osprey_archer | Book Review: Losing Christina

Most of the world hasn’t read Caroline B. Cooney’s Losing Christina Trilogy, which is just too bad. The trilogy (Fog, Snow, and Fire) is fun, frightening, beautifully written, with wonderful characters and a wonderful sense of place and basically, you should go read it right now instead of reading this review.

The central conceit of the Losing Christina trilogy is this: Christina Romney, native of tiny Burning Fog Island off the coast of Maine, has to live with the high school principal and his wife once she starts middle school. The Shevvingtons (for those are their names) get their kicks by driving girls nuts by means of practical jokes and general creepiness.

This sounds totally ridiculous, and it is, but that doesn’t matter. Losing Christina works on dream logic, or rather nightmare logic—emotional logic—atmospheric logic—and in any of these spheres it makes total sense. It’s like a soap bubble: it’s perfect and unearthly lovely and it could be broken with just a gentle nudge of logic, but why would you want to?

It takes some time to perfect the atmosphere. The first book (Fog) is by far the weakest, because the plot (the destruction of Christina’s friend Anya) seems propelled more by authorial fiat than anything else; but by the third book (Fire) the Shevvingtons seem mythically evil, like a force of nature.

It’s suggested, by analogy, that the Shevvingtons are a force of nature, and can recruit fog or snow or fire for their evil ends. The title element of each book becomes a leitmotif within the book—a recurring image and a suggestion of how each girl will be destroyed. Anya will fade away to nothing; Dolly (Christina’s friend in Snow) will freeze; and Christina will go out in a blaze of glory.

Unless Christina can stop the Shevvingtons, despite the fact that no one else believes that they’re evil—not Christina’s parents; not Jonah or Blake or Benj; not even Anya, who ought to know.

Christina has a lovely relationship with her parents. They’re very close, especially her mother, so it’s devastating for Christina that they don’t believe her.

There’s this one scene in Fire where Christina and her mother go shopping for a dress for a dance. Christina tries to talk to her mother about the Shevvingtons, gives up when she can’t get through to her, and then they go for ice cream. “Buttercrunch with butterscotch,” said Christina. “Just the way you like it.”

“I love it when you remember details,” said her mother happily. “We’re so close, you and I.”

It’s so ironic. Especially given that Christina spends the rest of the scene growing progressively more alienated from the world, until when her mother leaves to go home the world freezes “like a sepia photograph” and then restarts again, but Christina is no longer of it—or at least, no longer of the human world. She’s falling into the Shevvingtonian world…

Especially in Fire, which is the best of the trilogy, similes and metaphors riddle the text. It’s like the real world and fantasy are bleeding into each other: Christina really is an island princess, marked out for sacrifice (another image that recurs within the books). To the Shevvingtons, who are evil gods.

It’s BRILLIANT. I LOVE these books.

But it’s grounded in mundane detail. You know how lots of teen books take place in Anytown, USA? Not this—this takes place in Maine, in a little tourist town on the coast, where the fog prisms sunsets to look like fire and the school raises money with clam chowder festivals. The Shevvingtons have laughs like the sound of tourists, who love breaking glass.

So there’s this wonderful mix of quasi-supernatural atmosphere and a well-delineated setting and wonderful characters (I’ve met Christina’s friend Dolly. I may have been Dolly), so it’s so eerie and beautiful and just iridescent. Incandescent. Efflorescent.

Oh, just go read them. There’s an omnibus edition at Barnes & Nobles (with the Fog cover, although I think the Fire cover is better. But I'm biased) and I suspect most libraries have them too. And they’re short! Quick to read, and so much fun!

Also, finals tomorrow. Wish me luck!