sexist beliefs, and how they can be reclaimed. None of this felt very revolutionary to me, but I could see it being more impactful for other readers. That being said, some of these excerpts drifted a bit too far into the didactic for my personal taste, like when we got descriptions of Trump’s election and the 2016 Women’s March in the form of fairy tales.

There are some interesting nuances that I’ll finish by noting. The CEO himself gets almost no page time or characterization, with all of the focus being on the survivors, their relationships with each other, and how they find their way to empowerment. I also appreciate that they encountered another coworker who had been assaulted but made the decision to stay silent about it instead of joining them. This character was not shamed or judged for for being weak or “letting other women down” as we often see in popular discourse – rather, Claycomb made it clear that she was doing what she decided was best for her survival and her priority of taking care of her family post-assault.

In its reclamation of sexist tropes that are genre staples and effective exploration of trauma, Silenced reminds me of How to Be Eaten and The Refrigerator Monologues. Have yourself a fictional survivor empowerment binge and read all three together!!!