Patricia C. Wrede - Thirteenth Child
When I was younger, I absolutely loved Patricia C. Wrede's Enchanted Forest Chronicles. It had snarky female king dragons, one particularly badass Princess, and crazy hijinks galore. Add to that the fact that the humorous covers were done by the amazing Peter de Seve, and you had a series that was well nigh unbeatable against the undefended mind of mini Mikki.
It's been ages since I picked up any of her books, so when I came across Thirteenth Child and read the synopsis, I figured I was in for yet another rollicking good time (yes! Rollicking! Action and adventure aplenty!)
So what if it's probably been a decade since I last read her? I am quite a bit older, but I haven't grown up that much (some might even replace "much" with "at all," but I feel like that's not necessarily a good thing).
PLOT
So Eff is our resident thirteenth child, right? Yes, that's right, thirteen kids.
Because apparently people in this world procreate like rabbits, but given the time period (American frontier days in some alternate universe) I suppose that was like insurance. The more kids you have, the bigger your chances that some of them will survive to adulthood and end up wiping the drool from your wizened fruit of a mouth.
It's apparently awful bad luck to be born the thirteenth child, but she's one half of a set of twins and her brother is the fourteenth child -- double the sevens, double the luck. Double-seventh kids are supposed to be chock full of magic and good fortune. Lucky him.
They ought to balance things out nicely, but poor ickle Eff is still set upon by all the neighborhood bullies and nasty relatives for being the harbinger of bad luck. Her family eventually moves to the wilds of the Frontier, where the only thing keeping the saber cats and wooly mammoths from rampaging through the town is the magical barrier.
Stuff then happens. Sort of.
This would have gotten two stars out of five for me if it hadn't been for the world Patricia Wrede had dreamed up for Eff to live in.
Story development was long and plodding. I suppose this a new sort of book genre: slice of life, fantasy style? Still, it felt like I was waiting for something to happen the entire time I was reading this book. The payoff (if you could call it that) was decidedly lacking in oomph. Not to spoiler you or anything, but she basically just stood there, and people who couldn't even see her promptly decided she was the one who saved their collective asses. Wow.
The same could be said for the main character. I understood that Eff's circumstances had caused her to take a backstage role even in her own life, but there is such a thing as being too self-effacing. I have read passive heroes and heroines before, but at some point, they do stop being, well you know, insipid. I found myself more interested in Rennie, the Lydia Bennet of the family, and I hated Lydia Bennet.
Rennie, being the black sheep of the family, falls in love, canoodles, and eventually elopes with a young Rationalist man. Rationalists are a political group of people who reject the use of magic as weakness and strive to live their lives in the Frontier without it. Rennie comes from a family of magicians, and I found the struggles she would have experienced in a new world where magic was forbidden much more interesting than Eff's internal self-inflicted drama.
I wonder if all the care Wrede put in crafting this frontier world had taken up too much of the story. The magical theories and customs, the wildlife and environment, and the way of life on the frontier represented much of the book's pull for me, but that isn't enough to make this book truly memorable, or something I'd want to pick up again. You need a character to carry you through it.
So I was definitely glad when I found out that this appears to be the first in a series. I don't want to give up on Eff just yet, so here's hoping Wrede doesn't let me down again!