Tuesday, March 22, 2022

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Redwood and Wildfire by Andrea Hairston

 


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Redwood and Wildfire was the second book published by author Andrea Hairston.  The book originally was published by a small press in 2011, where it won a bunch of awards, but soon fell out of print.  Which was a shame, because I only became aware of Hairston in 2020 when Tor released her terrific epic fantasy "Master of Poisons" (Reviewed Here) and found that I could only obtain one of her old out of print books - the great Will Do Magic For Small Change* (Reviewed Here) - via Inter-Library Loan.  In frustration, I asked my library to try to purchase Hairston's backlog, and when Tor announced they were going to rerelease Hairston's entire backlog, my library actually took advantage to give this one a buy (Libraries are great folks).  

*Technically Will Do Magic For Small Change is a sequel to this book, although it's a distant sequel and features distant descendants of these characters so as to be wholly stand-alone with its own themes*

But enough about me, let's talk this book, which is a really strong Historical Fantasy taking place around the turn of the 20th century, featuring African American hoodoo conjuring girl Redwood and half-Seminole half-Irish man Aiden (Wildfire) as they struggle first in Georgia and then in Chicago with traumas and oppressions that come from nothing but their own backgrounds (as a Black girl and half-Native man in America).  Hairston features the two interacting with a number of characters, all of whom are trying to survive and thrive in their own ways - even if those ways aren't entirely good - in a world that tries to punish people for striving for their dreams.  Its a tale that does not go in the directions I expected, and can at times be difficult to read because of how each of the characters struggle and are imperfect, with some very magically real/surreal moments at times, but it works in the end pretty damn well.  

Trigger Warnings:  Rape, Animal Cruelty, Lynching; none of this is gratuitous and Hairston treats these events with the gravitas they deserve.  

-------------------------------------Plot Summary------------------------------------------------
Redwood was just a little Black girl in Peach Grove, Georgia in 1898, when her Hoodoo Conjuring mother told her and her brother and family to run....and when she found her mother dead in a local church.  

Aidan Cooper was a young teenage boy, of half-Irish and half-Seminole heritage, on that fateful day when from his vantage point up in a tree he saw a group of hooded men lynch Redwood's mother, while he was too scared to do anything to stop them...only taking her body afterwards to the church to be found.  

As they grow up, Redwood would go further into her mother's hoodoo ways, while Aidan would find himself haunted by her mother's spirit, turning into the town drunk known as Crazy Coop.  But somehow when Redwood and Aidan were together, their hoodoo magic was far beyond anything Redwood could do alone.  And so despite all their miserable circumstances, they found moments of happiness, and dreams of lives elsewhere such as in Chicago together.  

But when tragedy strikes and forces Redwood to flee the town separate from him, the two find themselves bitter about the world, and unable to truly dream, even as they wind up considering a possibility of a life for people like them that rich Whites would never imagine, such as that in show business, if life will even let them get that chance....
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Redwood and Wildfire is essentially the story of two individuals - Redwood and Aidan (Wildfire) - caught up in a time and place which is particularly hostile to their very existences and the existences of those they care about: people who aren't white, whether they be black, indigenous, or some other kind of PoC (a couple of characters are Persian and are treated as exotic* and non-white), especially in a post-reconstruction America, where Jim Crow is fully in effect. 

*This is one of the weaker parts of this story honestly, as Hairston doesn't just make the Persian characters exoticized by the Whites, but does so to an extent herself with a Persian Prince and his three wives.*

It's a world where rich white former plantation owners start exploiting race laws as well as their power to start taking away the land of the black folks who have lawfully taken the land to live on (as well as taking the land of poor Whites), where people of color have choices between playing into race stereotypes - like the Natives playing savage Indians in a show - or ripping off poor people, whether they be White, Black or whatever, in order to try to survive and thrive, where being three dimensional people is something that just isn't supposedly anything anyone would believe or want to see, and where these roles the PoC are forced into cause them to be in conflict with one another - Christians against ancestral Hoodoo, Businessmen against dreamers, etc.  The book does an incredible job with its minor characters at showing all these conflicts, and how they derive from them being real three-dimensional people in impossible situations.  

And that's exemplified perhaps most of all by Redwood and Aidan, our two lead characters.  For Redwood, she grew up a bit sheltered by her family as to what really happened to her mother, and delighted in being a bit wild and in learning the Hoodoo that her mother and mentor Subie taught her to do minor magics, like healing, or transporting someone in spirit to another city, or more.  She dreamed of singing and showing off and being wild....even if she was a bit lonely and always wished she had someone of her own, with the only one who felt like that to her being Aidan.  And then an event occurs, and Redwood finds herself on the run, and traumatized and struggling to hold on to that world view.  She can't quite use Hoodoo the same way, and can't find the ability to get any pleasure from a man....even if she does have feelings for that man.  She deals with people who both can be the family and friends she needs - like her brother George and his wife Clarissa (who is basically her best friend for the book's second half) - but who also have their own lack of understanding of what she is or what she's going through.  

And then there's Aidan, who is more jaded from the start, owing from his feeling a coward at not doing anything to stop the lynching of Redwood's mom, and from his Aunt who took him in trying to force him to embrace his White Irish heritage instead of his indigenous one, and to take those stories out of him.  He's a drunk and a lout, who has several wives who all leave him* and who brought him no joy when he had them.  But with Redwood, he can show his Seminole heritage, from the traditions he secretly maintains that his father taught him, to the stories he wrote down to remember, and he feels something - at first brotherly and then romantically for her, as she lets him embrace that side.  And yet, when he tries to do so in Chicago in the book's second half, he finds himself being stereotyped and forced into roles that cause him fury, and hurt his very soul - something that isn't helped by Redwood's new jadedness that he never expected, as well his own self-guilt for not getting there in time to save Redwood from her trauma.  

*The book has Aidan mentioning that when drunk he becomes violent, possibly towards them, as he tries to get Redwood to leave him for his own good, but we never see any of this - but it seems certainly likely based on his wives' reactions, but the book never really deals with the issue of domestic abuse, as he never acts this way with Redwood.*

 And its when both Redwood and Aidan come back together that things go in ways that are particularly different than you'd expect, but ways that make sense and make them and their struggle feel particularly real.   Yes, the two have pined for each other as the only ones who have made them whole, as the only one who made the other feel like their dreams are possible....and yet what they have seen and experienced since then makes them each unwilling to truly believe the way they once did, and prevents them from fully connecting as much as they desperately want to.  You expect that when Redwood has issues sexually with men after what happens to her that being with Aidan will fix it....but it doesn't, because it was never about Aidan or any specific man, but about her trauma and her loss in belief.  You expect that Aidan will find his own experience again being with Redwood, but he sees how others treat him, including Redwood's family, and he can't quite bring himself to dream or think of his journal and the life she once made him dream of, and he feels guilty being with her even if his problems aren't physical.  

The result is a story where characters have to struggle to dream, to put themselves out there and to find the spark in themselves they once had before reality tried to crush it out of them, and this just plain works.  I'm really butchering explaining this, but this is a special book and it's just really lovely - I could go on for a while on things I haven't talked about, but I need to end this review somewhere.  Recommended.  


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