Shadows by Robin McKinley

Shadows
by Robin McKinley
Nancy Paulsen Books, 2013
356 pages

Before I go too far with this review, I think it would be helpful to explain a bit about my relationship with Robin McKinley's writing. McKinley was the first fantasy author I read outside of Tolkien, and that book - The Hero and the Crown - made a huge and lasting impression on me. The lead character was female, she was an outcast, she was determined and kind and confused and smart. I devoured that book, and turned back to the beginning and devoured it again, and I have never stopped loving it, though the related book The Blue Sword is the one I love more and has become one of the books I've read the most over the years. I've also read Deerskin (and holy shit was that ever an eye opener when I read it as a young teen - it's not an easy book to read, subject-matter-wise), a number of her short stories, Beauty, The Outlaws of Sherwood, Chalice, and Sunshine - which is also my favourite McKinley book and one of my top three books of all time. I do fully intend to read her entire backlist at some point, with either Spindle's End or Rose Daughter being next on the list.

Suffice to say, I am fairly well-versed in McKinley's works. And while I like some of her books and stories better than I like others, I always respect her work, if that makes sense. She has really excellent characters, and very detailed, realistically flawed worlds, and she rarely wraps all the bits up by the end of the book, but she doesn't write sequels. Sometimes I don't love her endings, but unlike some books, when a McKinley ending doesn't quite work for me it doesn't generally ruin what came before (Chalice might be a slight exception to this rule; I really disliked the ending of that one, enough that I haven't read it since my first reading.) And another thing about McKinley is that each book is different; though there are common threads running through her body of work, the narrative voice is often wildly different between stories.

It's the narrative voice of the titular character that makes Sunshine such a hit for me, and it's that same voice that turns a lot of fans of her other books off that particular one too, I find. It's very unusual, a first person perspective that is almost, but not quite, given stream-of-consciousness rein. I love Sunshine. I love her, and I love the way I can almost become her when I'm reading that book. I love the way some of her expressions, idiosyncratic and odd as they are, bleed into my own personal stream-of-consciousness narrative when I'm reading that book and often for weeks after. I love her turn of phrase, I love the way she thinks. She, more than any other fictional character I have encountered, feels like a friend.

This is key to my feeling about Shadows, because Shadows is pretty much in the same vein. Maggie, the main character in Shadows, is younger and lives in a very different world from Sunshine (maybe?) but that next-to-stream-of-consciousness narration is there in full force. We are right there, inside Maggie's teenage head, as she's telling us the story, and she takes us on her tangents (some of which circle back to be important, and some of which are just flavour) and she flashes back and she uses a lot of slang.

By which I mean to say that I really, really liked this book, and it's probably not for everyone.

Maggie is seventeen years old, and her mother has just remarried after her first husband, the father of her two kids, was killed by a drunk driver seven years previous. Maggie feels she would probably be predisposed to dislike the guy - she's fair-minded that way - but she outright hates him, because he's not normal. He is an immigrant from Oldworld, where magic is still common, which is bad enough. In Newworld, where Maggie and her family live, magic isn't just not practiced, it's illegal. Anyone who shows any sign of being genetically predisposed to magic has their magic gene removed as a kid, and anything that seems odd is reported to the authorities immediately. There are still breaks in reality, completely unpreventable, but the army deals with those using advanced technology. Magic isn't necessary and it's destabilizing and unsafe. But Maggie's new stepfather, Val, has strange shadows that follow him everywhere and seem to move on their own, and Maggie can see them, and they terrify her.

There is a lot going on in Shadows, and part of what I love about it is that it's so easy to read anyway. We have a coming-of-age story. We have a society that might almost be a dystopia, but it's not, not quite, because there are some safeguards against completely authoritarian rule. But it's close, and over the course of the book we see how easy it might be for ordinary people (and even the not-so-ordinary ones) to just accept what they are told as truth, and how easy it might be for those who mean well to step over the line into despotism. What we have, in short, is a world that's unsettlingly familiar, in all its political chicanery and popular intellectual laziness.

We have a love story, but it's fairly secondary. We have a female friendship, between Maggie and her lifelong best friend Jill, that is realistically and beautifully portrayed; they're not catty, they're not mean to each other, they get each other, and sometimes they argue. We have a lot of diversity - Maggie is white, Jill is black, one of the love interests is Eastern European, and another of their good friends is Asian. We have a lot of parallels to our world - certain countries we recognize exist, like Japan, and there are cellphones and drunk drivers and pizza parlours and animal shelters and cliquey, slang-spouting teenagers muddling their way through high school and life. It's also absolutely not a world we live in, with its regularly occurring breaks in reality ("cohesion breaks" or cobeys) and magical gene splicing and "physics of the worlds" departments in local universities and a big army structure designed to clamp down on magic.

We also have a plot that develops surprisingly quickly and smoothly, given the roundabout narration, and that then proceeds with inevitable speed. This book moves once it gets going, and everything slots into its place, and while one's disbelief has to get suspended at one or two points, it mostly works. The end is a bit cheesy. But I've seen far worse.

Oh, and the book is funny.

I don't think this book is for everyone. Some of the slang is a bit overdone (for me, the parts where it worked amazingly well far outweighed the parts where it didn't) and as above, the ending didn't quite fit. But the detail of the world, and the enjoyment I got out of living in Maggie's head, and the fact that all the pieces don't always get explained (there's a bit about Val, the stepfather, that we never learn more about and it's BIG), and the fact that I used the word "cobey" in conversation without realizing in that moment that it wasn't actually a real thing that happens... You should read this, I think. It's not your ordinary young adult novel. It's not your ordinary adult novel. It's something McKinley does well, which is write something entirely, completely new, using bits and pieces of old, and throwing in a strong, vital, honest, and realistic female lead as a bonus.

*book clubbing* Little Brother by Cory Doctorow

After an insane and sad mix-up involving the internet eating emails, Mandy and I are back at it with reviews and chats about Cory Doctorow's award-winning YA novel Little Brother. Which, incidentally, you can now download for I-kid-you-not free, in addition to checking it out of your local library or buying yourself a hard copy.

My review:

So, Little Brother. There were parts that I really liked, and parts that I didn't like. But overall, my impression is very good: this is an Important Book, one that a lot more people need to be reading. It helps that it's very readable. It occurs to me that most of this review will be about some of the problems I had with the novel, but I want to be clear: I did enjoy it, and I will recommend it. What seem like problems to me actually all stem from the point of view of the narration, and so many will probably not find them as jarring as I did. It's not something Doctorow did wrong, it's that the point of view is completely consistent and strong throughout and sometimes I wanted more.

I would call this is a dystopian novel, although I'm not sure that's quite right. It's really, frighteningly close to what we've already got. There but for the grace of intelligent people like Cory Doctorow go we, my friends. Take a big, devastating terrorist attack and a giant, scary overreaction by the feds, and there are teenagers being disappeared for being teenagers, and privacy being stripped from us all. It doesn't take much to extrapolate from our current situation to get to where Doctorow has put his hero Marcus.

What I didn't like was that some of the villains were a little flat. The big villain, the Department of Homeland Security, is faceless, implacable and terrifying in the way it is supposed to be; but the individuals, the class bully, the obnoxious VP, the sadistic interrogator, all were kind of ... meh. I didn't see them as much but strawmen in a lot of ways, people for Marcus to fight against so that he could win and explain why he was right in the process.

The problem with the flatness of the villains is that it does lend an air of unreality to the big problems Marcus takes on. A number of times I ended up thinking, "really? really, reasonable people would let that sort of thing happen? really, reasonable reporters would gobble up the party line like that?" and I think that can be dangerous, because this book is all about not being complacent. I don't plan to ever get too political on this blog (it would get ranty and unpleasant for all involved), but this is a really political book. It forces one to be political, to think about what's happening in the world, and to be a little more vigilant than most of us have gotten used to being.

The only other problem I had was that occasionally Marcus would go off on tangents about various things related to his interests. Sometimes this is cool, but often it feels a little heavy-handed. That said, I don't think it was outside his character at all. The story is told in first person and Marcus is an earnest, righteously furious and very smart teenager. He wants the reader to understand his motivations, and he shares his various geeky loves with the reader too. So while I
found some of those interludes a little distracting, I don't think it was out of character -- it just took me out of the story.

Otherwise, as an intro to almost-dystopian YA lit, this was a good one. It was thrilling, I rooted for the good guys, some of it was quite original (I love the distraction Marcus came up with towards the end) and this book is absolutely an important one to read. It helps that it's a very readable, very engaging book.

***

This time, Mandy and I tried using Chatzy.com for a slightly different experience. What follows is our entire chat with only minor modifications to improve the flow. Enjoy!


Mandy: I liked your review, it was spot-on.

kiirstin: Thank you! I liked yours as well. You seemed to focus more on the technological aspects than I did. I didn't realize, for example, that gait recognition tech was something people were already working on.

Mandy: I was inspired to do some further reading, which is what I hope people would do after reading the book. My further reading was Google related, but I love that Cory included some fantastic resources at the end of his book for anyone interested.

kiirstin: Absolutely. And the essays by others at the end, I thought that was a neat touch.

Mandy: Gait-recognition technology sounds so silly after reading LB. It makes no sense. I love that LB made me question something that might otherwise seem like an okay technology to develop.

kiirstin: I thought he was very tech neutral, in some ways. Not necessarily saying "this is a bad technology" but "it is stupid to use technology in this way." Also, it made me decide I'd better password protect my cell phone.

Mandy: Many times throughout the book I was like "hunh?" about the techno-talk, but I'm used to that in SciFi. What is so cool about LB, and "mundane SciFi" in general, is that the techno-talk is not techno-babble; terms made up and used for plot purposes in some SciFi.

All of his explanations made perfect sense and were well researched. He also explained things very vividly.

kiirstin: Which all leads to that creepy "um, yeah, this could actually happen. yikes" feeling, because the technology behind the story was so established.

Mandy: Completely. You could see it all happening. LB did make me more paranoid in general--which was a big theme in the book. It also made me want to hack my Xbox with my zero hacker knowledge, but exuberant interest.

kiirstin: I think making you a bit paranoid's exactly what it was supposed to do. Even the times where I felt it might be a bit over the top, part of me was whispering that it wasn't really that over the top.

And then there was that thing on the border with the SciFi author who got the crap kicked out of him by border guards, like, a week after I finished the book.

Mandy: I didn't know about that. Who was the author?

kiirstin: Dr. Peter Watts. The first article I read about it was at Making Light. The comments on that post are really wonderful to read, too. Cory Doctorow was the first one to really break the news about that one. Dr. Watts is a friend of his.

Mandy: Cory is the coolest.

I love that his book was impeccably researched. He really knows his stuff. It's great to see someone who has a real message and gets it across, even in fiction.

Not to denigrate fiction, of course, as I love reading it. A heavy dose of non-fiction is great, though, and a bit of a breath of fresh surveilled air compared to many contemporary YA books.

kiirstin: There's a lot of fluff out there, which of course is wonderful to read too, but LB definitely had meat to it.

He just felt so familiar with the subject material. Although... if I can admit... that was one of the small things that kind of bugged me every once in a while.

Mandy: At times it was too much for me, as well.

kiirstin: It was just sometimes that there was such a clear agenda. While I agree wholeheartedly with the agenda, it was still quite noticeable.

Mandy: I agree. It was a little heavy-handed. I did like how he brings up the question, a few times in the book, how can you tell the difference between the good guys and the bad guys? Both know how to hack but the good guys are the ones who use it for a "good" purpose. However, who's the judge of that?

He touches on this a few times. I would have liked him to bring this to the fore a little more in the book.

kiirstin: Oh yes! Definitely. I liked what he did with that but I did want a bit more. The thing with Marcus' father was interesting -- I think any parent reading that would understand Marcus' father's perspective perfectly.

He was like the walking question "How much freedom and privacy would you give up to protect your family." And I *know* for many people it would be "all of it" except that without a bigger picture it's hard to recognize that by giving up those things, you're also harming your family.

Mandy: And the question of security was huge in the book. But when does the need for a sense of security become a means to possibly "evil" ends? Can we ever attain the type of security we're so set on keeping?

kiirstin: For example, how far are we willing to go just to catch wankers who decide that putting explosives in their underwear is the ideal way to inspire terror?

At the risk of overloading, there's another great Making Light thread talking about that issue. The point that is made somewhere in there is that there will *always* be outliers that we will never be able to predict.

Mandy: The lengths that we'd HAVE to go, according to LB, would only be "good" for the whole, not the individual and then you get on the slippery slope of means to the end for the greater good, which sometimes bulldozes the individual. And Homeland Security in the book demands that predictability be the norm. Which is crazy to suggest. And desperate to maintain.

kiirstin: Yes, exactly! Actually, something that stuck with me about that even though I didn't write it down was an offhand comment made about a kid who was HIV positive and his parents didn't know. And because of DHS' movement-watching scheme, they flagged his (her?) movements and blew his cover. Which would quite possibly have ruined his life.

Actually, this is something we've started having to deal with in libraries. In the States, there have been a couple of cases where the DHS has wanted libraries to release patron records to see what someone who is suspicious has been checking out of the library.

Mandy: I've heard of the library records cases. Crazy.

I also love the theme of Don't Trust Anyone Over 25 (I want to source this in the book to make sure). Because in the book anyone over 25 doesn't trust them. It's a theme that's interesting; the latter generation doesn't trust the newer generation because they are the next world-makers. What if they aren't right for the job?

"What if we haven't taught them the right way of being in the world and now it will come back to haunt us?" = blanket mistrust.

kiirstin: That whole blanket mistrust is SO PREVALENT though. Even some parents don't trust the kids they've raised to make good decisions. And true, teenagers sometimes make stupid decisions. But adults also often make stupid decisions, and they're the ones with the power.

I really liked that push-back.

***

And that's that! Thanks so much, Mandy! It was awesome chatting with you about Little Brother. Head on over to edge of seventeen and read Mandy's review for a different angle.

The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard *guest review by fishy!*

It appears that book blogging is catching. My husband, known here as fishy, asked me if I thought he should review some of the books he's been reading. I was quite excited at the prospect, so here it is -- his first ever review. My nefarious plan is to keep him reviewing after this one too and apparently he is down with that. He might even consider reviewing a thing or two with me. But for now, he has reviewed a science-fiction classic. With footnotes! Enjoy!

***

J. G. Ballard passed away this past spring, and shortly after, Writers and Company¹ aired an earlier interview with him, and a reading by him of a short story ("The Enormous Space"). I listened to this as a podcast² while driving north towards Huntsville, Ontario along highway 11. That route is a mix of natural beauty and beautiful human ruins, an ideal environment for Ballard. The reading put me in such a trance that I became convinced that I was lost, and pulled over to look at a map, only to discover I was in Orillia, right next to the shattered corpse of the Sundial Inn³.

I've been wanting to read his work ever since, and picked up this early novel for a birthday stay-cation this week. The library had very little, but this felt like a perfect introductory work.

The novel opens some 70 years after the beginning of a global environmental collapse. Sun storms have increased global temperatures and blown away the Van Allen Belt, exposing the earth to (you got it) global warming and ozone depletion. Human populations have dwindled and fled north, living in polar regions as rising waters swallowed major cities, rising heat made them uninhabitable, and atmospheric loss made high altitudes impossible.

A small military scout team has spent the last 3 years mapping out flooded cities, cataloguing the new realities of flora and fauna in preparation for an overly wishful future of rehabitation. Working their way north as temperatures continue to rise, the team has spent the last 6 months in some great northern European city: maybe Paris, Berlin or London. Our main character, Dr. Kerans never bothers to find out. He and Dr. Bodkin are the scout biologists, flora and fauna respectively.

The city is submerged, 10 stories deep, the base of operation is in 'the lagoon', a silty swamp surrounded by the crests of hotels, apartment blocks and office buildings. Kerans has commandeered the penthouse of the Ritz, living in a bubble of hermetic luxury in the middle of a primeval lagoon. The staggering temperatures lay a tropical exhaustion over the narrative. Bodkin and Kerans carefully recorded their observations at first, but now the effort feels impossible, and the conclusions clear. The heat and the high levels of solar radiation have the world re-converging on a "Neo-Triassic". Reptiles dominate the lagoon, giant horsetails erupt from the silt, and moss coats the insides and outsides of buildings. The genetic memory of the Triassic has been reawakened and re-expressed in plants and animals; whole swathes of modern species simply die off.

And humans? Colonel Riggs, the commander of the scouting party, jokes that humans will return to the jungles, but continue to dress for dinner. But humans in modern form here are submerged and stuck in a silt amber, living in air conditioned bubbles and increasingly hypnotized by the lagoon. Alarmed by jungle dreams and a primal fear of iguanas, spinal Triassic memory seems to be awakening too.

Ballard's prose could be read and enjoyed for the imagery alone, I think:

Kerans [..] was distracted by his discovery among the clutter of debris on the opposite bank of a small cemetery sloping down into the water, its leaning headstones advancing to the crowns like a party of bathers. He remembered again one ghastly cemetery over which they had moored, its ornate florentine tomb cracked and sprung, corpses floating out in their unravelling winding-sheets in a grim rehearsal of the Day of Judgement.

and I felt myself entranced by the punishing sun setting the lagoon surface on fire. The setting and mood feels real and immediate, but the humans feel uncomfortably cold and unconscious. Civilian hold-out Beatrice seems almost reptilian, solitary and aloof. Characters are compelled and sometimes singularly driven, but without accessible motives.

I suspect this might be a big turn-off for some readers, but it is critical to both the mood and the ideas of the piece. And at least for me, this novel is a work of images and ideas. Characters and plot are well constructed, but minimally constructed, all underlining a well executed thought exercise.

It is tempting as a novice reviewer to launch into a discussion paper about the ideas in this book, and my reflections on them. It's similarly tempting to just say that the book filled me with enough reflections to shovel the driveway and wash two loads of dishes. I'll strike a balance.

A lot of dystopian novels, which I guess this is, depict post-collapse humanity as... well, humanity. Some of those archetypes are here: the tribal scavengers, the lucky recluse, the naval artifact, the survivalist. Kerans even references the surreality of the Crusoe-model of human survival... I think of this as the dystopian Flintstones effect: regressed to the stone age, we can fashion a tea-set from elk bones and retire to the parlour.

But in reality, modern humanity is profoundly environmental, and human desires and motivation suprizingly submerged in our reptile brains. Somewhere perched on that knife-edge between the two is our reality. Ballard's regressing survivors are solitary, selfish and alliances are transient. Like the crocodiles, they are only momentarily agitated when one of their companions meets an end. They clutch loosely to the remnants of civilization, and when they spring from that lingering structure into the jungle, language and identity drift away. It is hard to say whether they descend into the jungles as animals, or flare out as human sparks dispersed into the swamps.

Time is also a concern: at the lagoon there is a transient overlap of human time and evolutionary time. The city has no Friday afternoon rush hour, the hands have fallen off the clock towers, or are locked in place. But the days have their rhythm and presumably the seasons will too.

I enjoyed this book, though in places it did feel like an 'early novel'. Plot periodically was too neat, the science a bit loose. There were moments of magic realism, which stuck out a bit. But with strong imagery and interesting (to me) themes, this was perhaps a book written for me. If you need redemption or rescue, or perseverance of the traditional sort, it should be clear early on in this short work that you will be disappointed. However, it isn't as dark or stringy with the sinister as you might expect. Suprizingly buoyant, rather than cynical. Calling it cheerful would be a stretch.

From the interview referenced at the start of this review, I understand that urban decay and driven but somewhat inaccessible characters are common in his works. That appealed to me, and this work didn't disappoint. Next for me from Ballard will be Vermilion Sands, a collection of short stories he wrote about a decade later with similar themes.

---
1. http://www.cbc.ca/writersandcompany/

2. http://www.cbc.ca/writersandcompany/schedule/may.html
[scroll down, this can be listened to on the page, or if you are nimble at
agent spoofing, downloaded as an mp3]

3. http://urbexbarrie.blogspot.com/2008/02/sundial-inn.html
http://urbexbarrie.blogspot.com/2008/05/sundial-reloaded-1.html
http://urbexbarrie.blogspot.com/2008/05/sundial-reloaded-2.html
http://urbexbarrie.blogspot.com/2008/08/sundial-3.html
[though sadly a dearth of good exterior shots]