Ronald, Margaret: Spiral Hunt
Spiral Hunt (2009)
Writer: Margaret Ronald
Genre: Urban Fantasy
Pages: 307
I discovered this book while browsing through Eos Books's Blog. They were looking for people to read ARC's, and while I missed out on that, I didn't miss out on this nugget about the book, coming from--I assume--the editor:
I took the manuscript home with me on a Thursday night, [ . . . ] with the intention of reading fifty pages and, if those pages were any good, finishing it off over the weekend. Instead, I was up till midnight.
That caught my attention. As did the very beautiful cover gracing the post (which, if you want to read the whole thing, is here.). So I plunked this sucker on my private wishlist and made a note of when it came out. When I found it in the bookstores, there was no question of letting it waste away on my shelves. I decided to read it right away.
The premise: Some people have the Sight. Genevieve Scelan has the Scent. Lifted straight from the back cover blurb, that describes the fantasy aspect of this urban noir pretty well. Evie can find almost anything, just by using her sense of smell. She keeps her head out of the magical undercurrent that thrives through the city of Boston, trying to stay unnoticed by the wrong kind of magicians. But when an ex-lover calls her in the middle of the night, Evie finds herself dragged into a world of magic she never wanted to be a part of. She's got to pick a side, because if she doesn't, someone's going to pick a side for her. BTW: did I mention this urban fantasy takes place in BOSTON? Just making sure.
Spoilers ahead.
There's a lot that Ronald does right in this book. First and foremost is making her specific setting absolutely integral to the plot. There's so much Boston culture filling this novel to the brim, particularly Evie's fierce love of the Sox and how it just keeps popping up no matter what's happening in the novel. If you want to talk about detail, Ronald's provided it in spades, and I'm glad to see an urban fantasy that takes place in Boston, because frankly, I've not read that before.
The problem I had, and this is just me personally, is that I've never been to Boston. Ever. Probably couldn't even recognize Boston if I saw a picture of it. And this was a problem while reading because there's so much detail my brain couldn't fall back on my mental stereotype of a city. Just couldn't do it. But again, that's a personal problem. :)
The voice is rather strong too, and the cast is something I paid attention to. This book has 1% romance in it, which leaves room for an interesting cast of characters, including two strong female leads besides our heroine. This snags my attention because Carrie Vaughn discussed this in her Urban Fantasy Analysis about a month ago, how there's a distinct lack of multiple strong women characters in UF, and how so few UF books would pass the Bechdel Test. Well, Spiral Hunt passes this test in spades, so go Ronald! Talk about providing a standard for other UF authors (especially those of us who'd like to publish our own work) to follow.
The plot was a little dizzying. That shouldn't surprise me, given the predominant symbol of the book is a spiral, and hey, it's in the title too! Everything certainly FITS together at the end, but if I had a problem with anything, it was remember how what fit together and in what way. Ronald heavily bases her fantasy and magic system on Celtic mythology, and she does this little thing that drove me crazy through-out the book: threw out all these terms without giving the uninformed reader a bone to latch on to. Admittedly, when writing, one shouldn't dummy down one's prose just to sit down and explain every little, or even BIG, thing to the reader who isn't in the know. But I feel like Ronald straddled the line of holding back just enough and manipulating the reader. I never felt comfortable with the magic system in this book, save for how Evie's talent worked. She smelled and followed a trail. Easy. The rest of the magic in the book, especially when combined with the mythology? Not so much. I think that's more my problem as an uninformed reader, but there's another part of me that wanted just a WEE LITTLE MORE hand-holding, because not only was the setting alien to me, but so were the rules of magic. Just a couple of throw-away lines would've helped. But that's me.
I also had a little trouble keeping track of the supporting characters. Not the women, but the men, but that boils down to names. Leon, Deke, Hawk, Nate: all four letters (then there was Rena. Too many four-letter names!). Then there was Conner and Corrigan, which I interchanged regularly when Ronald referred to Corrigan instead of Brendan, and then there's the fact that Corrigan rhymes with Morrigan, but I never had trouble with the latter. Just when Conner and Brendan were in the same scene and Brenden was referred to as Corrigan. Ouch!
It's a solid, fast read, but for me, it wasn't difficult to put down. I couldn't fully emphasize with Evie's character, mostly for the reasons mentioned above regarding the setting that she's so familiar with but I'm not, as well as the feeling the character/author knows far more than I do about the magic system but won't tell me. But then there's the fact that Evie is very realistically drawn in terms of her humanity. She's not perfect and she's a bit prickly. I find that heroines can be very difficult to portray, let alone in a sympathetic light, and when your heroine is realistic and has some obvious flaws, well, it becomes even harder to empathize. Evie's got some serious shit in her past, least of which was fulfilling her promise to kill her own mother (I making that sound more dramatic than it is, so bear with me). It's not that I had any personal issues with Evie's decisions and why she made them, but she's a real, far-from-human, prickly character. I never really rooted for her. In fact, I wasn't sure who or what to root FOR, again going to the fact I felt distanced from my understanding of the magic system, how it worked, etc.
Some people might accuse me of having issues with any UF that doesn't have a particularly strong romantic plot/subplot. That may or may not be a fair criticism: I find that I have an easier time empathizing and understanding characters who are in strong relationships with other characters, whether said relationships are romantic, platonic, or familial. It helps to see how our leads treat the different relationships in their lives, and how those people in those relationships treat our leads. While we have a large cast in this book, Evie treats most everyone the same, with very little degrees of difference, and that didn't provide me with a very wide spectrum of who she is. The scenes I liked best were her scenes with Katie, Nate's eight-year-old little sister, and I think those resonated because Evie acts around kids like I would. Awkward, and talking to them like an adult. I can relate to that.
I never really rooted for Evie to get together with Brendan, though they shared a couple of kisses. Nate I knew was in love with her, and I like how she's pretty much oblivious to that, so it'll be interesting to see just where that relationship goes and how it goes. Her friendships with Sarah and Rena will also be interesting to watch develop. All of Ronald's characters have very solid, human flaws that are pretty obvious, and that's not always an easy thing to accomplish. But because of that, which I admire greatly, I'm having a harder time warming up to the characters than I would normally if the people weren't QUITE so realistically human. Go figure.
I do want to shout-out this word of praise: sensory detail is great. How often is do we read a book where the sense of smell is so largely paid attention to? Evie's descriptors for what she's smelling is also great, and I admire the writing very much in that regard.
My Rating
Worth the Cash: though I'll be fair and say for UF fans, this is probably a must-have. Detailed, unique setting with a rather different premise: a heroine who can find almost anything based on her sense of smell (her nickname is The Hound). This book shows a lot of promise and gets a lot of things right, but I was held at a distance, partially because of the fact I've never been to Boston so I couldn't sink my teeth into the setting as much as I would like, and then the fact that I never really felt I understood how all the magic related to the mythology. Still, there's lots of interesting stuff here, and it'll be an interesting series to keep an eye on. This is a very good book, but I didn't fall in love with it.
Cover Commentary: I really love this cover. The coloring is awesome, and the artist makes use of the spiral motif rather nicely, and I love the image of the Boston cityscape on the cover. To me, this is the kind of cover that's hard to ignore if you see it faced out on the shelf, which is a good thing, especially since it doesn't follow the current trends in UF cover art by any stretch of the imagination.
Next up:
Prime Codex: The Hungry Edge of Speculative Fiction edited by Lawrence M. Schoen and Michael Livingston