(no subject)
Okay, so I just read The Lost Conspiracy by Frances Hardinge (published in the UK as Gullstruck Island), and - okay, this woman has published four books, and every single one I have loved to pieces, and this one isn't my favorite exactly, but I think it is legitimately her best.
It's hard to describe the actual plot of this book, because the worldbuilding is so fantastically dense and complex and original that it would take up like a chapter of real text to give a good idea of what's going on, but I'm going to give it a shot:
A long time ago, the Cavalcaste came to Gullstruck Island. The various ethnic groups living there reacted in various different ways -- among them the Lace, known for their jewelled teeth and creepy constant smiling. The Lace said, "hey, welcome, do anything you like but please don't settle right in between the volcanoes!" The Cavalcaste, of course, built a city right in between the volcanoes. Pretty soon, people from that city began disappearing; it turned out that the smiling Lace had been kidnapping and sacrificing them in an attempt to ward off VOLCANIC DOOM.
Fast-forward two hundred years. The island is ruled by a combination of Cavalcaste governors and the Council of the Lost -- people born with the ability to basically astrally project their senses away from their bodies. (On a volcano-strewn island inhospitable to travellers, it is really useful to have people around who can go, say, check on approaching weather, or read a newspaper in the next town over without having to physically leave their house.) As for the Lace -- they're a marginalized, impoverished minority group, and their religion has been officially banned, but they're still jewelling their teeth and smiling creepily at everyone they meet. Nobody trusts the Lace.
Of course our heroine, Hathin, is Lace. And not only that, even among the Lace, she's the invisible girl -- the shyly smiling, quiet helper of her beautiful older sister Arilou, the only Lost born among the Lace . . .
. . . maybe. Because the thing about kids who are sometimes not all there is that child development looks a little bit different than it does with kids who are grounded in their own bodies, and sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between a kid who's a Lost and a kid who's just . . . not all there. Arilou rarely shows signs of responding to the people around her and has never spoken a coherent word -- but the Lace village desperately needs the status and privilege conferred by having the local Lost, and over the years the hope that she is a Lost has gradually turned into a village-wide conspiracy to cover up the what if she isn't. When a senior examiner shows up to test Arilou's Lost abilities, the responsibility of maintaining that conspiracy falls on Hathin's shoulders.
That covers maybe the first fifty pages of plot.
What happens next involves mass murder, and a love triangle between three volcanoes, and cities of the dead, and obsessive assassins, and a secret group of desperate sworn revengers living in the forest, and a crowd-witch who plays the mob like a harp, and a perky teenaged boy madly in love with a giant, broody, battle-scarred middle-aged woman with loads of backstory angst (this is the only thing that even approaches a romance in the book AND I LOVE IT -- uh, unless you count the volcanic love triangle) and epic standoffs with pet birds and wooden fish, and a perfect storm of prejudice and miscommunication, and the astoundingly evil things people are willing to do for a concept of the greater good.
This is a book about colonialism and culture clash and the undeath of history. It's about the family you have, and the love and resentment you feel towards someone who needs you, and whose existence overshadows yours, and whose mind is so alien that you don't even know if you can reach it. It's about the family you don't have, and the ways broken people can and can't rely on each other -- there's a subplot that I love, about Hathin and a boy who has lost his family and calls her his little sister, because Hathin knows she isn't his little sister, that broken pieces don't fit together that easily. And the thing is, it would be a great book that treated any one of these things with the complexity that it deserves, but Frances Hardinge manages to do all of these things at once, and still have time for incredible worldbuilding, and even to be very funny on occasion, and I just closed the last page with a sense of awe.
This entry is cross-posted at Livejournal from http://skygiants.dreamwidth.org/265991.html. Please feel free to comment here or there! There are currently
comments on Dreamwidth.
It's hard to describe the actual plot of this book, because the worldbuilding is so fantastically dense and complex and original that it would take up like a chapter of real text to give a good idea of what's going on, but I'm going to give it a shot:
A long time ago, the Cavalcaste came to Gullstruck Island. The various ethnic groups living there reacted in various different ways -- among them the Lace, known for their jewelled teeth and creepy constant smiling. The Lace said, "hey, welcome, do anything you like but please don't settle right in between the volcanoes!" The Cavalcaste, of course, built a city right in between the volcanoes. Pretty soon, people from that city began disappearing; it turned out that the smiling Lace had been kidnapping and sacrificing them in an attempt to ward off VOLCANIC DOOM.
Fast-forward two hundred years. The island is ruled by a combination of Cavalcaste governors and the Council of the Lost -- people born with the ability to basically astrally project their senses away from their bodies. (On a volcano-strewn island inhospitable to travellers, it is really useful to have people around who can go, say, check on approaching weather, or read a newspaper in the next town over without having to physically leave their house.) As for the Lace -- they're a marginalized, impoverished minority group, and their religion has been officially banned, but they're still jewelling their teeth and smiling creepily at everyone they meet. Nobody trusts the Lace.
Of course our heroine, Hathin, is Lace. And not only that, even among the Lace, she's the invisible girl -- the shyly smiling, quiet helper of her beautiful older sister Arilou, the only Lost born among the Lace . . .
. . . maybe. Because the thing about kids who are sometimes not all there is that child development looks a little bit different than it does with kids who are grounded in their own bodies, and sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between a kid who's a Lost and a kid who's just . . . not all there. Arilou rarely shows signs of responding to the people around her and has never spoken a coherent word -- but the Lace village desperately needs the status and privilege conferred by having the local Lost, and over the years the hope that she is a Lost has gradually turned into a village-wide conspiracy to cover up the what if she isn't. When a senior examiner shows up to test Arilou's Lost abilities, the responsibility of maintaining that conspiracy falls on Hathin's shoulders.
That covers maybe the first fifty pages of plot.
What happens next involves mass murder, and a love triangle between three volcanoes, and cities of the dead, and obsessive assassins, and a secret group of desperate sworn revengers living in the forest, and a crowd-witch who plays the mob like a harp, and a perky teenaged boy madly in love with a giant, broody, battle-scarred middle-aged woman with loads of backstory angst (this is the only thing that even approaches a romance in the book AND I LOVE IT -- uh, unless you count the volcanic love triangle) and epic standoffs with pet birds and wooden fish, and a perfect storm of prejudice and miscommunication, and the astoundingly evil things people are willing to do for a concept of the greater good.
This is a book about colonialism and culture clash and the undeath of history. It's about the family you have, and the love and resentment you feel towards someone who needs you, and whose existence overshadows yours, and whose mind is so alien that you don't even know if you can reach it. It's about the family you don't have, and the ways broken people can and can't rely on each other -- there's a subplot that I love, about Hathin and a boy who has lost his family and calls her his little sister, because Hathin knows she isn't his little sister, that broken pieces don't fit together that easily. And the thing is, it would be a great book that treated any one of these things with the complexity that it deserves, but Frances Hardinge manages to do all of these things at once, and still have time for incredible worldbuilding, and even to be very funny on occasion, and I just closed the last page with a sense of awe.
This entry is cross-posted at Livejournal from http://skygiants.dreamwidth.org/265991.html. Please feel free to comment here or there! There are currently
comments on Dreamwidth.