Maybe more books should be built like escalators.
Written: Oct 13 '09
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Simple but compelling characters and setting.
Cons: The first few pages left me unimpressed.
The Bottom Line: Not quite what I expected, but a delight nonetheless.
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| panguitch's Full Review: Dean Whitlock - Sky Carver |
Happy Discoveries
My favorite story from The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction so far this year has been Dean Whitlock's "Changeling." I was so struck by the honest insight and sensitivity he showed his imaginative but identifiably real characters that I immediately looked to see what else he had written and found not the adult novel I expected, but the wonderful middle-grade fantasy Sky Carver.
Here Whitlock shows the same ability to present characters who are simple rather than extravagant, but who possess the quirks and insecurities that make real human beings so compelling. He shows this wisdom and restraint at the same time he gradually elevates the level of the fantastic in this novel for young readers.
Story
Sky Carver is the story of Thomas Painter, who wishes his name was Carver because carving wood is what he loves, not the painting that his father was famous for and his uncle expects him to excel at. Thomas escapes this pressure when a raven drops a stick on his head. That stick turns out to be a weather wand and Thomas proves to have some magical talent. Now he's expected to leave home for the first time, find a weather mage, learn how to use the wand, and save his drought-stricken village.
Meanwhile Raven, who is actually a girl apprenticed to a bird mage, needs to find some way to get the wand back before Thomas takes it too far downriver. As the two travel south, deeper into the civilized world, they're joined by Fireboy, a bondservant who works on a steam-powered paddleboat. Together they finally reach Dunsgow, the dirty center of the world where mages have been mysteriously disappearing--the same place where Thomas's parents disappeared years ago.
Thoughts
This sets up a standard orphan-seeks-his-parentage story, but it's made interesting by several things, first among them the ambivalence and buried bitterness Thomas feels for the parents who abandoned him. Raven is another bitter character, appropriately caustic and likely a favorite among young readers who might find her rudeness entertaining.
Whitlock's quiet manner of escalating the fantastic also does much to draw the reader along in the story. The world of Sky Carver centers on a single river system, with industrialized Dunsgow at the delta, and the valleys of the five tributary rivers forming five baronies. The land is tiered, with the rivers cascading down from the High Reach to the Upper Reach to the Middle to the Low Reach, and with each step the land becomes more settled, more modern, and less magical. Perhaps simplistic from one point of view, this design feels perfectly right for the book, paralleling the reader's journey of discovery and the characters' journey from home down into danger, adventure, and self-realization.
Although magic ostensibly weakens farther from the High Reach, it plays an increasing role in the story as the characters travel further south. At first Thomas has no control over the wand and Raven is trapped in her bird form. Gradually they learn how to use their powers even as they become part of the underground in Dunsgow where mages have been disappearing. By the end, in a classic confrontation atop a cruel sorcerer's tower, magic suffuses the book, but Whitlock's patient building keeps the reader grounded in the concerns of the characters and the tensions of growing industrialization in this world.
Thomas is the focus, even if Raven has all the flash. His quest to find himself, and by extension to find his parents, and the complicated feelings surrounding this journey, even more than the world, the magic, and the adventures, make Sky Carver a memorable book that should appeal widely to younger readers.
- Panguitch
Recommended:
Yes
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panguitch
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"Realism is quite incapable of describing the complexity of contemporary experience." -Ursula K. Le Guin
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