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jazzfishLeah Bobet, Above
I didn't really know what to expect from Above going into it. That may be the best way to go in, honestly. So: Above is a contemporary YA urban fantasy that is, to quote the author, "about complicated, tangled, late-stage Growing Up. And people with crab claws. And living shadow-creatures. And a girl who turns into a honeybee, and a boy who grew up underground." And if that interests you at all then you should read it. Now.
What, you're still here?
Fine. It seems that there are certain kinds of ... depictions of trauma, I guess, that I can't write, or even think, coherently about. They plug straight into some sort of primal fear or empathy and the conscious brain shuts down. Above is one of those.
Which means that I don't have much of anything useful to say about it. This frustrates me because it does what it does very well indeed.
Above throws the reader straight in at the deep end. Matthew, the viewpoint character, grew up in an undercity community of freaks and outcasts, and I barely had time to adjust to this before something horrible happens and the community is broken and scattered. So I'm piecing together what the heck is going on, while sinking into Matthew's highly distinctive voice and dialect, while getting to know a small but diverse cast of characters. (Lest you get the wrong idea, I love this. The hell with prologues and explanatory asides; give me characters in weird situations and trust me, as the reader, to figure it out.)
Then the action moves from things Matthew accepts as perfectly normal to things he finds deeply strange and unsettling and dangerous. Things like hospitals, or buses, or people who've lived all their lives in the city aboveground. It was at about this point that I finally registered that these characters are deeply damaged in terms of their ability to interact with anyone else, including each other, and I stopped being able to respond rationally to the book because the way they think and speak and feel and act resonated all too well.
I hesitate to talk about the "magic," because the word, and the concept, never come up in the book. (Cf. "water, as discussed by fish.") Matthew's vague distinction between "Freak" and "Normal" is useful only as a first-order approximation of what's "magic" and what isn't. That is, he recognizes that there are certain things, such as crab-claws for arms or turning into a bee that'll get you kicked out of Normal society, but phenomena like the shadows or Whisper's ghosts are just natural parts of life for him.
To veer way the hell off on a tangent, this is the exact thing that bugs me about the Glamour (magic) system in the RPG Changeling: the Dreaming. Your character has Magic Powers / Spells, and you know they're Magic Powers / Spells, and you cast them using Magic Energy ("Glamour"). They're things you can do, not part of who you are as a changeling. So, yay for finally having a conceptual grasp on that, and perhaps my next modern-fae game will be closer to my platonic ideal.
(Above also handles "normal society thinks these magical people are crazy and wrong and locks them away" better than default Changeling, but that's its own rant, and one I'm not really confident in my ability to back up. And this is quite long enough already.)
I didn't really know what to expect from Above going into it. That may be the best way to go in, honestly. So: Above is a contemporary YA urban fantasy that is, to quote the author, "about complicated, tangled, late-stage Growing Up. And people with crab claws. And living shadow-creatures. And a girl who turns into a honeybee, and a boy who grew up underground." And if that interests you at all then you should read it. Now.
What, you're still here?
Fine. It seems that there are certain kinds of ... depictions of trauma, I guess, that I can't write, or even think, coherently about. They plug straight into some sort of primal fear or empathy and the conscious brain shuts down. Above is one of those.
Which means that I don't have much of anything useful to say about it. This frustrates me because it does what it does very well indeed.
Above throws the reader straight in at the deep end. Matthew, the viewpoint character, grew up in an undercity community of freaks and outcasts, and I barely had time to adjust to this before something horrible happens and the community is broken and scattered. So I'm piecing together what the heck is going on, while sinking into Matthew's highly distinctive voice and dialect, while getting to know a small but diverse cast of characters. (Lest you get the wrong idea, I love this. The hell with prologues and explanatory asides; give me characters in weird situations and trust me, as the reader, to figure it out.)
Then the action moves from things Matthew accepts as perfectly normal to things he finds deeply strange and unsettling and dangerous. Things like hospitals, or buses, or people who've lived all their lives in the city aboveground. It was at about this point that I finally registered that these characters are deeply damaged in terms of their ability to interact with anyone else, including each other, and I stopped being able to respond rationally to the book because the way they think and speak and feel and act resonated all too well.
I hesitate to talk about the "magic," because the word, and the concept, never come up in the book. (Cf. "water, as discussed by fish.") Matthew's vague distinction between "Freak" and "Normal" is useful only as a first-order approximation of what's "magic" and what isn't. That is, he recognizes that there are certain things, such as crab-claws for arms or turning into a bee that'll get you kicked out of Normal society, but phenomena like the shadows or Whisper's ghosts are just natural parts of life for him.
To veer way the hell off on a tangent, this is the exact thing that bugs me about the Glamour (magic) system in the RPG Changeling: the Dreaming. Your character has Magic Powers / Spells, and you know they're Magic Powers / Spells, and you cast them using Magic Energy ("Glamour"). They're things you can do, not part of who you are as a changeling. So, yay for finally having a conceptual grasp on that, and perhaps my next modern-fae game will be closer to my platonic ideal.
(Above also handles "normal society thinks these magical people are crazy and wrong and locks them away" better than default Changeling, but that's its own rant, and one I'm not really confident in my ability to back up. And this is quite long enough already.)
no subject
Date: 2012-04-05 08:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-04-06 05:09 pm (UTC)