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Unraveller - Francis Hardinge
I haven't read Hardinge in ages, so I'm catching up some of her books I missed. I started with this one, and really enjoyed it! Although it's not specifically similar to it, I was reminded of Fly By Night in its general vibe - not as dark as some of her books (... I say this about a book in which with entertainingly unhinged worldbuilding including a kingdom partly ruled by spiders, and kid protagonists caught up in adult politics in which they're not sure which of the various morally gray adults around them they can trust.
Hardinge is very good at writing (technically) unlikable characters who are somehow deeply likable, and that's very much on display here. The characters live in a land adjacent to the eerie, eldritch Wilds, home of creatures ranging from the aforementioned magical spiders to carnivorous, aquatic marsh-horses, Erlking-like Gladelords, drifting robed beings that imprison souls in cages made of their own handbones, and so on.
Thanks to the unpredictable magic of the Wilds, this is also the land of cursers - people who develop the ability to curse the objects of their hate. A curse is unstoppable and unfixable, and people who have cursed once continue to have the ability to do so. Therefore cursers are treated as extremely dangerous criminals, and are locked up in the magical equivalent of sanitoriums.
Kellen, one of the two protagonists, is a teenager who is the one person in the entire world who has the ability to undo curses. Unfortunately Kellen has the impulse control and empathy of a potato, so while clearly people are (usually) better off not being cursed, he tends to change them back and then leave them stranded in the wreckage of their life after the curse destroyed it. The other protagonist is one of Kellen's .... rescuees? victims?, a girl named Nettle. She and her siblings were all turned into birds by her poisonously hateful stepmother, one of her siblings ate one of the other ones while they were birds, and when Kellen turns them back, Nettle doesn't quite know how to be human anymore; as well as being traumatized, she's still psychologically at least partly a heron, leaving her weird, withdrawn, awkward, and generally struggling with a human body that she no longer entirely relates to. Nettle takes it upon herself to follow Kellen around and essentially act as his conscience to try to get him to slow down a bit and think about the consequences of his actions.
Also, one of her brothers is still a seagull, who follows her around and habitually perches on her head. This doesn't make Nettle any easier for regular humans to accept as one of them and get along with.
And that's just the setup in the first chapter. The actual plot kicks off when the kids are approached by a mysterious, slightly eldritch adult named Gall, who is psychically bonded to one of the carnivorous marsh-horses (this is done by giving up an eye, along with most of your humanity) who needs Kellen's special talents to solve a mystery involving curses. You're basically just dropped into the middle of these characters' lives, there's a *lot* going on and a lot of people that the kids already know and just casually name-drop, and assorted delightfully bananas bits of worldbuilding - the local magical spiders HATE technology, but in a very unpredictable way, so anyone who imports a new weed-puller or potato peeler runs the risk of being completely swarmed by angry spiders, or maybe they'll be fine with it! who knows! - along with a variety of interesting and weird curses (such as a guy who gets turned into a boat), creepy and slightly off-kilter magical creatures, and so forth.
I really liked that the book doesn't give us easy answers or a clearly ethical Correct Path, including not taking the easiest road on who the sympathetic characters are. The cursers are clearly dangerous; they're also clearly persecuted; and they're being manipulated by a politician who is using them for his own ends under the guise of helping them. The protagonist children are also being manipulated by adults who aren't telling them the entire truth and often put them in danger in pursuit of the rogue cell of cursers. Cursers are entirely capable of being basically decent people, regardless of how they're seen by others, but also the simple fact of being able to curse the object of your hatred tends to warp and damage you.
As usual in a lot of Hardinge's books, it's the charming nice people who you have to look out for, whereas the morally gray assholes are more or less what they seem (but still dangerous in their own way). The book did actually manage to completely surprise me with one of the betrayals, and the reasons for it.
If I had one complaint, it's that the ending is a lot more pat than everything leading up to it. The book ends in a series of vignettes tying up the characters' storylines and basically reads like the author either ran up against MG word count minimums and her editor told her she had to tie it up now, or ran into a deadline and was forced to hastily tie up a bunch of loose ends. Most of them were still reasonably in line with the characters' arcs up to that point, just a bit of a speedrun, but I was genuinely baffled at Leona, who paid a guy to sell his soul and become a monster to serve her, just being like "You're free! Guess you can go have a nice life now!" which was .... not really where I thought that storyline was going. (Although I did really enjoy most of what led up to it - Gall the marsh-horse rider was one of my favorites of the side characters, including his tangled set of allegiances to Leona, the kids, and his past.) On the whole, the characters' arcs were all really neat, and developed in ways I liked; it just felt like it was a little rushed and tied up in a neater bow at the end than I was expecting.
The Wilds were wonderfully weird and eldritch, terrifying and occasionally absurd; I liked that we see ordinary humans surviving and even sort-of thriving there in spite of everything wanting to eat them; and the floating Moonlit Market, where anything including human hearts can be bought and sold, was wonderfully eerie.
I also loved this particular exchange, because I don't know if I've ever seen this point made quite this distinctly:
I saved a few other quotes on my Kindle that give a general idea of the book's flavor:
(They did not like it.)
(Kellen defeating the bad guy in part by just being Too Dumb To Lose.)
Nettle was absolutely wonderful; I loved her. Kellen has a solid character arc but is pretty hard to take at the beginning, but that's kind of the point of him.
slight spoiler
one protagonist's brother ate her sister and that's not even the worst trauma of her life),Hardinge is very good at writing (technically) unlikable characters who are somehow deeply likable, and that's very much on display here. The characters live in a land adjacent to the eerie, eldritch Wilds, home of creatures ranging from the aforementioned magical spiders to carnivorous, aquatic marsh-horses, Erlking-like Gladelords, drifting robed beings that imprison souls in cages made of their own handbones, and so on.
Thanks to the unpredictable magic of the Wilds, this is also the land of cursers - people who develop the ability to curse the objects of their hate. A curse is unstoppable and unfixable, and people who have cursed once continue to have the ability to do so. Therefore cursers are treated as extremely dangerous criminals, and are locked up in the magical equivalent of sanitoriums.
Kellen, one of the two protagonists, is a teenager who is the one person in the entire world who has the ability to undo curses. Unfortunately Kellen has the impulse control and empathy of a potato, so while clearly people are (usually) better off not being cursed, he tends to change them back and then leave them stranded in the wreckage of their life after the curse destroyed it. The other protagonist is one of Kellen's .... rescuees? victims?, a girl named Nettle. She and her siblings were all turned into birds by her poisonously hateful stepmother, one of her siblings ate one of the other ones while they were birds, and when Kellen turns them back, Nettle doesn't quite know how to be human anymore; as well as being traumatized, she's still psychologically at least partly a heron, leaving her weird, withdrawn, awkward, and generally struggling with a human body that she no longer entirely relates to. Nettle takes it upon herself to follow Kellen around and essentially act as his conscience to try to get him to slow down a bit and think about the consequences of his actions.
Also, one of her brothers is still a seagull, who follows her around and habitually perches on her head. This doesn't make Nettle any easier for regular humans to accept as one of them and get along with.
And that's just the setup in the first chapter. The actual plot kicks off when the kids are approached by a mysterious, slightly eldritch adult named Gall, who is psychically bonded to one of the carnivorous marsh-horses (this is done by giving up an eye, along with most of your humanity) who needs Kellen's special talents to solve a mystery involving curses. You're basically just dropped into the middle of these characters' lives, there's a *lot* going on and a lot of people that the kids already know and just casually name-drop, and assorted delightfully bananas bits of worldbuilding - the local magical spiders HATE technology, but in a very unpredictable way, so anyone who imports a new weed-puller or potato peeler runs the risk of being completely swarmed by angry spiders, or maybe they'll be fine with it! who knows! - along with a variety of interesting and weird curses (such as a guy who gets turned into a boat), creepy and slightly off-kilter magical creatures, and so forth.
I really liked that the book doesn't give us easy answers or a clearly ethical Correct Path, including not taking the easiest road on who the sympathetic characters are. The cursers are clearly dangerous; they're also clearly persecuted; and they're being manipulated by a politician who is using them for his own ends under the guise of helping them. The protagonist children are also being manipulated by adults who aren't telling them the entire truth and often put them in danger in pursuit of the rogue cell of cursers. Cursers are entirely capable of being basically decent people, regardless of how they're seen by others, but also the simple fact of being able to curse the object of your hatred tends to warp and damage you.
As usual in a lot of Hardinge's books, it's the charming nice people who you have to look out for, whereas the morally gray assholes are more or less what they seem (but still dangerous in their own way). The book did actually manage to completely surprise me with one of the betrayals, and the reasons for it.
If I had one complaint, it's that the ending is a lot more pat than everything leading up to it. The book ends in a series of vignettes tying up the characters' storylines and basically reads like the author either ran up against MG word count minimums and her editor told her she had to tie it up now, or ran into a deadline and was forced to hastily tie up a bunch of loose ends. Most of them were still reasonably in line with the characters' arcs up to that point, just a bit of a speedrun, but I was genuinely baffled at Leona, who paid a guy to sell his soul and become a monster to serve her, just being like "You're free! Guess you can go have a nice life now!" which was .... not really where I thought that storyline was going. (Although I did really enjoy most of what led up to it - Gall the marsh-horse rider was one of my favorites of the side characters, including his tangled set of allegiances to Leona, the kids, and his past.) On the whole, the characters' arcs were all really neat, and developed in ways I liked; it just felt like it was a little rushed and tied up in a neater bow at the end than I was expecting.
The Wilds were wonderfully weird and eldritch, terrifying and occasionally absurd; I liked that we see ordinary humans surviving and even sort-of thriving there in spite of everything wanting to eat them; and the floating Moonlit Market, where anything including human hearts can be bought and sold, was wonderfully eerie.
I also loved this particular exchange, because I don't know if I've ever seen this point made quite this distinctly:
“She’s got terrible taste in men,” Kellen said aloud.
“It might not be her fault,” said Nettle. “Maybe terrible men just have taste in her.”
I saved a few other quotes on my Kindle that give a general idea of the book's flavor:
Unfortunately, the only way to find out if [the magic spiders] objected to something was to try using it, and see whether one ended up neck-deep in irate spiders.
[a few pages later]
Someone in the be-spidered boat managed to kick the musical box into the water with a melodic splong.
(They did not like it.)
“You’re good at planning ahead. But I’m good at making lots of stupid plans really fast, and sometimes that’s better.”
(Kellen defeating the bad guy in part by just being Too Dumb To Lose.)
Nobody wanted to trust anything important to an easily distracted bat.
Nettle was absolutely wonderful; I loved her. Kellen has a solid character arc but is pretty hard to take at the beginning, but that's kind of the point of him.
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Sold.
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But yeah, in general, there was a very odd, rushed sense of tying everything up at the end that I don't normally get from Hardinge's books, as you say - I could definitely see it being either editorial meddling, or having to rush to complete a deadline.
But I agree about loving the rest - I think generally it's up there among the ones I've enjoyed most of hers, aside from the last couple of chapters, but the parts I loved, I loved enough to be entirely worth it, and it'll definitely be a reread.
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