New Book Review: The King's Feather

Title: The King's Feather 

Author: Amy Earls

Date: 2023

Publisher: Portal

ISBN: 979-8-9874017-2-9

Quote: "...and now on the afternoon of my seventeenth birthday, the same man who took Mom away would come for me."

This is a science fiction story about human trafficking. About two-thirds of the plot seems to come from the narratives of refugees and trafficked humans in "the developing" countries; about one-third is a very, very, very loose reinterpretation of the story of the siege of Jericho in the Bible. 

Pero, or Ro for even shorter, has a name derived from a word for "feather." She has an adoptive mother she barely remembers and an adoptive brother she's never met. They are the Three Chosen to travel back and forth between alternate worlds, identified by special necklaces whose pendants are "wooden feather" carvings. What they're chosen for is a special relationship with Elohim, the Hebrew name for God that is a plural form used as if it were singular. (If you don't think it's appropriate to use God as a fictional character, don't read this book.) Two villains, Carper, who is "chosen" in his own way and will repent, and Rose, who is still a baddie at the end of this story, think that their being "chosen" means that they need to be part of Carper's army of drugged teen soldiers, 

As Pero's mother has outgrown being a teen soldier, she has been kept as Carper's personal slave. Exactly what that entails has been left to the lurid imaginations of teenagers. We're told that she's been forced to kill other soldiers in the same army and that she's been a "concubine." In the Bible story the Israelite spies stayed at an inn operated by a well-known prostitute called Rahab, and part of the plot was that, as a prostitute, she displayed red things from her windows--a red "cord" from which the spies climbed out of a back window, and a red flag the spies pointed out to the army as a sign to rescue the occupants of that house when they took the city.  In this story Pero's mother's name is Bahar and she ties a red scarf and a red hose to the window at the appropriate parts of the story, but no one specifically says that she's been prostituted. 

Human trafficking is not part of the story of the siege of Jericho in the Bible. Rahab may have been led into prostitution as an enslaved or trafficked child--the Bible doesn't say--but she's a free woman, the manager of her own house, in the story. It's hard to say just why human trafficking is a dominant motif in the novel. One reason may be that it's hard to discuss the moral ambiguity of Rahab's early career in the Bible. We tend to want to judge Rahab as if she had grown up in a culture where we still want to think that women are respected more for chastity than for wealth. She didn't. If we can't whitewash Rahab's past with the claim that innkeepers or even mere extroverts were sometimes called "harlots" in Middle English (they were, but the Hebrew word was more specific), we'd rather see her as a victim. She wasn't. The Bible didn't split Rahab's character into a victim mother and hero daughter; she's a heroine, just as she is, because she acts with the converted form of the same boldness that had to have guided her pre-conversion career. 

Historically, Rahab was part of a culture where fertility and sexuality were literally idolized; the "gods" were worshipped through temple prostitutes, so Rahab might have gained her reputation as a girl who chose to show special religious fervor by sacrificing her virginity instead of her hair (history records that that was the choice girls made before marriage in Babylon), then went on to specialize in legal private prostitution, profiteering on younger women's...enough said. Anyway what she did was legal and socially accepted in her culture. Even in ancient Israel...Rahab married an officer in the army and became one of the ancestors of the kings of Israel, and of Jesus. We're not comfortable with the idea that a woman who very likely participated in the trafficking of young girls who had not chosen sex work as a career, who certainly had chosen that career for herself, could simply convert to a religion that frowned on prostitution and become a respectable man's mature, sultry, yet respectable wife. It's not compatible with that foolish notion, started by weak men, that a "good girl" is basically asexual. But it's in the Bible.

There is an obvious reference to the current focus of the mainstream media's feeding frenzy...In this election year we have three male presidential candidates, three old men, two old enough to be forced out of almost any other job and the third old enough to be pensioned off in most offices. ("You've earned a higher salary than we can afford so now, please, take a pay cut and go home.") And each of those three old men has done things that showed the level of contempt for women that was normal when he was young. And yes, in a more enlightened world, we need to be teaching little boys, any man who's done any of those things will be lucky if anyone ever employs him to come in at night and scrub toilets. But in this present world, that's what we have for presidential candidates. Kennedy has, I think, the most credible excuse--he was on drugs at the time and did himself almost as much harm as he did his friends. Trump has at least claimed a religious conversion, conveniently timed at an age when almost everyone develops resistance to sexual temptation. Biden has never repented and never had a valid excuse. In terms of conventional Christian morality, though I want to emphasize that nobody's soul can be judged by their public record, Biden's public record puts him on the lowest moral ground of the three.

Not that the spiritual struggle Pero goes through when Elohim tells her that Carper can repent and be her friend was necessarily written as a rebuke to people, like Beth Moore, who think Trump should never be forgiven. Carper, when he shows signs of softening and repenting, is still a jerk. It's still hard for Pero and her friends to believe that he's capable of repenting or changing his ways. If they had only the general idea of forgiveness, rather than a directly inspired "chosen" prophetess who hears God's voice regularly, Pero and friends would probably feel inclined to kill Pero; their story gives them so many opportunities, and it doesn't seem as if he could possibly be missed. But in the story Carper does something good for them in the end.

Oh, and also the man who teaches the characters about forgiveness in private prophetic visions is not a romanized Jesus the Christ, but a completely Jewish Rabbi Yeshua the Messiah. The main characters have modern Hebrew, Israeli names and belong to "the Abram family." I'm not sure whether the story is better described as whole-Bible Christian or as Messianic Jewish. (That aspect of the story, as a whole-Bible Christian, I approve.)

So, in summary, this is a very controversial, very speculative novel. I think the author (and editors) did a better job than could reasonably have been expected, splicing science fiction, trending news, and the tattered scraps of a Bible story together into a boys' (and girls') adventure story. I can't say the mix works for me, but it obviously works for Amy Earls' students, Now you know the main reasons why some people won't like this novel and can make your own decision about reading it.