Wednesday, February 1, 2023

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Unraveller by Frances Hardinge

 


Unraveller is the latest dark fantasy novel from young adult/middle-grade author Frances Hardinge, who has won or at least been nominated for a bunch of awards for her past works, including the Lodestar (Hugo) and the Norton (Nebula) Awards for books aimed at YA readers. The two of Hardinge's works that I've read have been at least very interesting even if I loved one (A Skinful of Shadows) more than the other (Deeplight) - both are darker young adult works with violence and dark but serious themes that probably make them a bit too much for Middle Grade readers, even as they don't have any mature/sexual content that would absolutely place them out of the middle grade age range. So I was interested to hear about Hardinge's latest...and was made even more interested when its worldbuilding was praised by Ursula Vernon, one of my favorite authors.

And Unraveller is absolutely phenomenal and well worth that praise, with it being my favorite Hardinge book yet. The story features a country with a fae-like Wilds that contains weird and supernatural-type creatures, one type of whom - the spider-esque Little Brothers - can grant a person with immense anger the ability to magically curse another. Into this world the story follows two teenagers: Kellen, a boy who is the only one who can "unravel" those curses...as long as he understands the intent of the curser and can suggest ways to mend fences (sorta), and Nettle, a girl who was cursed once by her stepmother to become a Heron but remains silently a bit traumatized by what happened to her and her siblings during their time as birds. The story deals with anger and rage - both at injustice and at individuals - with love and trauma and the struggle to recover from it and the difficulty of staying and trying to help others really fully recover from abuse and tragedies, and deals with these themes extremely well through its two main protagonists and the fantastical world around them. It's a clear highlight that I will be absolutely nominating or this year's Lodestar Award and hope it picks up a Norton Nomination as well.


---------------------------------------------Plot Summary----------------------------------------------
In the Country of Raddith, the people there live in a tentative treaty-drawn peace with the beings of the Wilds, the marsh-woods home to magical, supernatural, and just plain unearthly or inhuman creatures, whose magical ways can affect those humans who make the mistake of coming across their paths. In particular, the Wilds are known for housing the Little Brothers - spider-like creatures who seem to seek out people who are consumed by rage or hatred and gift them with a magical curse....a curse they can wield at the target of their rage, transforming them or affecting them in ways that can make their lives miserable...or worse. There is no way to defend against a curse, it seems, and no way to cure them either...except for a boy named Kellen.

As a child, Kellen had an incident with a Little Brother, that left him with a strange gift - he can unravel curses from those who were cursed...along with an uncontrollable power to unravel threads of fabric all around him. But that gift isn't so simple: Kellen needs to understand the cursed and the curser and sometimes come up with ways to respond to the anger between the cursed and the curser. Kellen though lacks the patience he needs to really use his ability and finds help from Nettle, a girl who was once cursed into becoming a bird - a heron - along with her siblings by her stepmother, who more quietly has stuck by his side ever since. But while Kellen has good intentions, he has trouble sticking around to help those healed who have recovered from a curse, and those he has helped often find moving on from the trauma harder than he can imagine...something Nettle is well aware of, as she privately feels shame, anger, and nightmares about her times as a bird and what transpired, and how the curse devastated her family.

And when a member of the merchant government, the Chancery, comes to Kellen and Nettle and explains that someone is gathering up cursers, including ones who Kellen has previously found out and gotten imprisoned, for some nefarious prupose, Kellen and Nettle find themselves dealing with a more organized and dangerous threat of curses...one which has every reason to target Kellen himself. To figure out what's going on, who's responsible, and how to deal with it, the two of them will need to deal with the dangerous other creatures of the Wilds, as well as the traumas of their own pasts that continue to linger in their minds....
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I'm going to screw up this review, because Unravelling is one of those books that is deep in so many ways and is just really really good at most of the things its trying to do in its themes, plotting, and characters - and its very hard to explain that. But here we go anyway.

Unraveller alternates its point of view chapters largely as being between Kellen, who gets the majority of chapters, and Nettle, with the perspective being used in any given chapter or segment not always being clear at first (the book alternates every chapter at first, but then stops doing that which caused some slight confusion). And each character has a very different view on the world from their experiences - to go along with very different temperments - which makes each of these perspectives very different and allows the book to drive home different ideas and variations of its themes, as well as to further its plot and subplots in really well done ways. The story also, for much of the book, follows Kellen and Nettle in kind of mini-arcs, as they get involved in a new place where someone has been cursed and have to figure out why and by whom in order to unravel that curse, in order to further get answers to the ongoing mystery, sort of as if this book was a TV Show with episodic moments and a longer myth arc. And this setup works really well as each of these mini-arcs are generally really interesting and enjoyable, and never feel like taking away from the longer story-arc or character development.

It helps that Kellen and Nettle are terrific leads to guide us through this world. Kellen is a young man or teenager who due to a fluke accident with a Little Brother got kicked out of his home village at a young age, and thus doesn't have anything to do other than to wander around the country unravelling curses for money. Kellen is good natured and caring, but he's also brash, impatient, and quick to anger, even if he doesn't really bear long grudges. He's also a really good detective at making leaps of intuition to discover the person and reasoning behind a curse. These traits make him very good at knowing what must be done to unravel curses....but also make him very bad at handling doing so and their aftermaths, as he isn't exactly the type who can necessarily convince people on his own to do what must be right and is too impatient and, to be honest, cowardly to try and handle the long term ramifications of unravelling a curse - dealing with that person's trauma, healing the community, etc.

By contrast Nettle might not be detective Kellen is (she at one point notes internally that Kellen's oft-right intuitive leaps are ones she can't really follow) but her experiences have made her a slow and deliberative person...and by experiences I mean her trauma from being cursed. I don't want to spoil too much, but when Nettle's whole family was turned into birds, the results were devastating for all four of them by the time Kellen got to them: one of them traumatized from killing a sister in bird form, another refusing to have the curse fully unravelled and staying as a bird, albeit one who can communicate telepathically with Nettle, and Nettle herself feeling immense guilt over her own animal actions as a Heron and what happened to her siblings. Nettle has a ton of internal agony and frustration and anger, and she deals with this all unlike Kellen by growing silent and holding it in, remaining calm to the outside even as she inwardly seethes, and tries to keep Kellen from screwing himself over too much. She's the one who thinks and deliberates among the two of them, but while others see that as her being the smart sensible one, she feels herself constantly roiling within and withdrawing, and wonders why she can't be like a few other former cursed survivors, who she sees thriving....of course those other cursed survivers (who call themselves the Rescued) think the same thing about her and see her as a leader.

And the book uses its incredily varied and well written setting, filled with magical beings, forests, marketplaces, and well normal village life, as well as its plot to really hammer home these themes of trauma and abuse through its lead characters. It also uses that plot to examine what it is that drives someone to curse - in some cases its evil anger, but in lots of cases, its righteous anger about injustice felt by people without the wealth or power to otherwise do anything about those injustices. This Country isn't a monarchy or dictatorship, but is ruled over by a merchant class and has its own significant amounts of inequality that causes such pain, and it doesn't really know what to do with those who feel such anger as to curse other than to lock them up in the equivalent of a prison/insane-asylum, for fear they might curse or do it again. And so as Kellen and Nettle get put, and are kind of forced into, the chase of a group that is collecting cursers for some form of revolution, they need to figure out that the people who are directing them might not be wholly right either - something that is especially felt by Nettle, who understands the righteous indignation of those who have seemingly lost everything.

This book goes on about these themes, about injustice, about trauma and recovery, about rage and patience and when they are valid and when one should let them go, and does so incredibly well, from beginning to its really great conclusion. It even handles how those changes due to curses affect other people, as well as other themes about love and sacrifices for loved ones etc. There's a lot I haven't dove into here. Does the book have some flaws? Sure - for exampe, How Kellen unravels curses kind of seems to vary and be ambiguous with that sometimes requiring the curser or cursed to do something to make up for the anger or sometimes seemingly just requiring Kellen to understand the motivation and its not consistent. But these flaws just aren't important compared to everything else, so I care very little about them in the end. Unraveller is pretty much a masterpiece, and absolutely is a recommend.

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