Frances Hardinge is a UK writer who writes young adult fantasy; I first discovered her when my friend Victoria Ford Smith recommended her novel The Lie Tree, since it was about that favorite subject of mine, Victorian science. (I in turn recommended this to my friend Christiana Salah to teach in her British literature class, and she reported it was her students' favorite of the readings she assigned.) I liked The Lie Tree enough that I've since bought any of Hardinge's books that become Lodestar finalists; this is the third, after A Skinful of Shadows and Deeplight.
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Originally published: 2022 Acquired: April 2024 Read: May 2024 |
Reading the finalists for the Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book often makes me despair. Does the genre of young adult sf&f have to be so, well, generic? Saying Hardinge "transcends" genre is condescending, but she does refuse to be hemmed in by it, I think. Unraveller is squarely YA, in that it's about young people coming into adulthood and learning to navigate that, but it's not the currently overly common YA narrative of villages getting attacked and people going on quests, which are clearly written by writers who have watched a lot of Avatar: The Last Airbender but not read many actual books. (Though if that's what the market wants, can we blame them?)
Anyway, Unraveller is set in a fantasy world where a sufficiently angry person can incubate inside themselves a "curse egg," which then allows them to hit the target of their anger with a curse—usually a thematically appropriate but disproportionate punishment. If, for example (minor spoiler here), you are a boat inspector who goes around fining people for illegal fishing, maybe you get transformed into bait for the hook of a fisherman. One of the two main characters has the talent of "unravelling"; he can follow the threads of a curse and unravel it, which usually required him to emotionally understand the curser and set things right. The other main character is a girl who he uncursed; she was transformed into a bird... and still sometimes finds herself yearning for that way of being.
So, as I am coming to realize is typical of Hardinge, we have an interesting secondary world but also a set of concepts that are thematically rich. No one would ever be tempted to use the term "magic system" to describe this book. There are a lot of really great sequences in this novel, as the two protagonists travel from place to place, unravelling curses, but also slowly realizing that there's a conspiracy they need to unravel too, a plot to leverage the power of cursers in a systematic way. Hardinge is an evocative writer, and her dark landscapes throb with life.
Compared to the previous Hardinge novels I've read, I would rate this below The Lie Tree and A Skinful of Shadows but above Deeplight. Though I liked a lot about this novel, I felt like its ambition somewhat outreached its grasp. There were a rich set of associations here, but by the novel's end, I didn't think they'd totally cohered. The metaphorical associations resonating in Unraveller's conception of cursing didn't pay off in the plot about the conspiracy. In our era of populist leaders leveraging anger to dark purposes, it seemed to me that there was some potential in how the conspirators were taking people's curses and misdirecting their anger to fulfill their own ambitions, but this wasn't really present in the text. I also found the conspiracy plot a bit jerky in the way it unfolded.
But, you know, give me a flawed Frances Hardinge novel over a successful A:TLA ripoff any day. So many of those books are completely forgettable; this book contains images I will remember for a long time.
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