Living in Threes
This is one of those projects that needed the freedom of small press.
Judith Tarr, whose name many of you will recognize, had written the project of her heart--her agent read it, loved it, said, "I'm not sure how to market it." But sent it out anyway. And after a few ice ages had passed, notes came back from editors that boiled down to: Loved it, but not sure how to market it.
So Judy brought it to the rest of us at Book View Cafe. When I read it, I saw what the Big Six was whinnying about: much of the subject matter was definitely YA, without the familiar-these-days love triangle centered around an angsty iteration of Draco Malfoy. Instead of a variation on teenagers enduring some form of gladiatorial violence, there is a nasty plague threatening to go pandemic.
The protagonist is an everyday horse girl, texting constantly with friends in the here-and-now, but there is also a historical element. And a sfnal element.
And a mystery to be solved.
And a fantastic element, in the psychic link across time and space. A fantasy, then? But the subject matter was profoundly real: love, death. Friendship. Dreams and duty. And the big questions: paradigm, meaning, identity.
As Judy worked on the book, no longer constrained by trying to fit it into a definitive marketing slot, those disparate elements became its strength. I read it three times, and though the voice is breezy, at times funny, I teared up all three times.
It starts out the summer Meredith turns sixteen. At last her life seems more or less normal--her mom has recovered from life-threatening illness, her horse Bonnie might be pregnant. Then Mom drops the bomb.
“Seriously?” said Cat. “They’re giving you Egypt for your birthday?” When Cat gets excited she gets squeaky.
She was up in bat territory now.
Between that and the arctic air conditioning and the solar-flare lighting, the Ice Creamery was a migraine waiting to happen. I’d had a psycho break and ordered a Bama Slammer, which was a double banana split with blackberries, pecans, peaches, three different sauces, and enough ice cream to feed a third-world country.
I already had brain freeze from eating the first few spoonfuls too fast. I picked at the rest while Cat gnawed on her Choco-Cone. In between bites she kept squeaking. “Egypt! King Tut! Pyramids! Barging down the Nile!”
“Terrorists,” I said, two solid octaves down from her. “Sandstorms. Mummies.”
Meredith does not want to be packed up and sent overseas, but the adults have decreed, and it's the part of a kid to obey. Even if you're sixteen, so no longer a 'kid.' Meredith is furious, withdraws to write . . . and falls into a vision.
. . . against the wall, a shadow stirred. Wings unfurled, half mist, half solid. Eyes glittered above a drift of fog that might have been a beak. The starwing stroked its half-substantial wingtip across Meru's cheek, a touch like ice and smoke . . .
The vision is not Meredith's story, it's a vision-vision, of a girl named Meru who, with her best friend, a boy named Yoshi, are determined to be picked for star pilot school, but then Meru gets a message that her mother is missing. And Meredith falls out of the vision. What to make of that?
Events begin to accelerate Egyptward, in spite of Meredith's wishes, and it happens again.
A hawk hung on the pinnacle of heaven.
From the temple far below, it looked like a bird of metal suspended in the sky.
The sun’s heat was fierce, but Meritre shivered. The choir was so much smaller than it had been a year ago: so many lost, so many voices silenced. Of those whom the plague had left, too many were thin and pale, and their singing barely rippled the air above the courtyard.
They would be strong again. New voices would join the chorus. Pharaoh had promised, swearing that the promise came from the great god Amon himself.
This time the vision is not in the future, but long in the past . . . and the weird thing is, when Meredith gets to Egypt at last, little things begin to look familiar from the vision.
The visions come together to solve a mystery--a race against time, only how do you measure it when the three voices are separated by thousands of years? There are two climaxes, with Meredith emerging, with profound and painful insight, onto the threshold of adulthood.
I don’t cry for humans. I cry for things that are so beautiful I just can’t stand it, like Bonnie in front of me, all crusty from rolling in the sand, with a mouthful of half-chewed hay and eyes that knew everything I’d ever thought or felt or been.
Impatient Bonnie, who always has to be moving and thinking and doing, stood for a long time while I cried into her mane. Her warm animal smell filled my nose.
I think this book is so warm, so wise. I'd put it into the hands of a ten year old, yet the adult me was swept up in it with all the old intensity.
I hope you'll give it a try.