Thirteenth Child by Patricia C. Wrede

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I was a big, big fan of Patricia Wrede’s “dragons” series in middle school, though my memories of those books are vague. I remembered them fondly–as slim, plot-driven, funny, and somewhat feminist tales–so I was eager to revisit her writing in Thirteenth Child.

Too bad, then, that this book is nothing like the quick, addictive reads I remember. Thirteenth Child is less a novel and more a fictional memoir. It’s the story of Eff, seventh daughter in a large frontier family, whose twin brother Lan (as the seventh son of the seventh son) is magically gifted from birth. Unlike Lan, Eff herself has been told that she’s been cursed as the thirteenth-born in her family, that her magic will eventually come to poison her and those around her.

But weirdly this pronouncement has little impact on the story generally, if there is one. There really isn’t. As Eff grows up, we follow the progress of her family from the east coast to a settlement in the west, where her father is recruited to teach. Eff attends school, makes friends, deals (or doesn’t) with her sisters and her sisters’ marriages, does chores, catalogs wildlife, and occasionally sulks. She’s plenty busy–but a lot of what happens to her just isn’t that exciting or engaging. She’s largely a passive narrator, reporting back to us the events of her world without really taking an active role in them. I often felt like I was plodding through the chapters–and the years–but I was never really captivated by the plot or the voice.

Regarding the voice, I have to say that, incidentally, Eff’s narration never really rang true to me as the voice of an eighteen-year-old. She sounds much, much younger–it’s a voice that reminds me more of Scout Finch than anything you’d encounter in most YA. In fact, generally, I felt that this wasn’t a young adult novel at all. And while I’d be tempted to call it middle grade thanks to a lack of sexual content, it’s not that, either. Eff’s voice, though young, is wistful, detached, and nostalgic. This very much felt to me like a novel meant to appeal to adult fantasy and science fiction readers, who might better appreciate Wrede’s extensive world building and better tolerate Eff’s total lack of compelling romantic relationships.

The world building here certainly is extensive. Wrede’s central premise is that this is an alternate Earth where magic exists and some prehistoric creatures never became extinct, and she goes to great pains to show how that might conceivably impact every aspect of frontier life. The magical systems–and there are multiple ones here–are well-developed and believable, and so intertwined with the daily life of the characters that they don’t even think to info-dump on us, something a less talented writer might resort to. There are backlash movements, philosophical disagreements, vivid ecologies, and several different methods of magical schooling. There are even historical twists–Benjamin Franklin as an unschooled magical genius!

But Wrede seems so wrapped up in her world that she’s really forgotten to give us a worthwhile story. This promises to be a series, but I really can’t imagine where we’d go from here, because, in three hundred and forty pages, we really haven’t gone anywhere.

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A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It took me about eight tries to successfully dive in to Libba Bray’s A Great and Terrible Beauty. “I’m just not sure if I want to read about a rich, bratty Victorian teen and her privileged experiences,” I told my friend Nicole, when she had shared her own difficulty with the novel. And it’s true; particularly through the first chapters, heroine Gemma Doyle comes across as a brat. Despite her exotic locale (India), she argues with her mother in the first few pages like a stereotype of a petulant teenager. Sustained reading, however, is ultimately rewarded. Following her mother’s supernaturally-induced suicide, Gemma moves from India to the prestigious Spence Academy in London, a sort of posh finishing school for a gaggle of wealthy young ladies–and the book becomes very hard to put down.

At Spence, Gemma finds enduring, if slightly thorny, friendship with Felicity Worthington, queen bee of the school; Pippa Cross, epileptic pretty thing; and Ann Bradshaw, her ugly, poor, and hopelessly romantic roommate. The girls begin an exploration into the occult that will ultimately uncover answers about Gemma’s mother’s true nature–and lead to tragedy.

This journey is tenderly and vividly written, and if at times it edges on the purple, then that’s a wholly appropriate stylistic choice thanks to the era and the writing that Bray is attempting to invoke. The settings–Spence, India, the otherworldly “realms” that the girls are eventually able to enter–are rich and richly described. And there’s a real, admirable honesty in the ways that Bray writes her teenage girls. They’re difficultly sexual, and at times plain difficult; alliances shift easily, and the girls are often petty and ugly to one another. Nowhere is this more obvious than in Gemma’s treatment, as a narrator, of Ann. A more saccharine–and less honest–author might be tempted to whitewash such a character into a secret beauty or a governess-to-be with a heart of gold. But Gemma is more unforgiving than that in her narration, and I found the sometimes harsh depiction much more true-to-life.

Unfortunately, Bray’s modern values sometimes impacted A Great and Terrible Beauty in an ill-fitting way. Bray seems eager to let Gemma be described as a “strong” heroine, and so there’s some awkwardly inserted bratty dialog every so often that I felt wasn’t ultimately reflected in the character’s actions or narration. There’s a bit of lip service about feminism that felt entirely too-modern in tone. Likewise, the awkward insertion of a subplot about cutting.

However, these are the kind of details that only distracted slightly while I read and are quickly forgotten–and forgiven. Bray is, after all, a modern writer even if this is historical fiction–and what lingers about A Great and Terrible Beauty are its successes: the beautiful world, the complex women, the absolutely heart-wrenching ending, and the very strange–and seductive–magic.

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