Unraveller, by Frances Hardinge

My hold on the newest Frances Hardinge came in! [Insert more gushing about the wonders of libraries.] I shall settle in my chair with it and not come back to reality for a good, lovely while.

...

I don't even know why I try to review Frances Hardinge's books. They are so hard to describe. And also, you should just read them because they are always brilliant and wise and will wind their tendrils around your heart and into your brain and leave you feeling like the world is more magical and people are more multi-dimensional than you had ever understood.

Unraveller is about curses and hatred and despair, and loyalty, healing and love, and how all those things can exist within one human heart, and that's what makes us human and worth the time and effort and love it takes to understand and heal us.

"I'm good at hate. I'm better at it than anything else I've ever done! This is the only power I've ever had!"

Every Hardinge book is completely different from every other Hardinge book (I'm pretty sure I say this in every review, but it's important to remember), but Unravelled reminds me most of Cuckoo Song. It has the same creepiness, and the inhabitants of the Wilds have a lot in common with the Besiders. Hardinge is wonderful at taking folktales and teasing out the logic behind all the weirdness to create a coherent, shiver-down-the-spine otherworld with its own terrifyingly logical rules. The Wilds are a swamp-forest, spooky and dripping with menace, inhabited by beautiful and terrifying monsters that are almost familiar.

As I was reading, I found a scrap of paper and wrote down "wildly inventive" and "stunningly coherent," because I think those are the best ways to describe a Hardinge novel. The curses in this book are folktale weird, like being turned into a tree that's then cut down and made into planks which are made into a boat. Kellen is the unraveller, because he can sense the nature and origin of a curse and unravel it, transforming even the planks in a boat back into a person. He is travelling with Nettle, who is having trouble readjusting to being herself again after Kellen unravelled her curse. (No, she wasn't the boat. I won't spoil the reveal of her curse.)

At first it seems the novel will be about Kellen and Nettle finding cursed people and learning their stories so Kellen can fix them. But it turns out that people, and curses, are a little more complicated than that, and so is the novel. But it all makes so much sense—that's what I mean by coherent. It's quite delicious and satisfying the way everything comes around in the end. You recognize the character and story elements because you've seen them in folktales, but also because you've seen them in yourself and the people you know. Everything is a brilliant metaphor for the workings of the human heart. Anger and trauma and patience and forgiveness.

Hardinge's books have a darkness in them, because she doesn't shy away from the hard things in people's souls; she sees them so clearly; but she sees them with deep compassion. She's a lot like T. Kingfisher that way. That's what keeps me eagerly waiting for the next Hardinge novel; her ruthless compassion, and her brilliant writing.

I do not like humans. Your hearts smell of earth and sweat. you miss notes when you sing. You bleed too easily. You walk in with stories tangled around you like briars and do not notice. You trip over everything and break it. You are too real, and it is wasted on you. I lose patience.

A Skinful of Shadows, by Frances Hardinge

If you've read my blog you know that Frances Hardinge is one of my auto-buy, drop-everything-and-read-now authors. So I can't believe that I didn't know she'd come out with a new book in October. I love the feeling of suddenly having a new favourite author's book to read! It's like finding a 100$ bill in the pocket of your coat!

I dropped everything as soon as I found out about A Skinful of Shadows and read it in two days. It was everything I've come to expect from Frances Hardinge: rich, layered setting, fierce, lovable characters, and beautiful, poetic-without-being-flowery writing.

If you've read Lois McMaster Bujold's Penric novellas, then you'll be familiar with the central premise of Hardinge's novel: Makepeace has the ability to house other souls inside her (in this case ghosts rather than demons, but it amounts to the same thing). It's a scenario that is usually confrontational, as the ghosts try to take over from their host, but Makepeace, like Penric, discovers there's another way to go about it.

Hardinge loves to play with names, and our heroine Makepeace has more than her share of them. We never find out the name she was born with, just as Makepeace doesn't know who she truly is or what she's capable of. She's labelled with a Puritan name so she can fit in with her Puritan aunt and uncle, but she never quite fits in, and her defiance and temper seem to belie her name. She's given a noble name by Royalists who want to use her, and she chooses yet another when she escapes them, deliberately naming herself after Judith who cut off her enemy's head. But in the end, Make Peace is what she proves most able to do. And she defines herself, thank you very much.

"I am not changed," she said. "You never knew me. None of you ever knew me."

Classic Hardinge character!

The setting was one of the more unique aspects of the book: I'm pretty sure I've never read a fantasy set during the English Civil War. (Pretty sure I've never read anything set during the English Civil War.) It's a period of history I know almost nothing about, but with her deft descriptions and deep understanding of context, Hardinge plunged me right into the middle of the Catholic/Protestant, Royalist/Parliament conflict. The political happenings are tied in quite brilliantly with the plot, as Makepeace is thrust from one side of the conflict to the other, and each side tries to use her in pursuit of their own agenda.

The huge old manor house of Grizehayes is a character in its own right: spooky, looming, a prison for Makepeace but also a home, with nooks and crannies only she knows about. Makepeace's inhabitation of Grizehayes, the way she turns its oppressiveness inside out and makes it serve her instead of containing her, is a sort of inverted metaphor for what she does with the ghosts who inhabit her. By knowing them, she stops fearing them; by allowing them to know her, she turns them into allies.

Okay, as I write this I'm getting more and more impressed with this book. Layers of theme interwoven with plot and character and setting—man, she's a good writer! I have to stop this post from becoming a dissertation!

Just go read it. You'll love Makepeace, her courage, her compassion, her desperate attempts to be herself. You'll love Bear—I don't want to spoil anything, but the scene where they meet is just—wow. The villains are super creepy, there are spies and disguises and plots and counterplots, and you never know who you can trust. Suspenseful, exciting and supremely satisfying.

Seafood chowder, because it's something Makepeace might have made in the kitchen of Grizehayes, and because it's rich and flavourful with multiple textures so that every bite is a little different but it all works together as a harmonious whole. Also I made some last night and there are leftovers for lunch today, so yay!

MMGM: The Lie Tree, by Frances Hardinge

There are a lot of things Frances Hardinge does well (pretty much everything, as far as I'm concerned), but setting/world-building has to be one of her top talents. Every book she's written, she's come up with a completely different world and she's filled it in with all the layers and detail and fascinating life that the real world has, only better, because it's bursting with all the cool stuff only Hardinge's imagination can come up with.

Her earlier books were set in completely imaginary worlds, but her latest two have taken times and places from real history and magically transformed them. I loved what Cuckoo Song did with the 1920's.

The Lie Tree starts with England in the Nineteenth Century: Age of Scientific Discovery, when Geology and Darwin upended everything man believed about the world, when anyone could be an amateur botanist or paleontologist, when finding a new species of flower could make someone famous. A time when anything was possible, and everyone wanted to be the one to find it out.

(That spirit of discovery and possibility is a large part of why I think Steampunk is so popular; there was a naivety and excitement that somehow isn't possible in the cyber age, that we wish we could reclaim.)

Drop into this exciting atmosphere a family running away from scandal and ruin, with a daughter who would give anything to join her father in his scientific endeavours, to have her intelligence and curiosity valued. But she is a girl, so no one will take her seriously, most particularly not her father. Faith is Calpurnia Tate without an encouraging grandfather, and it's torture to watch her be rebuffed and belittled. She cannot blossom, but she still must grow, as a plant contorts itself to grow to the light.

Hardinge's female protagonists are another one of her amazing strengths. Faith (brilliant name, given all the themes of the book) is remarkable because she says and thinks and does some truly awful things that in any other character would make her thoroughly unlikeable—but she is so entirely justified that I ended up rooting for her all the way. Her anger, her hatred, her need for vengeance are all heart-breakingly understandable (as is her loyalty to someone who does not deserve it). She's smart and curious and analytical and rational and WHY CAN'T ANYONE VALUE THAT INSTEAD OF TELLING HER TO BE QUIET AND DEMURE???

So, major theme about gender equality, clearly (the nineteenth century is a great venue for that discussion). But it's all woven in with themes about everyone having depths: there isn't a single character who is what they appear to be. And almost everyone is deliberately pretending to be someone else in order to get what they want out of other people (not a scenario limited to the nineteenth century!). Lies, manipulation, betrayal, judgement: Faith is trying to figure out what is true and right but she's not getting much help from any of the adults around! It's deeply satisfying to watch her renegotiate all her relationships—with mother, father, brother, that annoying boy who keeps turning up—as she learns more truths about herself and everyone else.

The only fantastical element in this story is the Lie Tree itself, and I loved how it was presented as a scientific curiosity: discovered by an exploring botanist in a far-off land, with unique properties that need to be studied through experimentation. (Because, why not a plant that lives on lies? Giant flying lizards are real!) The Lie Tree is marvelously creepy—almost sentient, certainly evil—though it only has the evil people bring to it. And the evil people will do to try to get their hands on it.

Reading the synopsis, I wasn't sure this was a book I would like (I hate themes of social ostracism, and lying as a plot element generally makes me squidgy). But Hardinge made me like it. I loved her flawed, striving characters; I was absorbed in the time and place and atmosphere; the multi-layered plot more than fulfilled all its promises. Whenever I finish a Hardinge novel I always clutch it to my chest and say, "Yes!" I had to look up "satisfied" in the thesaurus, because it doesn't seem a strong enough word for how The Lie Tree made me feel. "Requited." That works. I loved this book and it loved me back.

Layered, meaty, satisfying, great British feel: I think Shepherd's Pie is the food metaphor of choice for this one.

I tried to finish this post in time for Marvelous Middle-Grade Monday, since I haven't had an MMGM for a while. I didn't make it in time to get on Shannon Messenger's list, but you should go see what everyone else reviewed this week. I've discovered a number of favourite books there!

Cuckoo Song, by Frances Hardinge

Holy sainted cows out standing in their field—this woman can write! She can write like a house on fire, like your brain is the house and she sets it on fire.

I didn't know she had a new book out—why am I not following her ravenously like a puppy??—and when I saw this book mentioned on a blog I forgave Amazon for all their faults and bought it on Kindle right away. Then I pretty much put my life on hold for a day and finished it in as close to one sitting as I could manage without my children starving and my house burning down around my ears.

Take a deep breath. Okay. Here's my rational, coherent review of Cuckoo Song: 

Go read this book!! No one can prepare you for it; it isn't like anything else you've ever read, except maybe another Frances Hardinge book, and it isn't like any of them either. It's a little like Neil Gaiman, maybe. Yes, she's up there with him. 

Cuckoo Song starts out a little ordinary, and for a while you think it's just a very well-written, slightly creepy story about an ordinary, completely dysfunctional family. And then it goes sideways, and you think, okay, it's about some really weird magic stuff happening to this extraordinarily dysfunctional but otherwise ordinary family. And then it goes even sidewaysier and you realize that you have no idea what ordinary even means anymore.

I love Triss, love her with heart-gasping terror like she is my first born child. All the characters, they're all so real and deeply complex and full of needs and hopes, how can you not love them. Pen is so perfectly a nine-year-old girl and her relationship with Triss was absolutely real. And marvelous.

I love the setting. The city is fantastic, with its hills and bridges and zig-zag streets. It takes place in the 1920s, and everything about the time is subtly and inextricably woven in with the plot and the themes: jazz; independent women; cars; belief in progress; the lingering impact of the First World War.

I love the Besiders. I don't want to say anything about them, except that Hardinge draws from familiar superstition and myth but her creation far surpasses the source material. Very cool, and completely believable.

Scary villains, but, as with all Hardinge books, there aren't good guys and bad guys. Even the scariest have reasons for what they do; even the kindest do things they shouldn't. It's wonderful to be rooting for different people with entirely conflicting desires and wonder how on earth Hardinge is going to solve it so that everyone gets what they need.

Gorgeous language, as always. (I'd quote, endlessly, but Kindle books are annoying to flip through looking for quotations.)

Cuckoo Song will probably be shelved in the middle-grade section of a library or bookstore, but I wouldn't call it middle-grade at all. Not that a precocious young reader couldn't enjoy it (it's creepily scary like Coraline, but has nothing in it a nine-year-old couldn't handle), but it has so much more going on in it. No adult should pass this by thinking it will be simplistic or insubstantial. Hardinge doesn't do insubstantial!

I'm currently harvesting endless tomatoes from my garden and they are mind-bogglingly delicious. You don't know what tomatoes taste like until you grow some yourself; when you first try a real tomato it's like discovering an entirely new color you have never seen before, and going back to the store-bought ones is like willingly blinding yourself. Cuckoo Song is a bowl full of red, gold, orange, yellow tomatoes of all different sizes, that you can eat with a little balsamic vinegar and olive oil, or quickly saute with some garlic and basil and serve over fresh pasta, or simmer until they reduce down into the most intensely flavoured tomato soup you've ever had, or . . . (if you have more suggestions, I'm open to them. I have a lot of fresh tomatoes to eat!)

A Face Like Glass, by Frances Hardinge

A new Frances Hardinge novel! I had to drop everything and go find it as soon as I heard. This woman just keeps getting better and better. I'm going to go out on a limb here and call her the next Diana Wynne Jones, and I do not do that lightly. A Hardinge novel makes me turn every page with a frisson of excitement to find out what wonders await me in the next paragraph.

I don't know where to begin.  I can't really tell you what this book is like, because it isn't like anything else. Hardinge is one of the most original and imaginative authors out there. Her awesome website calls A Face Like Glass "a stand-alone tale of deception, cheese-making, betrayal and strategic amnesia." That pretty much sums it up!

You want to know more? A Face Like Glass is set in the underground city of Caverna, where master Craftsmen create magical luxuries (the Cheeses were my hands-down favourites). In this world of corridors and caves, the only light comes from luminescent carnivorous plants. (Coolest light fixtures ever!) The ruler is so paranoid only half his brain sleeps at a time. And children born in Caverna have to be taught how to make expressions on their faces; servants might only be taught a few, like "keen alertness" or "respectful attentiveness," while rich courtiers might have a range from "World Weary, with a Hint of Sadness and a Core of Basic Integrity" to "Amused Shrewdness, with a Well of Deeper Wisdom." So interesting! Original in an entirely different way than Catherine Fisher's Incarceron is original. (Even though they're both cave worlds, they're nothing alike. Except for the twisted, dangerous politics, maybe.)

Hardinge doesn't just have a bunch of clever ideas that she sprinkles through the story like pictures on the wall: everything is thought out; she knows how the cheeses and the wines are made and what happens if they aren't watched carefully; she knows what goes on behind the scenes to make everything work, so I completely believed in Caverna. Plus, everything ends up being crucial to the plot, from the biology of trap-lanterns to the psychology of Cartographers. It all fits together in ways you never would have guessed.

Yes, the plot.

"The problem with Caverna is that it isn't flat. It goes up and down and slants and narrows and spirals round itself and bursts into huge caverns and meets itself going the other way. So—you know the crinkly edible bit inside a walnut? Well, suppose you had to draw a flat picture of the surface of that." . . .

"And now . . . imagine that you are trying to map the biggest, crinkliest, most complicated walnut in the world—that's Caverna. Cartographers have to twist their brains a certain way to understand even part of it, and afterwards their brains don't untwist.

That's what the plot is like. Five-dimensional. Intensely satisfying.

Then there's her language: inventive, textured, surprising, precise, evocative. "She felt the Facesmith's smile tickle over her as gently and irridescently as the headdress feathers had touched the ceiling." When I reviewed The Lost Conspiracy, I compared Hardinge to Laini Taylor in her poetic richness, but Hardinge is less flowery and more colorful and bumpy. Reading her sentences I feel like a kid in a toy shop where the words are the toys. Several times I laughed out loud in delight at her choice of words.

But other books have inventive settings and crazy plots and great language, and I don't love, love, love them the way I love this book. For me it always comes down to the characters, and I adore Neverfell. (She's named after a cheese.) "Despite her best efforts she was a skinny, long-boned tangle of fidget and frisk, with feet that would not stay still, and elbows made to knock things off shelves." Neverfell has such a good heart, and she lives in a terribly dangerous world, and it's heartbreaking and thrilling to watch the world be transformed by her naive, stubborn goodness. And ... but I don't want to give anything more away. I'll just say that Hardinge really understands people and their motivations. Loved Master Grandible the Cheesemaker. And the Kleptomancer. And ... Oh just go read it now!

Because I just spent all day making it, and it turned out delicious, I'm going to compare A Face Like Glass to chicken corn chowder, made with cream and fresh herbs from the garden (thyme, basil, tarragon, green onion, cilantro), and baked in the oven with herb biscuits on top. Rich, complex, textured, layers of flavours, sweet and savoury. (Might just go have another bowl right now.)

I could have been there . . . and more Frances Hardinge

Last weekend our tango teacher hosted a tango festival that we bought tickets for, but when Saturday night came around and it was time to go to the Gala (which starts at 10pm--past our bedtime), my husband and I looked across the couch at each other and decided we were too tired to go. This is what we missed:

For those of you who are serious tango fans, (and in case my video embedding didn't work) you'll want to see the rest of the videos from the evening: here they are. I am still kicking myself for not managing to drag my sorry behind out of the house!

And in other news, I just finished my third Frances Hardinge book, and I went to her website to confirm that I have now read all of her books, and it turns out she's just published a new one! Much excitement! It's a sequel to Fly By Night, which I shall now reread to get up to speed.

The one I just finished is Verdigris Deep (also titled Well Wished, which is more literal but way boringer). I won't do a whole review, but I highly recommend it. Very different from The Lost Conspiracy but equally well-plotted, well-charactered, well-written. This one's British urban fantasy, the kind where unwitting kids unleash ancient magic on their everyday town. Here's a great scene: "A shrill, laughing conversation upstairs, a television-crowd roar in the living room, and nobody with enough attention spare to notice as two children scrambled past, struggling to prevent a god escaping from a bucket." (They flush it down the toilet.) And did you know shopping carts were so creepy?

You know who would make the most excellent panel at a writers' festival? Frances Hardinge, Laini Taylor, and Neil Gaiman! (Round it out with Frannie Billingsley.) Oh, oh, and Neil Gaiman could collaborate on a novel with Frances Hardinge. You'd have to leave the lights on all night after reading it!

I have to leave you with another quotation from Verdigris Deep. She is just so amazing, the way she uses words to come up with concepts you hadn't ever thought of that way but know immediately are true:

People's personalities took up space, he sometimes thought. When they were trapped in a house or a job or a school together they rubbed up against each other, squeaked like balloons and made sparks. Ryan's parents both had large, gleaming, hot-air-balloon personalities. Sometimes it was hard to fit them into the same house, and Ryan had learned the art of suddenly making himself take up less space, demand less, so that his parents were not chafing against each other as much.

And here's a psyche-shaking one from the end of the book (no spoiler 'cause it won't make any sense until you read the whole thing):

The image that would not leave Ryan's imagination was of Josh walking with a mask-like countenance towards the woman who had tried to kill him, and giving her the child he could not be. 

As Kiersten White said in her blog post about author crushes (and she was referring to Laini Taylor!): "Oh my gosh. I want that brain. I will keep it for my own and love it and take care of it and decorate it for all major holidays."

The Lost Conspiracy, by Frances Hardinge

This is a really, really good book, and you must read it. Go see if your library has a copy. Even quicker, it's on Kindle and it's cheap (by its original title, Gullstruck Island). (No, I don't get a cut of every sale!)

I don't want to tell you anything about the plot, because I don't want to give anything away. This is a book about secrets and lies, conspiracies and betrayals, murder and revenge. It's also about family and loyalty and myth and redemption. It's dark but it has a light heart.

Here is our first glimpse of our heroine:

As it happened, the girl supporting Arilou had a name too. It was designed to sound like the settling of dust, a name that was meant to go unnoticed. She was as anonymous as dust, and Skein gave her not the slightest thought.

Neither would you. In fact, you have already met her, or somebody very like her, and you cannot remember her at all.

If that doesn't give you a frisson of anticipation about the coming story, then I give up on you entirely!

The Lost Conspiracy is set on a marvelous volcanic tropical island. On this island and nowhere else, some children are born with the ability to send their senses out of their body independently, so they can see, hear, taste, touch, and smell things at a far distance. Before they learn to control this ability, they are often absent from their bodies, so a child who has trouble walking or talking or who doesn't seem to connect with their surroundings might be disabled or they might be Lost. Arilou is one such child. She and her younger sister (oh, have I not mentioned her name yet? I must have forgotten. Hardinger doesn't even tell us until Chapter 2) get caught up in an island-wide plot masterminded by a man with no face, that threatens all of the Lost and all of Arilou's kin.

The richness of Hardinge's fantasy setting reminds me a lot of Laini Taylor. Flitterbirds peck at your shadow and when they fly away they unravel your soul with them. The volcanoes King Fan and Lord Spearhead are rivals for the affection of a third volcano, Lady Sorrow. Implacable bounty hunters, called Ashwalkers, gain strength and protection by dyeing their clothes in the cremation ashes of the criminals they catch. The original inhabitants of the island, the Lace, have become outcasts, because when settlers first built a town in the valley between two volcanoes, the Lace kidnapped townspeople and sacrificed them to turn away the volcanoes' wrath (and save the town). The Reckoning is a secret group of Lace who have sworn to take revenge for murderd kin: they get a half a butterfly tattoo on one arm when they take the oath, and the other half of the tattoo on the other arm when they complete their vengeance.

It's not always easy to tell the good guys from the bad guys; in fact, not a single character is what he or she first appears to be. But at the end, right and wrong are clear and everyone gets their true name. (Oh, right. The heroine's name. It's Hathin.)

Hardinge's prose is jungle-lush and full of imagery: "they swung into battle like leaves on a water eddy"; "the king of tricks hatched in Hathin's brain like a baby dragon"; "a young child's despairing cry drew its serrated edge across Hathin's soul." All the strands of myth and symbol come together in a very satisfying way when the nameless girl defeats the faceless man.

Have I convinced you yet? I've read one other book by Hardinge: Fly By Night. It was pretty good, too; also had an interesting fantasy world with conspiracies and secret organizations and a nobody heroine (named after a housefly). I'm going back to the library to pick up Verdigris Deep, also known as Well Witched. And I just checked out Hardinge's amusing webpage.

The Lost Conspiracy is like a dish I had in Hawaii: mahi-mahi crusted with macademia nuts in a lime/coconut-milk sauce served with mango-pineapple salsa. (Oh, I really want to go back to Hawaii!)