Lowachee, Karin: Warchild
Warchild
Writer: Karin Lowachee
Genre: Science Fiction
Pages: 451
I want to say, first and foremost, that this is the best book I've read in a very long time. I've read lots of books I loved this year, but this one beats them all. If you write SF, especially SF involving outer space and other planets of any kind, you must read this book.
I can’t even begin to describe how much I loved this book. And it’s interesting, because there’s books I finish that are great, and some I love, but this one knocks all of them out of the water.
One of the elements I’ve been paying very close attention to lately is point of view. It’s more than just whose eyes we see the story/scene through, but also, the choice between first, second, and third person, and the verb tense as well. Point of view is one of the first things that catches my eye in a book, because it reveals a lot about the writer’s style. And as a general rule, I will love first person point of view to pieces, and always pay closer attention to books in this POV.
However, Warchild does not start out in the first person. It starts out in the second, and that’s one of the main reasons it was on my list this term, so I can see how second person POV is done in print.
Like first-person, second-person sucked me in. It used to be that I hated the second-person POV, but I realize now I hated the kind that literally makes the reader the character, and the shifty kind where the character or narrator starts talking to the reader. Ironic, since I blog all the time and talk to “readers”.
Anyway, what made the second person opening of Warchild so compelling was the situation at hand. We’re in the point of view of a child, and we never forget that this is a character, and we’re witnessing the most horrible event of his life--the destruction of his ship (his home) and the deaths of everyone he knows, including his parents. He’s taken in by (space) pirates, and life gets even worse. This is no sad little story about a poor kid whose guardians treat him badly--this is ugly. This is human. You fear as Jos fears, and this is an amazing accomplishment on Lowachee’s part. I would’ve always imagined that a second person POV would detach the reader from the story, and the detachment is there, but purposeful. In order for the character to survive, he must detach, and by doing so, can witness the horror around him. Sure, he still feels, as does the reader, but the detachment is more than just a stylistic whim--it’s a psychological defense of the character.
Only the first part of the book, the first thirty or so pages, is in the second person point of view. The book is divided into four parts: part one is second person past, parts two and three are first person past, and part four is first person present.
It’s one of the reasons I love this book. Because the style is deliberate, and it reveals something about the state of mind Jos is in at the time of the story. And there’s never one moment in any part where the reader is emotionally detached from the story--we experience events as Jos experiences them. And because that human element is so prominent through-out the book, the reader feels every emotion to the bone.
That’s the other reason I love this book--I don’t think I’ve ever been so emotionally engaged. And that’s saying something. To step back and read what this book is about, it’s really space opera SF with some hard SF elements mixed it. It’s a coming of age story in the middle of a war with aliens. The main character is an abused orphan. Seems kind of cliché and overdone, right?
But it works because of the character, and through the character, the point of view. Even when Lowachee is ambiguous about what exactly is happening to Jos (trust me, there’s ambiguity--you don’t learn whether or not Jos was raped until the middle of the book), you always know exactly what his emotional response is. And the beauty of it is that because we see Jos grow up during the story, we see how the weight of his experience effects the here and now. And personally, I never questioned his reactions. That’s how well-drawn the character is, how well-done the point of view is. My reactions were his reactions, and his reactions were my reactions.
The other reason this story works is because it is so human, so real, so ugly. And also at times, so beautiful you want to cry. And trust me, I wanted to cry. This book takes the rose-colored glasses of space opera and SF in general and smashes them against the wall. It also takes the stark black & white glasses of the genre and rips them to shreds too. This is more than space opera, more than an adventure story: this is real in that it reflects human nature and culture in an unforgiving and unflinching way.
I live for this in books. While I’ll always have need of “fluff,” and books to escape to, I crave stories like this. Characters and situations that are so real I can’t get them out of my head. Stories that end on just the right note of resolution, even though some emotional questions have yet to be wrapped up. And I have to applaud Lowachee in this: while I wanted to see some kind of emotional wrap-up in Jos’s relationships with Niko and Evan, she gave me exactly what I needed to know the direction things would go. To wrap it up, to fully resolve it, would spoil the characters, because like life, emotions aren’t neat and tidy, and happily ever after isn’t something that always lasts, if it happens at all.
This book reminds me why I want to write. The stories I want to write. If I could affect one reader like this book affected me, I’ll be one happy cat. To say I’ll track down Lowachee’s other two books is an understatement, even though I know she doesn’t employ the same point of view and characters. It’ll make for interesting comparisons between books and style, but if she uses third person anywhere near as well as she uses first and second, I'll be thrilled.