The Replacement, by Brenna Yovanoff
Author: Brenna Yovanoff
Genre: YA Paranormal
Pages: 343 (ARC)
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
Read in November, 2010
Summary (from Goodreads): Mackie Doyle is not one of us. Though he lives in the small town of Gentry, he comes from a world of tunnels and black murky water, a world of living dead girls ruled by a little tattooed princess. He is a Replacement, left in the crib of a human baby sixteen years ago. Now, because of fatal allergies to iron, blood, and consecrated ground, Mackie is fighting to survive in the human world. Mackie would give anything to live among us, to practice on his bass or spend time with his crush, Tate. But when Tate's baby sister goes missing, Mackie is drawn irrevocably into the underworld of Gentry, known as Mayhem. He must face the dark creatures of the Slag Heaps and find his rightful place, in our world, or theirs.
My thoughts:
Everybody knows something in Gentry is wrong, but like his neighbors and parents, Mackie is willing to ignore the strangeness until several things happen to force his attention: Tate, a classmate, comes to him for help because she is sure that her baby sister, who just died, wasn’t really her baby sister; he meets a mysterious stranger who tells Mackie something he’s suspected for quite a while, that he’s a Replacement and he's slowly but surely dying from iron exposure; and his sister Emma, also aware of how ill he’s become, makes a deal with one of the fey to help him and puts herself at risk. Mackie's only hope is to investigate his past, which leads him to become involved with the fey, who offer him medicine to keep him alive -- as long as he helps them keep sway over the town, by joining the band Rasputin and beguiling the humans with song, and by turning a blind eye to the whole sacrificing babies thing, like they do.
The dark side of the fey, or faeries, whatever you want to call them (Yovanoff resists naming them, so I am just going to call them "the fey" because it's a good blanket term) is well-mined territory in YA literature; finding a new take on them is a challenge, and I think Yovanoff succeeds in doing so. This debut novel creates its own mythology of changelings and the underground world where the fey live, while still using many common folkloric tropes. Discovering the dark, moody town of Gentry and their unnatural patrons is what kept me reading, even when I was semi-annoyed with suspect character motivations or the rushed ending. While I hesitate to call this a horror novel, because it’s not nearly scary or disturbing enough, it has horror undertones that make for a nice contrast with the current crop of more romantic paranormal YA books.
Here, at least, the fey and their world are not seductive: while they can appear beautiful (some of them, anyway), it’s not their natural state, and when they pass among humans, they disturb more than entice. The fey in this book are mostly creepy: some of them are revenants (the “blue girls”), and the alive ones appear almost human, but there’s always something off, like a mouth full of needle-sharp teeth, or red-rimmed eyes and lashes crusted with sickly yellow gunk. Even Mackie, the Replacement (changeling) who survived against all odds, is described as not being quite right -- he's too pale, too hollow-cheeked, and his eyes are too black (never mind the inconsistency that this supposed "ugly" boy seems to fit in so well at school one minute and then stand out as a freak the next, depending on what's convenient to the story). Humans aren’t swooning around the fey in sexual stupor, basically, which is refreshing in a genre that is overfull of super-hot, super-fly supernatural creatures. The fey don't seem to be all that powerful on their own, and it's obvious that they are struggling to survive, a species on the brink of dying out.
The two warring sisters who rule the fey, the Morrigan (in the form of a little girl) and the Lady (in the form of a beautiful woman), live underneath a slag heap and a dump hill respectively, and though their homes are grand and cavernous, they're also filled with disturbing things, like an insane revenant girl floating in a pool, or collections of pinned butterflies and stuffed birds. Despite their shared creepiness, the Morrigan and the Lady have different agendas for ensuring their hold over the town stays strong: the Morrigan sends up her musicians (posed as a rock band Rasputin) to make the town adore them, but that's not enough for the Lady, who needs blood sacrifice of the town's children. While the Morrigan disagrees with her sister's methods, she's unwilling to put herself and her people at risk to stop her, so instead she turns a blind eye, much like the humans in Gentry.
The relationship the fey have with the town of Gentry is parasitic at best: while both prosper whenever the bond between them is renewed, the times have changed so much over the centuries that even the sacrifices have lost some impact. Nobody's really prospering anymore; they're enduring instead, and none of them seem truly happy. The town is just as complicit in this relationship as the fey are. Every seven years a human baby disappears with a sickly fey baby left in its place, and nobody does anything. They wait for the fey baby to die, as it invariably does in its new inhospitable environment, and the family buries this replacement baby as if it were their own, even though they know it isn't. It's a culture of fear and silence and secret ritual, where parents hang scissors and other metal implements over their babies’ beds in the hopes of keeping the fey away. An interesting exercise for me was wondering how many of the townspeople accept this on a conscious level -- knowing that this is what it takes to honor the deal -- and how many just go along with it because it's the way it's always been, without allowing themselves to make the disturbing connections.
This makes Mackie's relationship with the town, and with his family and friends, particularly interesting, as he’s one of the only Replacements to grow up. Up front, no one seems to know that he isn’t anything other than what he pretends to be: Mackie Doyle. At first, he doesn’t even know he’s a Replacement, at least not consciously, but he feels there’s something secret going on that he’s involved in without understanding what it is. He feels as if the whole town is in on it, but at the same time, that the town doesn’t know about him . . . yet. He worries that eventually he'll do something wrong, something to make his unnaturalness stick out, and the town will take retribution, conveniently making him a scapegoat for their own ignorance and complicity. (There's even a very interesting local legend about such a man, who lived among townspeople for years but was eventually blamed for all of the children's deaths in his time and murdered, that Mackie worries will parallel his own fate.)
This immediately makes Mackie a sympathetic character, for me. He doesn't really want to know what's going on. He'd like to just pretend he's normal, but he worries that eventually the fiction will come crashing down when he least suspects it, and he'll be at the mercy of an angry mob. I think that fear motivates him more than anything else in the book; while he eventually comes to care about Tate and her baby sister, Mackie goes after the Lady who's killing children because he's afraid of what will happen if he doesn't. Even when he keeps talking about "what's right" (as in "it isn't right to kill babies just so you can be powerful"), and he has a world's worth of moral outrage on his side, I still think it's motivated a little more by desires to save himself. That's just my take on his character, though; I'm not sure it's intended.
Mackie's parents and sister were interesting side characters, the only side characters I think behave totally consistently. Mackie's parents have adjusted their household to his “allergies” to iron and concocted lots of cover stories for his aversion to blood and consecrated ground (event though his father is a pastor), but they never discuss the reasons for them. It’s so taboo that it’s clear they know a lot more than they let on, and one of the things I found most interesting to contemplate is whether his parents have grown to love Mackie for who he is or whether they are merely making the best of a bad situation by refusing to admit he isn't really their son. It adds a whole layer to the idea that you are supposed to love and trust your family, no matter what. Once you find out more about his mother and her childhood as a "pet" underground with the Lady, it's even more interesting -- Mackie is one of the very creatures she loathes, and yet, he's her son.
His sister Emma, on the other hand, clearly does know and in fact remembers the night the original Mackie was taken (while the replacement baby starts off looking like the original, the glamour wears off quickly, leaving a sickly, monstrous baby with sharp teeth behind). Despite knowing the truth, though, Emma is unwavering in her loyalty and devotion to Mackie, who has been her brother long enough to be the only one she really remembers. Her unconditional love has sustained him over the years and is the main reason Mackie has survived as long as he has. Emma may come off as a little too perfect, but I liked her relationship with Mackie and how it contrasted with everyone else's; she has a big heart, she's nonjudgmental (she recognizes, like Mackie does, that not all the fey are monsters; some are just victims of circumstance, like the humans), and she doesn't shy away from the truth.
Mackie's friends, on the other hand, are a weird, uncertain force in the book. His three closest friends are described in such an odd way that it seems like they know more than he does, particularly his best friend Roswell, who comes across as quite cagey. Tate seems to also know something, given that she seeks out Mackie for help when her baby sister is Replaced (Why else would she go to the weird guy she's never spoken to before? Why would she keep pestering him even when he said he didn't know what she's talking about?), but what she knows is never made certain. She looks to Mackie for proof that her baby sister is still alive, and seems sure that he will get it. I didn't really get where their romance came from -- it seems more of a product of convenience rather than actual feelings (they're working together on something dangerous, so they become too interested in each other), but it also feels like something just for the YA market, where there has to be a romance, even when it doesn't really fit. This book would have been fine without a love interest for Mackie; better, I would argue.
When Mackie finally "comes out" to his friends, they all accept the news with such ease that I’m still not sure if I was supposed to assume they already knew, or if that's just poor characterization, so that Mackie doesn't have to deal with any extra (but more realistic) drama just when he needs a support system the most. I suspect it's the latter in most cases, but I could be charitable, since one of the whole points of this book is that everybody knows Gentry has a dark secret they refuse to talk about, so some details are left for Mackie to figure out on his own. Still, his friends all eagerly agree to storm the Lady's underground home and kidnap back Tate's baby sister two seconds after learning about the town's bloody history and without having much of a plan for how to get back out once they get in. They are so willing, and so supportive, it feels like there was a shortcut in there, like we went right to the top of the skyscraper without bothering to check the foundation because, if you can get to the top of the skyscraper, well the foundation must be there, right?
Not in fiction, baby.
Of course their plan fails miserably, but they still win, thanks to a series of plot contrivances that play out very quickly. The worst is when Cutter, a monster who, as has been established over the course of the book, loves to torture with knives and is amazingly strong and fast, dukes it out with Tate and actually runs away because she gives him a bad scratch! Okay, okay, he retires chagrined from the field of battle, prepared to fight another day, with a "let's go another round someday soon" parting threat, but c'mon. He just leaves? It feels like Yovanoff wrote herself into a corner, with all of the kids captured and being held in the graveyard by creatures much stronger than them and the Lady about to murder Tate's baby sister, and realized if it played out honestly, they were all going to die. And that would suck.
However, the part of the ending I did like is how Mackie finally defeats the Lady (with a major assist from the Morrigan, of course). The connection between love and the survival of the fey is one made several times in the book (Emma's love kept Mackie alive into his teen years, and like him, the rest of the fey are sustained by worship and adulation of the town) and has a big part to play in the ending, when Mackie realizes the love of his friends and family make him stronger than the Lady, who is diminished by her inability to truly understand what love is. She equates love with the kind of worship that comes from fear, and her inability to understand the more purer forms of love is what gives Mackie the edge. Though I complain that the ending is rushed, I did like how this theme ultimately plays out. It didn't feel like a cheat, nor did the fairly pathetic nature of the Lady's death, with the Morrigan tutting over her corpse.
Overall, I complain, but I enjoyed reading this eerie story. I loved the setting of Gentry and its secret underside, its intriguing history, and the complex and frighteningly inhuman nature of the fey (especially on the Morrigan's side). I thought Mackie was a sympathetic character, given all the secrets he has to unearth before he can feel safe, and I liked his relationship with his sister. I may not have bought his romantic feelings for Tate, but I did believe that he loved his sister Emma. The writing itself isn't super distinctive -- it's kind of "see-through" writing that doesn't have its own style and just tells the story in a direct way -- but it's strong enough, particularly in describing the creepier aspects, that I have high hopes for Yovanoff's next book, especially if she continues the semi-horror route.