Cuckoo's Song by Frances Hardinge
Jul. 13th, 2016 12:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alias_sqbrA nice well behaved middle class 11 year old girl in 1920s England wakes up Wrong. Something's off about her memories. She's always hungry. Her sister keeps screaming that she's fake. Her parents start to wonder what's happened to their Nice Little Girl...
I normally don't like kid's books but I LOVED this with a FIERCE PASSION. I think all nice little 11 year old girls start to feel like there is Something Wrong With Them and Soon Everyone Will Know but this takes that experience and dials it up to a thousand and it was all very satisfying. The delightfully awful little sister is great too.
Note that this is children's horror, I found the awful things that happen cathartic but they can be quite awful.
Spoilers about what's going on and how it broadly plays out. I wanted to know, and am glad I knew in advance, but ymmv. I also mention the one thing I didn't like, which some people may find very upsetting.
SPOILERS
The main character Tris is a changleling, with the original Tris's memories. She is unambiguously not human, and not the same person as real!Tris, though they have a lot in common. Her true nature is quite monstrous and she gets a happy ending with freedom and agency regardless.
My one complaint is that her parents are well meaning but also pretty awful, even abusive (bad to their real children and even worse to the main character once she starts acting "off"), and while I'm all for sympathetic portrayals of flawed characters the ending was a bit too easy on them for me. While they get criticised harshly, and improve, I still worry for their parenting abilities going forth. Monstrousness as metaphor for girls being punished for not fitting their parents expectations is pretty explicit, and it also worked very well as a metaphor for being queer/trans/mentally ill, and once you start drawing on those kinds of feelings you have to follow through. The book tried, but didn't succeed quite as well as I'd have liked.
Also there's the typical "Oh no, weird things are happening, am I crazy?? ...no things really are that weird" thing, and I would have liked some sympathetic delusional characters to balance that out. But that's a common issue in fantasy/horror.
Still. She is delightfully monstrous and the narrative says over and over that she is still a person, and for that I loved it.
I normally don't like kid's books but I LOVED this with a FIERCE PASSION. I think all nice little 11 year old girls start to feel like there is Something Wrong With Them and Soon Everyone Will Know but this takes that experience and dials it up to a thousand and it was all very satisfying. The delightfully awful little sister is great too.
Note that this is children's horror, I found the awful things that happen cathartic but they can be quite awful.
Spoilers about what's going on and how it broadly plays out. I wanted to know, and am glad I knew in advance, but ymmv. I also mention the one thing I didn't like, which some people may find very upsetting.
SPOILERS
The main character Tris is a changleling, with the original Tris's memories. She is unambiguously not human, and not the same person as real!Tris, though they have a lot in common. Her true nature is quite monstrous and she gets a happy ending with freedom and agency regardless.
My one complaint is that her parents are well meaning but also pretty awful, even abusive (bad to their real children and even worse to the main character once she starts acting "off"), and while I'm all for sympathetic portrayals of flawed characters the ending was a bit too easy on them for me. While they get criticised harshly, and improve, I still worry for their parenting abilities going forth. Monstrousness as metaphor for girls being punished for not fitting their parents expectations is pretty explicit, and it also worked very well as a metaphor for being queer/trans/mentally ill, and once you start drawing on those kinds of feelings you have to follow through. The book tried, but didn't succeed quite as well as I'd have liked.
Also there's the typical "Oh no, weird things are happening, am I crazy?? ...no things really are that weird" thing, and I would have liked some sympathetic delusional characters to balance that out. But that's a common issue in fantasy/horror.
Still. She is delightfully monstrous and the narrative says over and over that she is still a person, and for that I loved it.
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Date: 2016-07-12 06:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-07-13 01:19 pm (UTC)It was so great! I have to decide which of her other books to read next now.
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Date: 2016-07-17 07:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-07-18 06:15 am (UTC)That looked really interesting, but I got the feeling it might have a sad ending, which I am a sook about. Does it?
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Date: 2016-07-22 07:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-07-22 04:30 pm (UTC)Thank you, that's good enough for me!
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Date: 2016-07-13 12:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-07-13 01:18 pm (UTC)Yes! I was going to say that protagonist!Pen style characters are not usually quite so complicit, but I guess Tris is like Toby in the Labyrinth.
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Date: 2016-07-13 01:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-07-13 01:16 pm (UTC)Yes, it was amazing.
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Date: 2016-07-13 04:07 am (UTC)I was a bit disappointed when it turned into fantasy instead of horror, but I ended up liking the fantasy half of the book just as much once I got into it.
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Date: 2016-07-13 01:14 pm (UTC)I tend to find the second half of horror novels dissappointing so the transition worked really well for me.