100 Books That Influenced Me, #43: The Moorchild

[osprey_archer]

Eloise Jarvis McGraw's The Moorchild is dedicated "To all children who have ever felt different." I don't believe I read this dedication the first time round - I was not in the habit of reading dedications when I was eleven - and it is perhaps just as well, because I already identified with the book so hard that I might very well have picked it as my desert island book if anyone had asked me at the time.

At the center of this of course is Saaski herself, the moorchild of the title: a member of the fairy Folk who is exchanged for a human child because she's half-human herself, and therefore can never fit in the Mound. And yet she doesn't fit with the humans either, with her dark skin and dandelion fluff of hair and overlong fingers (I latched onto this finger detail so hard that I gave it to my OC at the time) and her habit of forever running away to the Moors. "Freaky odd," the village children call her, and her only friend is the tinker's boy Tam, who comes sometimes to the moors with his pipes.

Saaski's journey to find - not a place she belongs, but a person she belongs with - resonated with me terribly. The book still hits me emotionally when I reread it now. I'm even more conscious of the pervasive sense of loneliness in this book: not just Saaski's but Tam's, Old Bess's, even Saaski's parents Anwara and Yanno, who love their child but can't understand her.

But I have enough distance from it now to admire the beautiful craft of the book too, not least of which is the marvelous grasp of historical detail. Saaski's daily chores (milking the cow, setting the bread), and the yearly chores of a small village farm - swarming the bees, retting the flax - are woven into the narrative with perfect naturalness, as are the thick swarms of herb names that dance across the narrative as Saaski brings them to her grandmother, Old Bess.

I loved (and still love) Old Bess almost as much as Saaski: a tough, tart-tongued village healer, who holds her peace and keeps her counsel and watches over Saaski, and loves her even though she knows from the start that Saaski is a changeling child - perhaps because she sees something of herself in Saaski. Old Bess is not one of the Folk herself (in fact, the Folk have written runes on her door to warn each other of danger: even they know Old Bess is a force to be reckoned with!), but she's an outsider too, and yet has built up a life in the village despite that.

There's also a lot of beautiful, beautiful description in this book, as vivid and absolutely unobtrusive as the historical detail: the simple images of the moor as "broom-gilded" (broom being a yellow flower), or the scene where Saaski and her one friend Tam play their pipes together and Saaski's bagpipes sing "over and under his little pipe's shrill melody like a bramble vine twining a sapling."

And the metaphors McGraw uses to describe mental states, too, are beautiful vivid and apt. After a bad start to the day, Saaski rushes up to the moors to "let the music mend the jagged edges of the morning"; or Saaski's struggles with her mostly-submerged memories of her time with the Folk, which she strives to push away and yet sometimes yearns to remember, so that when someone mentions a familiar name, it "streaked across her memory like a shooting star and vanished into the general dark."

God, what I would give to write a metaphor like that. There are a lot of books I admire without wanting to have written them, but this one - I would give anything to write a story that means as much for other people as this has meant for me.

Comments

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I would give anything to write a story that means as much for other people as this has meant for me.

I'm with you. I read this story as an adult, as the mother of children of an age to read it, and I loved it so hard, so deeply. It was so rich, so compassionate, and so **true**. The scene where Saaski chases the bees with her father--just thinking of it brings tears to my eyes. They loved their changeling daughter as best they could... I think that's part of it: the author empathized with the parents, too.

And I liked the portrait of life among the folk, too--oh, just everything. It's a unique and wonderful book.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

Yes! I was actually a little concerned about reading it, because it had meant so much to me and I couldn't bear for it to be ruined... but then I thought, "asakiyume read it as an adult and loved it, so there must be more there than the pure eleven-year-old iddiness of it."

And there is. The bee scene is beautiful - the nature imagery of it, and also the fact that this is one of the few things that Yanno and Saaski enjoy doing together, and despite the fact that they have so little in common they work together on this...

And the life among the Folk! McGraw does a great job showing them as - not evil, but profoundly alien in their mischievous indifference; and I think it's difficult for many authors to write any creature as alien, even if it has six eyes and tentacles.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

(And our family adopted the phrase "freaky odd" because of this book)

[thisbluespirit]

I've never come across this one, but it does indeed sound beautiful.

The author's name sounded familiar, though, so I had to Google and I did read or read an extract of* The Seventeenth Swap.


*I had a book of extracts of books called I LIke THis Story (which was basically Puffin editor Kaye Webb introducing you to her favourite children's books) and I religiously hunted down all the ones I liked in it for years and year. So off the top of my head, I can't quite say whether TSS was one I found, or one I liked the look of but couldn't find. But one or the other!

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

It somehow never occurred to me to see if she had any other books out there (what can I say, I was eleven), but... maybe now is the time to check them out! Not like I have a billion books on my list already or anything.

[thisbluespirit]

There's always room for one more, though - that's the trouble!!