Hugos 2024: Unraveller by Frances Hardinge

Unraveller by Frances Hardinge

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.

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.

Hugos 2020: Deeplight by Frances Hardinge

Trade paperback, 442 pages
Published 2020 (originally 2019)
Acquired May 2020
Read July 2020

Deeplight by Frances Hardinge

I've read two previous novels by Frances Hardinge, The Lie Tree and A Skinful of Shadows, and found them both strong books, deeply immersive and captivating, full of dark magic and dark truths. I expect to love this too.

Unfortunately, I didn't. Deeplight has an interesting premise: it's set in a fantasy archipelago that was once terrorized by gigantic sea creatures the islanders worshipped. A generation ago, the "gods" all died, and now the islanders harvest their scraps. The novel mostly follows a young street kid who ends up indentured on an island where a scientist in prying into the secrets of the gods, while at the same time he's come into possession of a powerful piece of "godware" himself.

I don't know what it is, but this never grabbed me like Hardinge's other novels did. I was never creeped out or unsettled as I was in those books. We're told that gods were terrible, but with some exceptions, the dark atmosphere that suffused her earlier books just isn't here. This is a perfectly serviceable fantasy adventure novel, but thematically, it never came together. There's this idea of storytelling running through the book, but it still doesn't quite cohere; one understands intellectually that there's a connection between the stories of the gods and the stories the narrator tells to get himself out of trouble and the stories we all tell ourselves in order to feel better, but you never feel it. The end just kind of becomes an action climax against cartoon villains.

(I wonder if it's because this is secondary-world fantasy, whereas the other two I've read are historical fantasy? Maybe she's more adept at the latter?)

That sounds like I hated it. I didn't. It's got neat worldbuilding (geographically, culturally, and historically), and some great ideas. But I would say it's a decent book and I know Frances Hardinge can write-- and I wanted her to write-- a great one.

Review: The Lie Tree by Frances Hardinge

Hardcover, 377 pages
Published 2016 (originally 2015)

Borrowed from a friend

Read December 2016

The Lie Tree by Frances Hardinge

I was moved to read this book by a review by Marah Gubar in Public Books. It's a very good review, so I recommend you read it if you're at all interested in this book, which is about a young Victorian girl named Faith whose father is a natural philosopher and minister caught up in a scandal of faking nephilim fossils. To avoid the effects of the scandal, the minister takes his household to a remote island, where he will ostensibly consult on matters archaeological. The beginning of the novel is fine, nothing special, but Hardinge needs this space to get all the pieces into position. When Faith's father dies and Faith discovers the eponymous lie tree, suddenly things kick into gear, and the book becomes compellingly readable. Faith takes desperate measures to locate her father's killer, and to protect the mendacity tree, which can reveal truths to those who sow lies. It's dark and beautiful and compelling; I stayed up late to finish it, and I was rewarded with every page.

Gubar covers the book's approach to science fairly well, which would normally be my go-to in a review, so I'll hit up a couple things. One thing that struck me was Faith's realization near the end of the book: "Faith had always told herself that she was not like other ladies. But neither, it seemed, were other ladies." No one is the stereotype of their social role; everyone engages in their own small acts of defiance and selfhood. That's probably one of the biggest lessons Faith learns here, but it's a hard lesson to learn. It's also one of the biggest strengths of the book-- these are all complicated characters, with multiple motives jockeying for supremacy. No one is one-note.

Secondly, as Gubar says of the mendacity tree, "The sudden intrusion of this apparently fantastic element into a meticulously realistic historical fiction is profoundly destabilizing." She's right: it's the only fantastic element in an otherwise historical novel. But the mendacity tree worked for me, as it did for her. In addition to what she argues about it, I felt that the mendacity tree actually seemed very scientific in a sense. Faith has to tell lies in order to get truth out of the tree, so that the more truth she possesses, the more falsehoods exist in her social sphere. It has a very First Law of Thermodynamics feel to it: truth can be transformed from one form to another, but cannot be created or destroyed. Increasing truth in one part of the system means it must be decreased in another. It's a very striking idea, and Hardinge weaves the mendacity tree right into the historical substance of her novel in a way that is utterly convincing.

One quibble: the word scientist is used a lot in this book, and I understand why, since it's what we're used to. But in the 1860s, when the book is set, natural philosopher or man of science would have been much more prevalent terms. Did you know Darwin never used the word scientist in his correspondence? And a Victorian minister, I think, would be even less likely to call himself a scientist than Darwin!

Hugos 2018: A Skinful of Shadows by Frances Hardinge

Trade paperback, 415 pages
Published 2017
Acquired May 2018
Read July 2018

A Skinful of Shadows by Frances Hardinge

For my Hugo reading, I automatically purchase all the Best Novel finalists in hard copy, and then pick and choose in the other categories. (Anything I don't purchase myself, I can get from the voter packet and/or the library.) A Skinful of Shadows, finalist for Best Young Adult Book (Not a Hugo), was an automatic buy for me, based on how much I liked Hardinge's last novel, The Lie Tree, and I sat down to read it literally knowing nothing about it, not even reading the back cover.

I guess for this reason it's hard for me to want to tell you anything about it here. Like The Lie Tree, Skinful of Shadows is a dark historical fantasy novel, with a unique magical conceit at its heart, that Hardinge explores all the permutations of. The novel twists and turns a lot, in a good way; I think a lesser author would have extracted two hundred pages out of any one of the things that makes up this novel, but Hardinge keeps things going, with lots of revelations and upheavals of the kind that make you say something aloud. Beautifully written, neat ideas, intriguing plot, and sharp character work. At the time I write this, I have two more finalists for Best Young Adult Book to read, but if either of them surpass this, I'll be quite amazed. (And happy, I guess, to read so many quality novels.)

Addendum: One of them did! And it was indeed amazing.