A Certain Slant of Light

As skygiants and genarti and I are all fans of Franny Billingsley’s, we decided to read her most recent release The Robber Girl as a buddy read, which was both a good and a bad decision.

In some ways, this is the perfect book for a buddy read. It’s a book with lots of mysteries, big and small, starting with “Is this a Snow Queen retelling?” We established within a couple of chapters that indeed it is not.

Instead, it’s set in a version of the Wild West very slightly off-kilter from our own world. In some ways it clearly is our own world: they celebrate Valentine’s Day and get dolls from France and horses from Belgium. But it is also a world where, if you don’t give a penny in return for a knife, the knife will quite literally cut you of its own accord; where some people have Afflictions, like permanently bloody hands for killing a child, or our heroine’s inability to speak until spoken to, which is a punishment for…

Well, we don’t know. Her past is also a mystery, and like the worldbuilding, we had a great time trying to figure it out.

However, at the end we agreed that the book really wasn’t designed to be read this closely, and probably suffered from this level of scrutiny.

Some of the problems we knew from the beginning weren’t really problems, but a mismatch between the questions we wanted to ask and the answers the book was interested in offering. For instance, I wanted to know how the cult of the Blue Rose, the predominant religious organization in the territory, fit in with other nineteenth-century religious splinter movements, and wasn’t it odd that it didn’t seem to have any relationship at all with Christianity, not even an oppositional one? But I fully acknowledge that this is just me and my weird preoccupation with 19th century utopian communities, which 99% of Billingsley’s readers will not share.

However, I do think the last few chapters genuinely do go off. My impression is that Billingsley wrote herself a little bit into a corner: suddenly the book is almost over, almost none of the questions have been answered, and she needs to cram as many answers as possible into that last little bit of space, and some of the answers don’t make sense and the answers that DO make sense don’t have much room to breathe.

But, although the ending is unsatisfying, I don’t think it’s bad in a way that spoils what came before, and I really did enjoy reading it, and the way that Billingsley plays with language, like her heroine’s arguments with her dagger:

No birds sang, no squirrels scrabbled in the indigo tree. The air held is breath, waiting for snow.

“Air can’t hold its breath,” said the dagger. “Air is breath.”

Bu the air was waiting for snow. I was waiting, too, and I was also waiting for morning, when I could go to the jail and tell Gentleman Jack I’d never betray him.

An imperfect but engrossing read.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Susan Cooper’s Victory! I began this in a dilatory fashion, then littlerhymes decided to spend a sultry vacation day at the library and zipped through the book, so then I had to zip too.

A good book for zipping, as it turns out! Very pacy, which is especially impressive as this is a dual timeline novel, and my experience is that usually one of the timelines drags. Usually the modern-day one, since the character in the Past is usually spying on the Nazis or becoming a pirate or something, while the modern-day character is, like, sipping coffee in a Starbucks while googling the adventures of Past character.

Sam does indeed have a more exciting story, as he finds himself on Admiral Nelson’s flagship Victory during the Battle of Trafalgar. But Molly’s modern-day story has a splash of magic to spice it up, as Molly finds Sam’s souvenir swatch of the Victory’s flag, and it kicks off some sort of mystical connection between them, which comes to a head when Molly and her grandfather visit the Victory at Portsmouth…

I expected a bit more to come of this mystical connection, to be honest, and instead it seemed that the book sort of petered off at the end. But nonetheless, an enjoyable read on the whole.

I also completed William Dean Howells’ Italian Journeys. Howells was the American consul in Venice during the Civil War, and this book, originally published in 1867, is an account of his vacations throughout Italy during that time. This time period was also, of course, in the midst of the reunification of Italy, and as my copy is a reprint of an edition that Howells lightly updated in the 1890s, there is an interesting palimpsest effect. He’ll describe, for instance, the Austrian soldiers still in northern Italy in the 1860s, then note that they are long gone now.

There’s a particularly charming bit where he describes a woman at the opera, wearing a white dress and carrying a fan that is red on one side and green on the other… the forbidden Italian colors! And every Italian in the opera knew it, and glowed with pleasure at the demonstration.

He also occasionally modifies his own reflections, as in this note on the unfinished excavations of Herculaneum. “[Herculaneum] was never perfectly dug out of the lava, and, as is known, it was filled up in the last century, together with other excavations, when they endangered the foundations of worthless Portici overhead. (I am amused to find myself so hot upon the poor property-holders of Portici. I suppose I should not myself, even for the cause of antiquity and the knowledge of classic civilization, like to have my house tumbled about my ears.)”

What I’m Reading Now

Onward in Chantemerle, where Gilbert has renounced his claim on Lucienne in favor of Louis! Gilbert’s religious advisor/father figure is hopeful that in sacrificing his betrothal, Gilbert will at last be able to accept the Catholic Church, and thus become a suitable leader for the deeply religious peasants of the Vendee. We shall see! Slightly concerned that this theme will lead to Gilbert drinking the cup of renunciation to its dregs and dying for the Vendee. But no, I still think this will end in a double wedding of four cousins… although it must be admitted that I am often unwisely hopeful about the endings of Broster books.

What I Plan to Read Next

skygiants and genarti and I are going to read Franny Billingsley’s The Robber Girl.

I finished Franny Billingsley's Chime, which I liked so much that I got her earlier book The Folk Keeper. They tell the same basic story: of a lonely, angry girl who is not what she seems, who only slowly realizes her true powers, with some help from a charming, wise-cracking lad who incidentally falls for her. If that story sounds like your sort of thing, they're both worth reading, but for my money Chime is by far the better book.

First, the setting: Chime’s Swampsea, a village ringed round in bogs inhabited by the Old Ones, is a better developed and more unusual setting than The Folk Keeper's island castle, and the Old Ones - which have their own voices and their own desires - are more interesting and more frightening than the faceless Folk.

Similarly, Chime’s characters are better developed than those in The Folk Keeper. The more space to develop the secondary characters and more apparent interest in doing so. I particularly liked Briony's unwanted suitor, Cecil, whose drippy mooncalf act is entertaining even as it irritates Briony. And I liked even more Briony’s twin sister Rose, who seems to have some form of autism, and is by turns exasperating and fascinating with her obsessions.

Most important, Briony herself is a much stronger character than The Folk Keeper’s Corinna - not in the sense that she faces down more adversity, but in the sense that she seems much more real. Her voice is far more individualized and interesting than Corinna's. She plays with language, and that playfulness permeates her character and leavens her anger and self-hatred. Neither character is always likable, but Briony is always interesting; she, far more than Corinna, is capable of the unexpected.