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(SFF Bingo): Wildings, by Eleanor Glewwe
Sep. 8th, 2023 06:32 pmDisclaimer: Glewwe is a friend and I was at a release event for this book, I bought "Sparkers" (to which "Wildings" is a sequel) then and had it autographed, so this isn't like a strictly impartial review or anything. But none of them are!
"The reasonable [girl] adapts [herself] to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to [herself]. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable [girl]." The original quote is from George Bernard Shaw, but it applies to both of these middle-grade novels. In Sparkers, 14-year-old Marah Levi investigates the truth behind a pandemic in her city-state of Ashara; Wildings picks up four years later, when Rivka Kadmiel and her ambassador father move to Ashara. (Although Marah and her family show up as side characters in Wildings, it makes sense without having read Sparkers.) Marah's friend is resigned about her sickness and potential death, and Rivka's twin brother is resigned to being separated from his family because he's non-magical. But both Marah and Rivka stand out by their stubbornness, and this moves them to create change.
An important difference between the books is in their narrators' social position; Marah is non-magical ("halani"), while Rivka is part of the magical ("kasiri") elite minority. I think this change works well, for a couple reasons. Both books are quite explicitly about discrimination, segregated schools, police brutality, etc. and Rivka's slower evolution from "hey, my brother doesn't deserve to be separated from me" to "nobody should be separated from their families" is realistic and not excruciatingly heavy-handed. (To be clear, it's still heavy-handed on plenty of occasions, and I'm probably too far from the target age range to assess if that "works" or not; I'm not sure I'd have been a good judge even when I was in the target age range.) Also, we get to see Rivka practicing magic; she's from the city-state of Atsan, and their magic relies heavily on music theory. This was cool.
Rivka has an unwavering commitment to reunite with her brother, despite the obstacles society puts in her way. However, compared to Marah, I felt like there was more "things falling into her lap" than her initiative moving the plot. It just so happens that, for the first time in four years, political hero Marah has come forward to speak out against forced adoption before even hearing about Rivka and her plight. Rivka happens to be attending class with Marah's brother, so she reaches out to him in order to contact Marah, and he unsurprisingly is like "you're just using me to get to my sister, everyone wants that, leave me alone." But oh look, the plot grants them another reason to hang out.
"Sparkers" starts out with small-scale events; Marah just wants to get into a good secondary school. Not till over a third of the way into the book does it escalate into "and maybe my friend and I can cure the plague." By the end, however, they discover corruption that brings down Ashara's government. "Wildings" starts with Rivka trying to find her brother, escalates with her trying to change unjust laws, and then, towards the climax, the plot veers into a thriller. I enjoyed getting to see the complications of interacting magic systems, but the abrupt "oh this rescue needs to be completed in the next couple hours" shift was jarring.
The kasiri/halani dynamic mostly seems to be drawn from RL racial injustice, ie, flashback Rivka (age 10): "He was plainly terrified of the police officer, which I didn’t understand. Mother and Father had taught us that the police were here to protect us." Towards the end, though, the legal arguments feel more like the 2010s fight for same-sex marriage equality.
"One by one, the parliamentarians make speeches. They all seem to want to say their piece, as though they hope to be immortalized in history books someday, whether as a hero who staved off an attack on the Family Laws or a visionary who led the way for progress." Compare this Onion take from June 2013. :P
A minor worldbuilding thing that I wanted to know more about, also in Sparkers: the characters have ten-day weeks, six "workdays" and four "weekend" days (although some jobs do work on weekends). Okay, whatever, they don't have the Genesis creation narrative or the Indo-European pantheon, we don't need seven-day weeks. But letting the kids and white-collar workers only work 60% of the time, is that going to fly? They have breaks between school years...
A couple funny parallels/tie-ins to other recent reads; Rivka's father is an ambassador, so part of his embassy is the chancery, which is also the court of government in Unraveller. (Yes, it's a real world, just one I hardly ever see.) And in both "Wildings" and "Tress of the Emerald Sea," there's a Deaf character who communicates by writing on a slate, and is temporarily cut off from the world when bad guys break the slate. In both cases I think it's an example of "having disability just be magically cured in a fantasy world is not good representation, what disabled people want to see is characters using accommodations that make sense given the setting."
Bingo: This should probably actually be "bottom of the TBR" for me since I read Sparkers when it came out seven years ago :P It's middle grade, so probably not YA. Glewwe is multiracial, so POC author square works. I'll probably use it for Sequel square.
"The reasonable [girl] adapts [herself] to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to [herself]. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable [girl]." The original quote is from George Bernard Shaw, but it applies to both of these middle-grade novels. In Sparkers, 14-year-old Marah Levi investigates the truth behind a pandemic in her city-state of Ashara; Wildings picks up four years later, when Rivka Kadmiel and her ambassador father move to Ashara. (Although Marah and her family show up as side characters in Wildings, it makes sense without having read Sparkers.) Marah's friend is resigned about her sickness and potential death, and Rivka's twin brother is resigned to being separated from his family because he's non-magical. But both Marah and Rivka stand out by their stubbornness, and this moves them to create change.
An important difference between the books is in their narrators' social position; Marah is non-magical ("halani"), while Rivka is part of the magical ("kasiri") elite minority. I think this change works well, for a couple reasons. Both books are quite explicitly about discrimination, segregated schools, police brutality, etc. and Rivka's slower evolution from "hey, my brother doesn't deserve to be separated from me" to "nobody should be separated from their families" is realistic and not excruciatingly heavy-handed. (To be clear, it's still heavy-handed on plenty of occasions, and I'm probably too far from the target age range to assess if that "works" or not; I'm not sure I'd have been a good judge even when I was in the target age range.) Also, we get to see Rivka practicing magic; she's from the city-state of Atsan, and their magic relies heavily on music theory. This was cool.
A maid helped carry in the harpsichord, which one magician painstakingly tuned while his colleagues, a cellist, a violinist, and a recorder player, arranged their chairs and stands. When they began to play, it was the first time I had heard polyphonic spells being cast, and despite my devastation over Arik and my worry for Mother, I was curious. The music was different from the kind I heard at concerts. The spells sounded more mathematical, somehow, composed not to be melodious but instead to shape magic into powerful currents.
There are several ways someone could handle a story about the divide between the magical elite and everyone else. One approach would be to have the majority group be genuinely mundane, and grapple with the implications of "yeah, it's just fundamentally not fair that we can't do what they can do." Another approach would be to have halani have a different form of magic that's looked down upon for absurd cultural reasons; maybe halani magic involves more motion and body language and kasiri are just prejudiced when they deride it as inferior to their incantations. But the rather painfully kludgy approach taken here is for halani to have "the intuition," which gives them gut feelings when the plot demands it, uh, something important is happening. Again, maybe the target audience doesn't find this lazy writing, but I do, sorry.
Rivka has an unwavering commitment to reunite with her brother, despite the obstacles society puts in her way. However, compared to Marah, I felt like there was more "things falling into her lap" than her initiative moving the plot. It just so happens that, for the first time in four years, political hero Marah has come forward to speak out against forced adoption before even hearing about Rivka and her plight. Rivka happens to be attending class with Marah's brother, so she reaches out to him in order to contact Marah, and he unsurprisingly is like "you're just using me to get to my sister, everyone wants that, leave me alone." But oh look, the plot grants them another reason to hang out.
"Sparkers" starts out with small-scale events; Marah just wants to get into a good secondary school. Not till over a third of the way into the book does it escalate into "and maybe my friend and I can cure the plague." By the end, however, they discover corruption that brings down Ashara's government. "Wildings" starts with Rivka trying to find her brother, escalates with her trying to change unjust laws, and then, towards the climax, the plot veers into a thriller. I enjoyed getting to see the complications of interacting magic systems, but the abrupt "oh this rescue needs to be completed in the next couple hours" shift was jarring.
The kasiri/halani dynamic mostly seems to be drawn from RL racial injustice, ie, flashback Rivka (age 10): "He was plainly terrified of the police officer, which I didn’t understand. Mother and Father had taught us that the police were here to protect us." Towards the end, though, the legal arguments feel more like the 2010s fight for same-sex marriage equality.
"One by one, the parliamentarians make speeches. They all seem to want to say their piece, as though they hope to be immortalized in history books someday, whether as a hero who staved off an attack on the Family Laws or a visionary who led the way for progress." Compare this Onion take from June 2013. :P
A minor worldbuilding thing that I wanted to know more about, also in Sparkers: the characters have ten-day weeks, six "workdays" and four "weekend" days (although some jobs do work on weekends). Okay, whatever, they don't have the Genesis creation narrative or the Indo-European pantheon, we don't need seven-day weeks. But letting the kids and white-collar workers only work 60% of the time, is that going to fly? They have breaks between school years...
A couple funny parallels/tie-ins to other recent reads; Rivka's father is an ambassador, so part of his embassy is the chancery, which is also the court of government in Unraveller. (Yes, it's a real world, just one I hardly ever see.) And in both "Wildings" and "Tress of the Emerald Sea," there's a Deaf character who communicates by writing on a slate, and is temporarily cut off from the world when bad guys break the slate. In both cases I think it's an example of "having disability just be magically cured in a fantasy world is not good representation, what disabled people want to see is characters using accommodations that make sense given the setting."
Bingo: This should probably actually be "bottom of the TBR" for me since I read Sparkers when it came out seven years ago :P It's middle grade, so probably not YA. Glewwe is multiracial, so POC author square works. I'll probably use it for Sequel square.
