skygiants

With Sorrow's Knot I think I have now finished reading everything from Erin Bow's backlog, which is good in that I have consistently enjoyed it all, but bad in that I have no more Erin Bow backlog.

All of Erin Bow's work (I can now say, having read all of it) is in some way about death and undeath and the wildly unhealthy ways in which human beings react to loss; however, Sorrow's Knot is EVEN MORE explicitly about this than most. The book focuses on Otter and her friends Kestrel and Cricket, who are all pretty sure they know what they're going to do when they grow up: Kestel is going to be a ranger, Cricket is going to become a storyteller (despite being a boy and getting a certain degree of side-eye for deciding to stay in the women's village at all -- everyone knows it's dangerous in the forest and boys don't have any power to protect themselves with, sorry boys!), and Otter is going to train with her mother Willow and Willow's teacher Tamarack to learn the very important job of being a binder, aka Person Who Stops The Dead From Coming Back And Killing Us All.

Then Tamarack dies -- and then Willow abruptly and without explanation decides she doesn't want Otter becoming a binder after all -- and then the knots that stop the dead from coming back to haunt the living begin unraveling -- and then more people die -- and then Otter and friends get to go on a road trip! It's not a super fun road trip and it unsurprisingly features several close encounters with the dead.

I really liked the worldbuilding and the slow and careful work that Bow does to build out the daily lives of the characters and the culture -- it's a North American-based world without European influence, and I'm certainly not qualified to comment on how well it's done, but to me it felt interesting and non-obvious. Also, Otter's world is almost entirely composed of women and everything revolves around Significant Mother-Daughter Relationships and it's great, although Erin Bow sadly had not yet discovered lesbians as of this book. (Though I feel like perhaps this is the book that led to her discovering lesbians? Like, I do wonder if someone came up to Erin Bow and pointed out that she'd written a matriarchal village where Actual Heterosexual Romance is explicitly rare and still somehow only featured Actual Heterosexual Romance onscreen, and Erin Bow was like 'WHOOPS OK SORRY I'LL MAKE IT UP TO YOU' and then we got The Scorpion Rules. Which, I mean, if this is the case, I guess I'm not complaining, I'm very happy to have The Scorpion Rules!)

I also really liked the importance of stories and storytelling and lore and bits and pieces of information shared and not shared, but the pacing of the way those stories are shared with the reader sometimes felt a little off to me; there were occasionally times, especially towards the end, when I felt like the book was leading me to expect a Big Reveal that had already been revealed. But, I mean, the point of the book is not really to Reveal, it's to examine grief -- and as I have mentioned above, Bow is exceptionally good on grief.

I liked The Scorpion Rules enough that I went looking for other Erin Bow books and found Plain Kate, which is the kind of middle-grade fairy tale that's sharper and darker than a good many adult novels.

When a mysterious peddler tries to buy her shadow in exchange for her heart's desire, protagonist Kate is very clear on the fact that it's a VERY BAD idea to make a deal with him. However, Kate's a strange-looking orphan girl who's suspiciously good at wood-carving, and doesn't have enough money to apprentice to a Guild so she can actually sell the things she makes -- which would be difficult enough if it were not a bad harvest, and people were not on the lookout for witches to blame for it. Without any options left, Kate makes the deal and trades away her shadow in exchange for some good travel and camping supplies so she can leave town.

She doesn't actually ask for her heart's desire -- not to be alone anymore -- but the peddler gives her cat the ability to talk anyway, as kind of a freebie.

And, of course, he warns her that she might want to try very hard to find people that will take her in before anyone notices that her shadow is disappearing.

Over the course of the rest of the book, Kate discovers why the peddler wants her shadow, and what he plans to do with it, and what she's going to have to do to stop it. It's not good! People definitely die! The book itself is very good, though, and works through cycles of violence and revenge with compassion for the people caught up in them. Kate spends a big chunk of the book traveling with the Roamers -- Romani or equivalent -- and although I am no expert, I liked the way they were written, as people with different customs to the rest of the country around them but generally no more or less fallible than anyone else. (Though, on another note, the peddler and one other character are both Magical Albinos.) Her most important relationships in the book are all really interesting and complex: her friendship with Drina, a Roamer girl who wants to help Kate but may be overestimating her ability to do so; her non-romantic, almost Stockholm-ish tie to the peddler; and, of course, the cat, who is SUCH A GOOD AND CATLIKE CAT.

( Spoilers for those who want to know in advance about risks to animals )