Review of The Bone Dragon by Alexia Casale

Title: The Bone Dragon
Author: Alexia Casale
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Published: 2 May 2013
Genre: YA, fantasy (sort of)
Source: NetGalley
Rating: 7/10

For four years, 14-year-old Evie has been living with broken ribs after being abused by her grandparents. Although she was adopted by Amy and Paul, who proved to be loving, devoted parents, it took three years before she trusted them enough to tell them about the pain and what it meant. When the novel opens she wakes up in hospital after her operation. As a memento, the doctor gives her the piece of rib that they removed. When she goes home to recover, Evie’s Uncle Ben suggests she make something out of the piece of rib, and she decides on a dragon – her ideal pet. Uncle Ben carves the bone into shape and Evie spends her recovery time etching scales and other details into the bone.

She only wishes her dragon could be real: “my chest was tight with longing. If I had a dragon, I’d never be powerless again”. And, inexplicably, Evie’s desperate wish comes true – the dragon comes to life at night and becomes her tiny but powerful guardian. Under the dragon’s direction, Evie sneaks out of the house at night and roams the almost mystical marshland of her neighbourhood. It is the dragon’s way of helping her heal and come to terms with the abuse and neglect she has suffered. But the dragon has a mysterious plan too, and he’s guiding Evie in the preparations for it. There is unfinished business that Evie cannot handle on her own, and that Paul, Amy and Ben could never handle for her.

At first glance, The Bone Dragon looks like a fantasy novel, but in truth it’s more a psychological drama that walks a fine line between fantasy and realism. At the borderline is the dragon – we never know if it really comes to life or if it’s only a product of Evie’s imagination and desperation. Initially it seems real, and indeed the simplest interpretation of this story is that the dragon comes to life. But as the story progresses you realise that Evie isn’t doing anything that she couldn’t do by herself. The dragon is certainly real to her in some way, but it might simply be a psychological tool, a means of pushing herself do dangerous, daring things, or another persona that does things the original Evie can’t or won’t. Whether she’s conscious of this psychological split is debatable; both possibilities are equally unsettling.

It does however, make The Bone Dragon one of the most sophisticated and psychologically compelling YA novels I’ve encountered. As I read, and then as I went through my review notes and re-considered the story, I was increasingly impressed by the psychology of Evie’s character. Some of the flaws that had bothered me actually became less significant as I admired the novel’s strengths.

Let me get the flaws out of the way. Or rather, just the flaw that bothered me the most: the night trips are pretty boring. They have the potential to be the most beautiful and exciting aspect of the book, but most of the time nothing happens on these brief adventures. You see, the dragon keeps his plan secret from Evie, and the narrative never reveals what kinds of preparations they’re making (although if you pay attention to other parts of the story you can guess). Even Evie gets frustrated with his secrecy:

‘What I want is for you not to speak in riddles the whole time. We’ve passed the point when it seemed clever and reached the bit where it’s just tedious,’

But the Dragon also tells Evie that it’s it’s part of his ‘contract’ with her that she can’t know everything and has to trust him. This sounds a bit silly; it’s more like the author’s plot device for keeping the big plan a mystery. The consequence is that, for the reader, it seems like the characters are just walking around. The only things driving the narrative here are the descriptions of the seemingly magical nightscape and a little mystery that Evie stumbles upon: Ben and Paul are going out on Friday nights to do something dangerous. They don’t want to tell Amy about it, but Ben thinks they should tell Evie, so what could it be? This question doesn’t carry enough intrigue to make the night trips more interesting though, and the descriptions of the landscape and atmosphere are wasted when there’s no action to accompany them. So my mind tended to wander as well, and I struggled to concentrate during these parts.

I was waiting for the story to get back to the real world, to Evie’s life and mind. At first we see her as a damaged but recovering young girl. Our first impressions are dominated by the overwhelming pain of the slowly healing wound in her side. For a while, she can’t move without pain, and needs Amy’s help to shower or walk up the stairs. Even when she recovers enough to go back to school she has to be careful.

Her parents arrange for one of her teachers, Ms Winters, to have regular counselling sessions with Evie, and these are very illuminating for her character; I looked forward to them. But even though the first-person narration puts us right in Evie’s head, we are never given the specifics of what happened to her; there are enough hints to guess at the facts, but Evie withholds the details:

Some things should never be said. Not out loud in clear, simple words. You talk around them. You leave gaps and blanks. You use other words and talk in curves and arcs for the worst things because you need to keep them like mist. Words are dangerous. Like a spell, if you name the mist, call out all of the words that describe it sharp and clear, you turn it solid, into something that no one should ever hold in their hands. Better that it stays like water, slipping between your fingers.

Our understanding of the abuse comes from its effect on Evie’s body and mind. We learn how much she hates her mother Fiona, who recently died of cancer. As far as Evie’s concerned, Fiona got what she deserved; she wasn’t the one who abused Evie, but she allowed it to happen because she was weak and cowardly.

Not surprisingly, Evie’s experiences have made her incredibly cynical. She’s given up on God and prayer because that never helped her when she needed it most. She knows that life just goes on even when it’s more unjust or unbearable than seems possible: “there are infinite places beyond unbearable”. As her friend Lynne later says, Evie also tends to expect the worst of everyone. She hasn’t told her two friends the truth about what happened, assuming it’ll just become humiliating gossip. She assumed Amy and Paul would never really treat her as their child. She was shocked to find that they loved her and never acted as if she could be returned, even when she made them angry.

The love that Amy, Paul and Ben show for Evie offers a comforting balance for the harsher parts of the narrative, especially Evie’s anger and cynicism. Nevertheless, as the story continues, you start to realise that Evie is perhaps more damaged that you initially assumed, and her narration becomes increasingly unreliable. This becomes particularly noticeable with the issue of Sonny Rawlins, a school bully who seems to focus on Evie. Evie hates him and understandably so, but there are few details that blur the issue. For example, Evie tells Ms Winters that Sonny Rawlins has been throwing eggs at their house. This comes as a complete surprise to the reader – it’s the first time she mentions something so upsetting. It suggests that Evie might be lying, making a stronger case against Sonny Rawlins. And believe me, this isn’t the only glimpse you’ll get of her vindictive streak.

Evie knows the world is unjust, but she still wants payback:

It’s all bound up with how angry, angry, angry I am that I never get to hurt anyone half as much as they hurt me.

 

 Usually Amy would tell me stuff about ‘an eye for an eye making us all blind’ and I know Gandhi said it and it was a smart thing to say if we want the world to be a good place. Only it doesn’t feel like that. And the worst bit is that I know that if I did make Sonny Rawlins pay, he’d never dare to even look at me wrong again. It wouldn’t be like the time with the flowers, or the cigarettes, or every other little thing since, when my pushing back against his attempts to hurt me have only made him try harder. It wouldn’t just be a little victory in the moment, making sure his hatefulness backfires [...] No, if I ever really made him pay, that would be the end of it.

 

I don’t want Paul and Amy fighting this battle for me because they don’t understand how much I want Sonny Rawlins to pay. They’d never make him sorry enough. They just don’t have it in them.  And I love them for it. I love that they don’t know how wonderful, and terrible, it is to be powerful. I couldn’t  bear for them to lose that… that innocence because of me.

 

The issue of innocence is a particularly interesting one, and I found it to be one of the most memorable parts of the novel. Evie actually considers Amy, Paul and Ben to be innocent in ways that she is not, because innocence is not what most people say it is:

People get it wrong when they talk about innocence: they think it’s something to do with ignorance about the facts of sex and all the nasty things that happen in the world. But facts don’t change people: it’s understanding how the facts feel that does. Only stupid people think innocence is some weird state of not-knowing that children grow out of once they start to understand innuendo. Or maybe it’s not that they’re stupid: maybe it’s just that in some weird grown-up way they are still innocent. Because otherwise they’d know better: they’d understand, even if they couldn’t really explain it, that innocence is so much bigger. It’s every aspect of the life you have before you know how precious and wonderful it is to be ignorant. It’s all the time you spend rushing, rushing to know, never expecting to find grief waiting beside knowledge.

 

It’s weird and sad that this kid is concerned about the innocence of her parents. At 14 years old, she’s frustrated that “at their age” they can still think the way they do. They can enjoy a kind of blissful ignorance that was taken away from her long ago. It creates a terrible conflict within her. On the one hand she’s angry and hateful that they’re so innocent; she wants them to lose that innocence so they can better understand her and share her pain. It’s not fair that they don’t have to shoulder the burden of understanding. On the other hand, she loves them too much to truly want this for them. After all, they have suffered too: Amy and Paul lost their son, Ben lost his wife, and Amy and Ben lost their parents, all in one car crash. Still, that’s not the same thing as what Evie had to go through.

Reflecting on all this and other things, I was struck by how dark this novel. It’s not something you notice at first glance. After all, it’s not bleak. Evie is strong, she’s recovering, she’s got a wonderful family. The plot isn’t depressing: there are many happy moments with Evie’s friends and family, we see her work through her problems, and of course she has her magical dragon. And as I mentioned, you don’t relive the abuse with Evie. But there are grim, brutal things that very quietly crawl in under your skin. Like Amy’s slightly pathological tendency to worry about her family’s safety and the fact that you would never know she and Paul had a son because they keep every trace of him locked away in a cupboard. Or Evie’s burning anger at Sonny Rawlins (anyone who’s been bullied could empathise, but Evie has an edge that makes it just a little bit disturbing). Her hatred of her mother Fiona. Then there’s the ending, which I think would could spark and interesting discussion because that’s where the issue of the dragon’s reality becomes the most important.

I think these things creep up on you because it’s not a dramatic book. It just calmly gets on with its very serious, painful and even shocking subject matter, while making room for the positive, heartwarming stuff too. And then it stays with you for a while after you’ve finished. I like Evie more than a lot of YA characters I’ve read, even though she scares me a little. The Bone Dragon is also a more mature and emotionally complex kind of YA than the kind I normally find myself reading, and I appreciate that. Not that I necessarily prefer all my books to be grim, but it’s good to see the genre handling something with such gravity too.

Beautiful Redemption: International Giveaway

OK, so I tried doing an SA blogger giveaway of my review copy of  Beautiful Redemption by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl, and sadly it seems that none of my fellow SA bloggers want it either Or they already have copies. So I’m making it an international giveaway for both bloggers and non-bloggers. I’ll also extend the cut-off date to Monday 15 April. Here are the details (again).

Beautiful Redemption by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl is the fourth and final book in the Caster Chronicles, also know as the Beautiful Creatures series. The series began with Beautiful Creatures.

The blurb (may contain SPOILERS for the previous novels)

Ethan Wate always dreamed of leaving the stifling Southern town Gatlin.

But he never dreamt that finding love with Lena Duchannes would drive him away. Lena is a Caster girl whose supernatural powers unveiled a secretive and cursed side of Gatlin, so powerful it forced him to make a terrible sacrifice.

Now Ethan must find a way to return to Lena – and Gatlin – as she vows to do whatever it takes to get him back. Even if it means trusting old enemies or risking their loved ones’ lives.

Can Ethan and Lena rewrite their fate and their spellbinding love story in this stunning finale to the Beautiful Creatures series?

I received Beautiful Redemption from Penguin SA. It was published on 23 October 2012.

To win my copy, follow me via WordPress, email or Twitter and leave a comment below.

Terms and Conditions:
 - This giveaway is open internationally.
 - The giveaway will run for one week, from now until midnight GMT+2 on 15 April 2013. 
 - I will choose the winner using random.org on 16 April, and will post the book once I have the winner’s address.

Good luck!

SA Book Blogger Giveaway: Beautiful Redemption

This giveaway has been cancelled.
If you would still like to win a copy, I am running an international version from 08 – 15 April. Enter here.

Every now and then local publishers send me print copies for review. Sometimes they send me books I don’t read, and if I were to read them I’d hate them and give them bad reviews. So to avoid torturing myself and being unfair to a book not meant for me, I’m doing a giveaway

The book is Beautiful Redemption by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl. It is the fourth and final book in the Caster Chronicles, also know as the Beautiful Creatures series. The series began with Beautiful Creatures, and you will have to get the first three books if you don’t already have them.

The blurb (may contain SPOILERS for the previous novels)

Ethan Wate always dreamed of leaving the stifling Southern town Gatlin.

But he never dreamt that finding love with Lena Duchannes would drive him away. Lena is a Caster girl whose supernatural powers unveiled a secretive and cursed side of Gatlin, so powerful it forced him to make a terrible sacrifice.

Now Ethan must find a way to return to Lena – and Gatlin – as she vows to do whatever it takes to get him back. Even if it means trusting old enemies or risking their loved ones’ lives.

Can Ethan and Lena rewrite their fate and their spellbinding love story in this stunning finale to the Beautiful Creatures series?

I received Beautiful Redemption from Penguin SA. It was published on 23 October 2012.

I am giving away my copy to one lucky South African book blogger. You don’t have to review it, but I’m hoping that you will. The book would only have gathered dust on my shelf, so it should at least have better chances with the winner

To receive a copy, you don’t have to follow me, but you do get to do a bit of self-promotion. Leave a comment below with a link to you blog, and that’s it!

Terms and Conditions:
 - This giveaway is only open to book bloggers residing in South Africa.
 - You entry will only count if you leave a link to your blog so that I can verify your eligibility.
 - The giveaway will run for one week, from now until midnight on 10 April 2013. 
 - I will choose the winner on 11 April, and will post the book once I have the winner’s address.

Since all entrants will have to link to their blogs, please take the opportunity to find more connections in the community by visiting the sites that are new to you, or checking out the latest posts on the familiar ones. And if you want to find more local bloggers, you can always check out the list of SA Book Blogs.

This giveaway has been cancelled.
If you would still like to win a copy, I am running an international version from 08 – 15 April. Enter here.

February 2013 Round-up

February was another lazy month in terms of reviewing, but a pretty good reading month, with a perfect balance between review books and leisure reads.

I had a bit of trouble deciding exactly what I thought of A Natural History of Dragons by Marie Brennan. The worldbuilding is well done, if a tad insistent and the story is fine, but I had some issues with Brennan’s creative decisions, particularly her decision to make her fantasy world exactly like ours during the Victorian period, but with dragons added. With the Victorian setting comes all the related sexism, classism, and insistence on propriety, all of which I found irritating to various degrees. I wished the narrator, Isabella, could just have been allowed to get on with the challenges of studying dragons without having to tell us, constantly, how unladylike her aspirations are.

Paprika by Yasutaka Tsutsui is a novel about technology used for viewing and engaging with people’s dreams, and a ‘dream detective’ who goes into people’s dreams to sort out their mental troubles. Things go awry with the latest version of the dream technology is stolen and misused, causing dreams to invade reality. The novel reminded me a lot of anime, with the way it so easily conflates fantasy and reality, its absurd villains, exaggerated emotions, and ideas about gender. Some of this works, but most of it is troubling, particularly the gender issues.

The Office of Mercy by Ariel Djanikian is a more thoughtful dystopian novel than most, featuring a post-apocalyptic society based on utilitarian philosophy and the idea that humanity has at least been unable to outgrow its need for natural impulses. The conflict in the novel comes from this society’s mercy-killing of the primitive tribes that live in the lush forests outside the settlement’s reinforced glass walls, and the ethical questions related to those killings and the vastly different lifestyles of the two groups of humans. It wasn’t quite as great as I’d hoped, but it’s undoubtedly one of the best books that I’ve read in the genre. I was really pleased by its absence of easy answers and its ability to surprise me. Review to follow soon.

I hadn’t planned to read The Assassin’s Curse by Cassandra Rose Clarke this month, but it came in very handy when I needed a quick read to finish a reading challenge, and writing the review was a rare pleasure in that it only took about 2-3 hours. The novel offers the standard commercial YA content: a feisty kick-ass heroine, a broody mysterious guy, a fantasy world that’s not too fantastical, and a bit of adventure. Nothing special, but luckily nothing infuriating either. That might be because I didn’t care enough about the characters or the story to be upset by the fact that the plot barely moves at all, and there’s an utterly pointless dearth of useful information about the curse, the world, and our mysterious brooding assassin. I won’t be reading the sequel.

It’s only when I did the pictures for this post that I realised I’d managed four leisure reads this month. The first was Carrie by Stephen King. I read this years ago, and I liked it even more this time around. I can’t wait to see the new movie starring Chloë Grace Moretz as Carrie and Julianne Moore as Margaret White.

Farewell Waltz by Milan Kundera was another short book I read for a reading challenge, although this one took me much longer to finish than The Assassin’s Curse. It relates a bizarre story that begins when a young nurse calls a famous, married trumpeter to tell him that she’s pregnant with his child, and quickly expands to include a large cast of related characters. I like Kundera’s philosophical and political musings more than anything else, and it wasn’t a bad read.

I’ve been downloading Clarkesworld Magazine podcasts lately, and Silently and Very Fast by Catherynne M. Valente is my favourite so far. I gave it 5 stars on Goodreads. It’s a story about machine intelligence that brings together sci fi, fantasy and folklore in a beautiful story that’s particularly magical when read by Kate Baker. I’ve listened to it twice in its entirety already (the podcast is broken up into 3 parts) and I will no doubt listen to it many more times. I was devastated to find that I currently can’t buy the limited edition hardcover of this novella.

I’ve had a copy of UFO In Her Eyes by Xiaolu Guo for a few years. It’s set in a village in rural China, where a peasant sees a UFO (or thinks she does) and saves a foreigner who has been bitten by a snake. Investigators are sent to find out what happened, and the chief uses the incident as a means of getting money to modernise her village. The story is told entirely in interview transcripts and other documents, with the pages designed to look like they’ve been photocopied and filed. It’s partly hopeful, but mostly quite sad and critical of the crass attempts at progress that benefit very few while ruining the lives of most of the villagers. a very quick read, and nothing like I’d expected.

I had hoped I could list Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson among my leisure reads for this month, but alas, I am still struggling to finish it… Here’s hoping I’ll complete it by the end of March!

Review of The Assassin’s Curse by Cassandra Rose Clarke

Title: The Assassin’s Curse
Series: The Assassin’s Curse #1
Author: Cassandra Rose Clarke
Published: 02 October 2012
Publisher: Strange Chemistry
Genre: fantasy, YA, adventure
Source: eARC from the publisher via NetGalley
Rating: 5/10

Seventeen-year-old Ananna of the Tanarau is the pirate daughter of pirate parents, raised in the violent, seafaring lifestyle of a pirate. She dreams of one day captaining her own ship, although that seems unlikely now that her parents have arranged her marriage to the son of another pirate clan. Tarrin of the Hariri. Tarrin is “the most beautiful man [Ananna] ever saw” and looks like a god from a temple painting, but Ananna distrusts beautiful people and when Tarrin shows his disdain for her family name, she decides to run away. Ignoring Tarrin’s warnings that his family will send an assassin to kill her for this insult, Ananna steals a camel and disappears into the city.

She hides out for a short while, but the assassin comes after her as promised. They are fighting it out in the desert when a snake appears. It’s about to bite the assassin and save Ananna’s life, but she’s so shocked and scared when she sees it that she kills the snake, saving the assassin’s life instead and activating a curse. The good news is that Naji, the assassin, can no longer kill her – the curse forces him to protect her from harm because every time she gets hurt or even finds herself in danger, he experiences physical pain. So of course if she dies, he will too. Ananna is not obliged to hang around, but after seeing the suffering that she could cause by leaving Naji, she decides to travel with him and find a way of ending the curse.

Ananna and Naji’s world is rich with magic and bursting with the potential for adventure. Naji comes from an elite order of assassins who reside in The Mists, a mysterious Otherworld that exists in the same space as the normal one, but is invisible to it. Naji is skilled in the magic of blood and darkness and can move unseen by leaping from shadow to shadow. Ananna has always been untouched by magic, although her mother is a water witch and tried her best to teach her daughter the craft. Instead, Ananna takes after her father and frequently recalls his advice in times of trouble. She’s a quick-fingered thief, is deadly with a blade and perfectly at home when running a ship.

Her quest with Naji takes them across the desert, the ocean and to a magical floating island. They fight magical beings and cutthroat pirates, proving to be deadly young warriors. Although Naji has to protect Ananna in order to protect himself, she has to look after and save him a lot of the time as well, especially after he’s incapacitated from using too much magic or suffering the pain incurred by Ananna’s injuries. I was surprised but pleased to find that Clarke didn’t entirely romanticise the idea of Ananna as a pirate by glossing over the violence of her lifestyle for the sake of a YA audience. At seventeen, she’s familiar and comfortable with violence. She’s kills people, she’s used to being cut and bruised, and she doesn’t make a fuss about it. That’s not to say it’s a violent book – it still has a very gentle YA feel. The characters don’t make a big deal of the violence and none of it is very graphic, so the tone remains light.

There’s a delicate touch of romance to the story, but that doesn’t quite fulfill the promise of “growing romantic tension” advertised in the blurb. Any attraction between our two protagonists is completely one-sided. The story is narrated by Ananna, and she finds herself drawn to Naji in the same way that any seventeen-year-old girl would find herself attracted to a mysterious guy who she spends a lot of time alone with. He’s also perfect for her in terms of looks: Ananna distrusts very good-looking people, but although Naji is handsome, his face is marred by an ugly scar, so Ananna sort of gets the best of both worlds with him. Naji however, remains taciturn throughout the novel, and the only romance he acknowledges is the one that once existed between him and a river witch named Leila. He doesn’t smile, he barely speaks to Ananna unless he has to, and doesn’t show any interest in her beyond their quest. He’s not mean, but he’s more like an estranged brother than a potential boyfriend.

I was surprised that the feisty, garrulous Ananna didn’t make more of an effort to get Naji talking. Because Naji, for completely inexplicable reasons, flat out refuses to give Ananna any proper information about the curse that’s changed both their lives, where they’re going to end it, and what they’ll have to do to achieve that. And like Ananna, Naji is also being chased by people who want to kill him, but he doesn’t provide the details. In contrast to her tendency to be hot-headed and smart-mouthed, Ananna is willing to just follow Naji around and wait to see what happens, even though she could easily coerce him into telling all. I’m not sure why Clarke makes her characters act this way. Normally when authors make characters withhold information, it’s to force them to maintain a sense of mystery that could easily be lost. But this is not a mystery novel and it doesn’t need the suspense. When Naji does eventually reveal tiny bits of his plans and the details of how he was cursed, it makes no real difference to the story. So why hide these things in the first place? If anything, they could have given the story a greater sense of purpose.

This is one of many small problems that spoil the book. Ananna generally speaks well of her parents, so it’s unclear why they basically sold her off in marriage at the age of seventeen. After running away, Ananna expresses sadness at leaving her parents as well as frustration regarding the arranged marriage, but she never thinks about this extremely troubling issue for very long. After activating Naji’s curse, you’d think she’d be calculating enough to realise that having a skilled assassin to protect you is very useful when there’s a clan of pirates out to murder you, but she lets her pride and her temper get the better of her and almost leaves to fight her battles alone. The problem with the Hariri doesn’t end up being nearly as dire as expected though – after the fight with Naji and another battle out in the desert, they practically disappear from the plot. The story mostly concerns the quest to end Naji’s curse, but it moves very slowly. There’s plenty of action and adventure so it’s not boring, but this basically fills up the long spaces between the very brief pieces that actually move the main plot along.

Then the book ends without resolving anything. This didn’t bother me too much. The end approached without the characters having made any real progress in dealing with the curse, so I assumed the bulk of the story was being saved for the sequels. But mostly it didn’t bother me because this is one of those books that I don’t feel much of anything for.  It’s just a quick easy read to pass the time and, in my case, finish a reading challenge. I couldn’t help but notice the flaws, but they didn’t elicit more than a shrug. Naji and Ananna’s adventures were enjoyable and I liked them both, but I’m not particularly interested in finding out how they solve their problems, so I won’t be reading the sequel. But at least I didn’t hate it, and this review was a lot easier to write than most.

Review of A Natural History of Dragons by Marie Brennan

Title: A Natural History of Dragons
Author: Marie Brennan
Published: 5 February 2013
Publisher: Tor
Genre: fantasy, YA, adventure, mystery
Source: eARC from the publisher via NetGalley
Rating: 6/10

The plot of A Natural History of Dragons is a fairly simple one – Lady Isabella Trent, the famous old dragon naturalist, is writing a series of memoirs about her great adventures studying dragons. This is the first. The novel recounts Isabella’s experiences as a precocious, scientifically minded child, which include reading her father’s scientific books in secret, dissecting a dove with her brother’s pen knife, and dressing up as a boy to go on a dragon hunt. Later, as an ambitious, newly married 19-year-old, she slyly manoeuvres her husband Jacob into joining an expedition to study dragons, then fights to get permission to join the expedition as an artist, despite how very, very improper it is for a woman to do such a thing, or for a man to indulge his wife in this way. The expedition takes them to the foreign land of Vystrana, but it turns out to be even more dangerous than they expected, not because of the dragons, but because of the people.

I need not say very much about the worldbuilding either – Isabella is from Scirland, which is Victorian England, with all its stuffy restrictions regarding class, gender and propriety. Vystrana is essentially Eastern Europe.

So, it’s the world we know + dragons in a YA-ish adventure with a good dash of mystery. It’s a nice story, and I know many readers have loved the setting, but I was hoping for a bit more fantasy in my fantasy, and not just because I value its inventiveness. The Victorian culture got on my nerves. Admittedly, this is partly because the worldbuilding is quite well done. Brennan/Isabella never misses an opportunity to tell  us how men and women are expected to behave, what women are not allowed to do and what society thinks of them if they do it anyway, and what the upper class expects from their servants. Lady Trent, writing as an old lady about her younger self, has a very prim and proper tone that alone will never allow you to forget what period you’re in (or rather, what fictional version of an actual period you’re in). It’s as Victorian as a Charles Dickens novel, and far, far easier to read.

But, but, but… This is fantasy, so why does it need to cling so tightly to reality? More importantly, why does it have to reproduce the unappealing sexism and classism that defines the society it’s modelled on? I’ll tackle the class issue first. Isabella and Jacob are from the upper class, and the expedition’s leader, Lord Hilford, is an aristocrat. For all their bravery in chasing after dragons, I don’t think they would get anywhere if they didn’t have servants to carry their bags and cook their meals. Isabella came across as quite a brat when dealing with her personal servant, Dagmira:

she was supposed to be my lady’s maid. I had been afraid of that. She would need to be educated in her duties, starting with the purchase of a bell I could use to summon her when I awoke. I laid that aside for the moment, however, and held up my hand to silence her.

It annoys Isabella that Dagmira, who is a peasant from a small rural village in Vystrana, doesn’t understand the needs and expectations of a well-bred lady from Scirland. She learns the local language mostly so that it’ll be easier to give Dagmira orders. She had expected that there would be a shortage of servants, but is a little shocked to find that there is a shortage of furniture and she doesn’t even a wardrobe to hang her dresses in, so she’ll have to live out of her luggage (the horror!). Again, the characterisation here is excellent, and I do like that Isabella isn’t perfect – she has a lot to learn about travelling, and has yet to have her mind broadened by it. She frustrates me, but then again, imperfect characters are bound to do that. So I’m not a fan of the classism here, but I accept it as part of the story.

I am less forgiving of the sexism, which has more consequences for the story and the reading experience. I can understand that it does a lot to enhance Isabella’s character. As far as her achievements are concerned, it makes her more heroic to know that she overcame all the gender obstacles that stood in her way. However, we’re told at the very beginning that studying dragons is not for the faint-hearted and that little was known about them when Isabella went on her first expedition, so isn’t it enough for her to be a pioneer in this field? That alone makes her courageous, dedicated, and highly intelligent. Why must she battle society as well? Does it make a better story? I’m not sure it does.

I’ll admit that I say this not because I feel sorry for Isabella as a character, but because of how it affects me as a reader. Brennan pushes this feminist agenda very hard for the entire book, and the constant sexism gets tiring. As a product of her society, Isabella irritated me too. She might be the exceptional woman, but Brennan is mindful of where and how she grew up, so Isabella is very aware of propriety and diligently observes it at times, often sounding a bit like a textbook on good behaviour even when she’s being ‘bad’. The plot is also slowed down by this social issue – before Isabella goes anywhere, she submits to her mother’s wishes and spends some time looking for a husband. She marries the first man to catch her eye (which speeds things along, but is a tad convenient), and luckily he’s the kind of person who shares her interests and lets her read what she wants. This is supposed to be heart-warming, but it makes me cringe. Jacob wins the reader’s favour simply because he (usually) treats his wife like an adult instead of a child. It’s wonderful of him in this context, but I can’t shake the knowledge that he gets praised for doing the bare minimum.

I’m also a bit tired of this kind of story, where a smart, brave woman is held up as a marvel because, oh my god, she’s a woman but not a doormat. I wasn’t inspired, only annoyed. Of course, we’re hardly past all of this in real life, where many people still hold very traditional ideas about gender, but speculative fiction gives us the opportunity to imagine a better, more interesting society. I think Marie Brennan wasted that opportunity.

On the positive side, she did a great job depicting Isabella as a person who aspires to be everything that society says she should not be, and dedicates herself to that goal. In fact, I have to admit that the novel as a whole is well executed, regardless of my criticisms about Brennan’s creative choices. Isabella’s stuffy style could have been difficult to read, but in fact it flowed very quickly and easily. It’s also worth noting how well her character is written as someone with a very scientific mind, who tends to have crazy ideas (well, crazy in her society anyway) that she acts on in a very practical manner. The main plot involves not only studying dragons, but unraveling a mystery involving a missing man, a group of smugglers, and strangely aggressive behaviour from the dragons. The science is light but engaging, and of course there’s the beautiful artwork by Todd Lockwood to pull you deeper into the story. Personally, I’m not intrigued enough to read the inevitable sequels, but I don’t doubt that most readers will be charmed.

Review of The White Shadow by Andrea Eames

Title: The White Shadow
Author: Andrea Eames
Published: 2 February 2012
Publisher: Harvill Secker
Genre: YA, literary fiction, fantasy, African fiction
Source: review copy courtesy of Tammy at Women24
Rating: 5/10

It began when my father told me that every person has two shadows: a black one and a white. The white shadow mweya, is the soul and the black shadow, nyama – a word which also means ‘meat’ – is the flesh.[...]

The mweya climbs out of the body after you die, in the form of a worm. [...]

The worm will crawl out and into an animal, and the animal becomes an ancestral spirit. (1)

 

It began when the second child was born to our family and my father fell in love. (3)

 

Of these two beginnings, the first emphasises the role of folklore in the narrative, but the second is more significant. The speaker is Tinashe, a young Shona boy from a rural village in 1970s Zimbabwe. When his sister is born, everyone is disappointed that she is not a boy, but his father loves her instantly and names her “Hazvinei”, meaning “it does not matter”. Tinashe himself is secretly pleased because it means he will be the only son in the house.

From the moment of her birth, Hazvinei proves to be a strange but gifted child. She doesn’t cry when she’s born, and it’s years before she speaks, although it’s clear that she’s very intelligent. She has a sharp little teeth and a tendency to bite. As she grows older, she seems to have a connection to the Shona spirit world.

Tinashe begs her not to speak about it. His parents have frequently told him to look after his sister, and he worries that she will be labelled a witch if people find out about her abilities. The two of them grow up in a dusty little village and are occasionally visited by their wealthy cousin Abel who lives in the city. Zimbabwe is fraught with political conflict as rebels fight for independence from the colonists, but for a long time the children experience this only in snippets – officious white men questioning them about guerrillas hiding out in the bush; an injured man in Tinashe’s home in the middle of the night; tense whispering among the adults.

Tinashe takes little notice and happily believes the propaganda he hears on the radio. He just wants to go to school and (if his uncle will pay the fees) attend university so that he may wear a tie to work, own a car and live in a house in the city. In the meantime his cousin Abel longs to defy his father and become a freedom fighter, while Hazvinei believes she might possess the power to save their country.

This is not a political novel, however. For the most part, it’s a portrait of a child’s life in a rural Zimbabwean village. Tinashe grows up playing with the other children in the village, swimming in the river, collecting glass bottles in order to buy cold cokes at the local shop, doing chores for his parents, watching trails of ants go about their business (that last one happens surprisingly often). Tinashe is one of the few children who goes to school regularly, even thought the teacher is simply the only man in the village to have finished high school, and the school’s tiny collection of battered text books means that lessons are frequently repeated.

Since Tinashe knows little life outside his village, he is not particularly bothered by the poverty of his existence, but it becomes apparent whenever his uncle, Babamakuru, is mentioned. Babamakuru is the symbol of wealth to the villagers – he lives in the city, he wears a tie to work, he drives a car. His home includes a legendary indoor toilet, and a refrigerator full of ice cold Cokes. Abel enjoys chicken and potatoes for supper every night, and is initially disappointed when he is given neither at Tinashe’s home. At one point, Babamakuru gives Tinashe a toy truck as a present, and Tinashe marvels over it because it is the first new, clean thing he has ever owned. Village life certainly isn’t what you’d call hygienic, and I have to say that the novel didn’t need quite so many descriptions of urination and other bodily functions.

But what I will remember most about The White Shadow is not the poverty but the culturally ordained misogyny:

Women are dangerous, I was taught. Women have a natural tendency to become witches. Everyone knows this; and witches are the only thing that can break the unbreakable line of family (2)

It’s odd – women are frequently seen as symbolic of family, but in this case they pose a danger to it, regardless of the role they play in reproduction. Men, rather, are seen as the ones who create families:

‘It is good to be a man,’ Baba [father] said. ‘We make children, and children are the greatest wealth.’

Women risk breaking families or are seen to exist outside of the family:

‘A boy makes the family stronger,’ said Baba. ‘A girl is with the family only until she marries. She is a little stranger in the house.’ (5)

Hazvinei, however, is such a wilful, strong-minded child that she defies cultural traditions. As Tinashe notes, “There were certain things girls were meant to do and certain things boys were meant to do, and Hazvinei did neither” (64). Her father also allows her to go to school, even though educating girls is considered pointless.

However, Hazvinei is in no way liberated. Her schooling is ultimately meaningless, and she remains trapped within the dangerously misogynist boundaries of her culture. She questions it, but at her peril. Tinashe’s pathetic attempts at looking after her mostly involve trying to keep her silent or well-behaved.

For the most part, it’s sad and frustrating, but every now and then it’s outright disgusting. When Hazvinei gets older, she develops a curvy figure that titillates the men who hang around the local shebeen (an informal pub/liquor store). They find it disturbing that Hazvinei neither insults nor flirts with them, but ignores them completely. Tinashe is warned that “[m]en complain of their seed spilling in the night [...] Wasted on their blankets when it should go to grow children. Your sister troubles their dreams. She unmans them” (212). He is advised that girls like Hazvinei should be married because it is “dangerous for such a woman to wander alone. [...] Her female essence is not guarded, nor protected. Not guided in the proper way” (211). I hadn’t been keeping track of Hazvinei’s age, so shortly after this conversation I was shocked to hear that she was only 13 at this point.

Although Tinashe is dedicated to protecting his sister, it’s a long, long time before he even begins to question the gendered beliefs he has taken for granted. He simply believes that things are the way they are. It’s no surprise then that Tinashe is not the most exciting of narrators. Although he’s three years older than Hazvinei, he almost always seems like the silly, fumbling younger brother chasing after her. He does well at school, but Hazvinei and Abel both accuse him of being stupid because he tends to be rather dim in social and emotional terms. Even the reader, trapped within his limited POV, will pick up on things before he does. He’s also annoyingly cowardly and incurious. His sister is the most interesting character in the novel, but when it comes to her abilities or ideas, he always tells her, “You must not talk about these things [...] You know what they will say. You know what they call girls like you” (222). Tinashe is not incorrect in assuming that Hazvinei may endanger herself, but it’s disappointing that he doesn’t want to listen to her or learn more about her, which means that the reader can’t either.

After a while I wondered where all this was going. The answer is: nowhere. It’s not that nothing happens – there are many notable events, causes and effects – but it has the random feel of real life where things happen without an overarching plot.

Whether you enjoy this sort of thing is a matter of personal preference. I generally didn’t mind meandering along with the characters’ lives, it gets frustrating because it feels like there should be more. You keep expecting a plot to develop because Eames sows its seeds from beginning to end – the country’s political turmoil, Hazvinei’s mysterious wisdom and power, Abel’s longing to join the guerrillas, Tinashe’s dream of getting a university education and a job where he has to wear a tie.  Each of the three main characters has specific obstacles in their paths – Hazvinei faces the misogyny of her culture; Abel has to defy his father’s wishes; poverty and family tensions crush Tinashe’s hopes of an education. It really looks like it will all combine to form a story of political and social rebellion entwined with folklore and personal achievements. Instead, the building blocks crumble before anything is properly formed.

As a result the book turns out to be fairly depressing. It begins in hardship and never really rises out of that. The most hopeful thing about it is the ambiguous ending, in which optimistic readers could find a glimmer of salvation for the characters. On the downside, it leaves you feeling that the story you were waiting for is floating wordlessly beyond the pages of the book and you will never get to read it. Unless perhaps Eames writes a sequel.

Alternatively, you could read it as grim realism. The fantasy aspects of the novel are never fully confirmed, and can be rationalised as the product of belief, imagination, and Hazvinei’s unique wisdom. The meandering plot, with its lack of successes and resolutions, can be seen simply as the sad reality of a hard life.

Neither perspective is favourable. The White Shadow isn’t a particularly bad novel – it’s well-written and memorable – but I feel that it’s unnecessarily dreary and wastes its potential for a strong plot. I’d recommend it to those with an interest in African fiction, but not the merits of its story or ideas alone.

 

Buy The White Shadow at The Book Depository