(no subject)

sovay reminded me recently that it had somehow been over a decade since I last read Carol Kendall's The Firelings, one of my favorite and most formative books growing up, so obviously I was immediately forced to remedy that.

The characters of The Firelings live on the slopes of an active volcano; in their theology, the volcano is the god Belcher, and their religious practices center around keeping Belcher happy and contented. Long ago, 'ways to keep Belcher happy' included occasionally giving him a 'morsel' to soothe his belly, but modern Firelings obviously don't do that ... except once, ten years ago, when a lot of seismic activity caused them to panic ... but the loss of baby Hulin was an unfortunate and singular tragedy.

Obviously, the story picks up when Belcher starts rumbling again. The attention of the village immediately focuses on the orphan Tacky-obbie, who would have been first choice for sacrifice ten years ago, if his uncle hadn't hidden him away at the crucial time. Tacky-obbie's parents were killed in an earthquake after building a sacrilegious potting oven on forbidden ground, so it seems natural that Belcher would want to complete the set. This comes to a head pretty early in the book; the rest of the plot focuses on the growing defiance of the other adolescents in the village, who form a tacit conspiracy to not only save Tacky-obbie but forge a different future for their community.

Aside from Tacky-obbie, the other most protagonist-y protagonists include Life, Hulin's sister, whose anger and impatience with the world have grown in proportion to her parents' grief and withdrawal after losing her her brother, and Skarra, apprentice to Belcher's priest MudLar, who has spent his whole life being shouted at and abused for not appropriately filling the Skarra-shaped hole in MudLar's expectations; this is pretty indicative of the way that the characters in the book are shaped by fear, loss, and trauma. Something that's really notable about the book, to me, is the fact that we get far more negative descriptions of the characters than positive ones -- Life is belligerent and judgmental, Skarra is weak and scrawny and wavering, mildly telepathic adolescent co-conspirators Milk and Mole Star are weird and reclusive, Life's frenemy Trueline is an annoying know-it-all who composes bad poetry and makes everyone listen to her sing it off-key, Tacky-obbie's uncle Potter Ott is ranting and drug-sodden and makes bad pots. We're never told to like any of these people. Often they don't like each other, and more often, they don't like themselves. But they're still willing to stand up for each other, and help each other, in the ways that they can and at the moments when it counts -- and in the end, that turns out to be enough.

(I somehow hadn't thought to draw the Frances Hardinge comparisons until sovay mentioned it, but as soon as I started thinking about it I would be genuinely shocked if this book hadn't been at least a partial influence on Hardinge's Gullstruck Island, with its untrustworthy adults, empty spaces left by past losses, and ambiguously hostile volcanic gods. )