skygiants: Mosca Mye, from the cover of Fly Trap (the fly in the butter)
[personal profile] osprey_archer, [personal profile] genarti have just finished a chapter-a-day buddy read of Franny Billingsley's The Robber Girl, which was great for us but I think possibly less than kind to the book itself ...

This is a book with a very distinctive voice that immediately sets up Questions and Mysteries. The nameless ten-year-old Robber Girl accompanies Gentleman Jack and his gang of bandits haunting the plains of what seems to be the American West; she has a mysterious and mostly-forgotten past, a judgmental dagger that speaks to her in her head, an Affliction that prevents her from speaking except when spoken to first, and a promise that once she's helped Gentleman Jack achieve his goals she will gain a Grandmother and a home and an opportunity to be loved.

When an attempted act of banditry goes wrong, Gentleman Jack ends up in jail, and the Robber Girl ends up at the house of the town judge and his depressed and grieving wife. She wants to help Gentleman Jack escape from jail. The Judge wants her to testify at his trial and also for her to eat some square meals. We, the readers -- at least if our small group is any judge -- want to know who the Robber Girl is, and how she came to be with Gentleman Jack, and who Grandmother is, and what the Judge's motivations are for his kindness, and whether the talking dagger is real and can in fact talk, and how Afflictions work, and whether we are currently in an alternate American West or not, and whether the town is in fact part of the broader civilization implied by the fact that Jack is accused of murdering a Federal Marshall, and and and ....

.... and some of these questions will be answered! But not all of them, and many of them sort of hastily at the end in a way that I'm not sure actually makes a ton of sense when you spend several weeks interestedly batting about possible answers, which, unfortunately, we were. Honestlhy I think the book is really much less interested in its mysteries and much more in general spoilers for the high-level thematic stuff I think the book is doing very well and the stuff that it does less well )

I had a fantastic time and I have no regrets about the way we did it, but I do think I'd be a higher on the book if I'd just raced through it and let the Robber Girl's voice carry me along. [personal profile] osprey_archer has an example of the language in her post;, she calls it an imperfect but engrossing read, with which I would agree!
skygiants: fairy tale illustration of a girl climbing a steep flight of stairs (mother i climbed)
Franny Billingsley's Chime has a lot in common with The Folk Keeper, the first Billingsley book I read -- it's a dark fairy tale centered around a teenaged girl who has a potentially-sinister connection with inhuman spirits, in the kind of universe where everything has a price. (Sometimes, you pay the price twice.) But within these parameters they are very different and equally excellent books, so the fact that there are two of them is like getting pumpkin pie and apple pie -- they're both pie, but they're very different kinds of pie, and they're both delicious, so why would anyone be unhappy about this?

The main difference, I think, is that The Folk Keeper's Corinna is fiercely independent -- she doesn't like people, she's not tied up with anybody else. Chime's Briony, on the other hand . . . also doesn't like people much, but she's completely, inextricably tied up in her family. Briony has a twin sister named Rose who is "peculiar," whom she loves and resents, for whose life she feels responsible; she has a stepmother, who encouraged her writing, whom she loved, for whose death she feels responsible; she has a father, who has been incredibly distant from the family for years, who apparently is now all of a sudden trying to act responsible for her; and according to Briony, everything bad that has ever happened to her family is her fault, which is why she starts out the book asking to be hanged.

Then you have Eldric, the love interest, who has just come from university in the city where they are beginning to have automobiles and electricity instead of witch trials and swamp spirits. Eldric is hilarious to me because he is one of those love interests who appears to have wandered in from a different book entirely and does not really understand that he is now in a dark fairy tale and his love interest fully believes that she is a being of pure evil.

BRIONY: So here we are in the library that I burned down, destroying every story I ever wrote, after almost killing my stepmother. Let's talk about you!
ELDRIC: I'm a well-known bad boy. I threw a stone and broke a window once!
BRIONY: . . .
ELDRIC: I'll teach you how to be wicked, Briony. Let's sneak out in the middle of the night and practice boxing!
BRIONY: . . . oh, you're sweet.

Then they attempt to flirt in Latin, except Eldric doesn't know it very well (though Briony does) so they flirt in terrible fake Latin, which cracked me up maybe more than it had a right to. I am saying this so you understand that there are some bits that are really funny in the middle of what the rest of the book is about, which is an examination of guilt, and emotional abuse, and how hard it is to break out of destructive ways of thinking about yourself -- how hard it is for someone who has been trained to see themselves a certain way to believe anything else.

Other virtues of the book: a.) Briony has an incredibly rich, witty, unique and incredibly unreliable first-person voice that I loved (although some people might bounce off it, I don't know) and b.) the treatment of Rose, Briony's twin sister. Rose starts out the book looking like a stock character, Briony's childlike burden, but as the story goes on Billingsley emphasizes more and more that Rose is not just a person in her own right, but an intelligent and creative one whose brain happens to work in a different pattern. Briony saves Rose once or twice, but Rose also saves Briony, and that made me really happy.

(I should, however, warn for a scene of attempted sexual assault, which I wish hadn't been in there -- I don't think it was necessary.)
skygiants: fairy tale illustration of a girl climbing a steep flight of stairs (mother i climbed)
[livejournal.com profile] elspeth_vimes has been recommending me Franny Billingsley's The Folk Keeper for ages, and, as always, she is a person worth listening to!

So The Folk Keeper begins with Corin, who is actually Corinna, a solitary orphan whose job is to sit in the cellar all day keeping the Folk fed and at bay. (Traditionally only boys do this job, which is why Corinna is being Corin.) Suddenly, a wild YA plot device appears! A mysterious and wealthy old man descends to carry our heroine off into a life of luxury!

MYSTERIOUS AND WEALTHY OLD MAN: To everyone's shock, Corinna, you actually have a secret noble heritage! And I have promised your tragically deceased parents to carry you off and provide you with a life of luxury, you'll be just like Sara Crewe, and be a noblewoman and have lots of pretty dresses and . . . why aren't you looking excited?
CORINNA: Thanks, but no thanks.
MYSTERIOUS AND WEALTHY OLD MAN: . . . I don't follow.
CORINNA: See, I actually really like being the person who sits in the cellar all day with the creepy supernatural figures. It gives me power and leverage and makes people afraid of me. In fact, I traumatized a small boy in order to get this job. And you want me to give that up to be a powerless noblewoman? As I said: no thanks.

So that's our heroine, who eventually does get convinced to go off to the mysterious old man's castle, but only if she's allowed to stay Corin and sit in their cellar and be their Folk Keeper. Which seems simple, except that the Folk there turn out to be significantly more difficult to handle than the ones she's used to and there's a very real possibility that they might literally eat her alive, and there are creepy background secrets among the castle noblefolk, and there's also this guy who just keeps insisting she do things like go for boat rides and have fun and what is this, she's not sure she's okay with this! Especially not when she has to worry about things like being eaten alive.

I really love Corinna as a narrator; she's ruthless and independent and invested in power, and runs her life on principles like "Find out what other people love the most, so if they threaten you, you can threaten them back." She's somewhat humanized over the course of the story, but not penalized. The feel of the book reminded me of Elizabeth Marie Pope's The Perilous Gard more than anything else - it has that kind of dark fairy-tale quality, and while the ending is happy, there's always a price for things. I love The Perilous Gard, and I loved this, too.

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