The Gracekeepers by Kirsty Logan

I want to be friends with Kirsty Logan. Is that weird?

When I started my Twitter account it was with the sole purpose of trying to attract more readers to my blog – I’m pretty sure that that hasn’t happened, although I must say that the publishing companies and some authors have been great about re-tweeting my reviews, which definitely makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. However! What I have really gained from Twitter, is a bunch of ladies that I love following – Kirsty Logan, Sarah Perry, Kerry Hudson, Jessie Burton – I love watching them interact with each other, I love reading their books and I literally just want to be friends with them. Whenever I tweet any of them, I get a response, and they just all seem so sweet and lovely. It really makes me wish I lived overseas and could somehow fandangle a ‘random run-in’.  But I’m a creep like that.

The Gracekeepers is Logan’s first novel – and I must say that she has done a brilliant job with it. I don’t really want to compare this to Station Eleven, as the books are totally different, but like Emily St John Mandel (another Twitter fave), Logan has created a deeply rich post-apocalyptic setting, where the setting is vitally important to the character of the story, but not at all the thing that you focus on. Logan has created another perfect blend of a story driven genre novel. This time we are in a world where the sea has taken over and there are very few landmasses left. Humanity has divided itself, as it always does, between the haves and the have nots. In this case the haves are the landlockers; those who live on the few islands, able to grow their own food, build their own shelters and have a refuge during the storms. The rest and, once again mirroring real life, the majority of humanity are the damplings – those who are forced to live a nomadic boat life. Travelling from island to island in the hopes of getting a real meal and living the best they can off the few fish and seaweed cooked any way you can imagine. “Ah, so you’re angry because they are rich? Because they don’t have to scratch around for every single thing they eat or touch or use? You have a lot to learn little fish. There’s no use in the poor hating the rich. There’s more to the world than landlockers versus damplings.” Unlike Station Eleven, in The Gracekeepers we never find out what happened or when, we are just plopped in the middle with no explanation.

In the same sort of way we come across the characters of this story. We have North, a circus performer with the traveling boat circus Excalibur; North is a rare character in the circus world due to her act – performing scenes with her tame bear. North was born on the circus, like most of its performers, it’s the only home she knows; but North harbours a potentially dangerous secret, one that might upset the precarious balance of the floating circus. Callanish, a landlocker by birth, now lives as a gracekeeper – one who buries the dead damplings at sea. She has taken this life as a form of punishment for something from her past, and she also harbours a secret that she fears will potentially destroy her. The life that she has chosen is a lonely one – gracekeepers live alone on a house in the sea and rely on food from mourners in exchange for the burial rites. She hasn’t really taken to the life and feels the loneliness very acutely “Around them the graces shuddered in their cages and the sea sucked at the moorings. It was not difficult to pretend they were the only people left in the world. It was so easy, in fact, that perhaps it wasn’t pretending. No one would ever know what happened out here. Such small crimes”. North and Callanish cross paths after a terrible storm and are brought together by their secrets and their fears. “I’ve never actually gotten this far before. I’ve tried to tell people, but I couldn’t manage it. You already know so I thought it would be easier.” While they end up parting ways almost immediately, they are both so struck by one another that they start to see life in a new way, Callanish tries to atone for her past and North tries to figure out a better way to live.

The Gracekeepers is a pretty quick read. I read it over a period of two days, but could have easily finished it in one. The writing is incredibly beautiful, lyrical and it just flows so smoothly, I had read half the book without even realizing it. It almost felt like I was reading a long short story – all of the characters could easily have their own stories; which were something I loved about this book. The characters were all larger than life – from ‘Red Gold’ Stirling, the circus ringmaster, who longs to bring his family back to land and respectability – trying to accomplish this by marrying his son off to North and forcing her to live on land, his horrible wife Avalon, who chose her name to appeal to Red Gold and wants nothing more than to live on land, doing anything she can to get it “When people are cruel it’s often said that they have no heart, only a cold space or lump of ice in their chest. This was never true of Avalon. She had no heart, everyone knew, but there was nothing cold about her. In her chest burned an enormous coal, white-hot, brighter than the North Star. North knew the truth about Avalon: she was made of fire, and she would burn them all.” Even the secondary characters, the clowns and acrobats in the circus, the messengers who bring news to the gracekeepers, even North’s bear – they all had a certain something that left me longing to know more about them – to read them in their own stories. My previous encounter with Logan was through her short story collection – The Rental Heart and Other Fairytales. I have only read the first couple of stories so far – but the titular story, The Rental Heart, I can honestly say, is probably the best short story that I have ever read. Logan is a master of the short story, of packing as much punch as possible into those few pages, it’s incredible.  One of the things that I honestly loved best about this novel was that I felt it to be a unifying thread (or story) connecting all these other potential stories. I will be very sad indeed if she doesn’t, at some point, write another collection based on the characters from The Gracekeepers.

There are definitely elements of old folk tales in this book and I loved how Logan wove them in throughout the narrative. I guess, really, that everything that happens, to North at least, comes from folk tales, but its not overt in any way. Its just a starting point for the story. A jumping point. I would have loved to read more on that aspect, but I didn't feel like I was missing out on anything - I think that the small amount of actual fairy tale ends up making to book more accessible to a wider audience.  My only actual complaint about this book at all was that the ending was a wee bit rushed, another review that I read commented on the fact that something very tragic happens and the character involved doesn’t really seem to react – which I didn’t really notice at the time, but upon reflection agree with – it would have been nice to see more closure with that. Generally, I am always a fan when things are left unsaid; when parts of stories are left untold or endings are left unresolved (I should not say always… Firefly ending prematurely will always sadden me). And while the ending of the main story in this novel was definitely resolved, there was so much more that was left open. There were people and stories that were alluded to, without really being developed – and this worked perfectly for me. This story wasn’t about them; it was about North and Callanish. I think that anything extra would have distracted from them, from their story. That being said, I still have my fingers crossed for a short story collection based on everyone else!

The Girl with the Glass Feet by Ali Shaw

The first thing that I want to say about The Girl with the Glass Feet is that it is beautiful. The story is beautiful, the writing is beautiful; but it is also incredibly melancholy. The entire book (well the first half) feels like it is under a veil, and while all these beautiful things are occurring and all of these beautiful people are living, it is so terribly sad that it feels like there is a rock tied to your heart and you are fighting so hard to be happy and stay uplifted but there is nothing you can do about it because no matter how much you want things to be ok, they never will be and its confusing because it’s still the most beautiful thing that you have ever seen.

I must say, I wasn’t expecting this. ‘ “Are you sure you’re okay? Have you lost something?” “Light” He turned back to her, wondering if she might have seen it. It was on the rock beside her, beamed through a hole in the clouds.’ It seems that every character in this book is looking for a little bit of light. The story is about Ida, a visitor to the strange archipelago of St. Hauda’s Land who had, months before, come away with a strange ailment. She is slowly turning to glass. It started with a shard in her foot one day and has moved up her toes and started to overtake her heels. She goes back to the island hoping to find a cure, but really has nothing to go on other than something small she overheard a man say on her first trip there ‘Would you believe there are glass bodies here, hidden in the bog water?’

On her search for the mysterious man Ida stumbles across Midas, a local who lives and sees the world through his camera. Midas is a little socially awkward but he feels drawn to Ida, just as she feels drawn to him. He knows about the man that Ida is looking for, but is not sure that he trusts her enough, or is quite ready to open the wounds that telling her would involve. Midas’ only real connection to the world before this has been his friend George and his daughter Denver. George’s wife, and Denver’s mother, died a few years ago in a tragic accident and Midas does what he can to help them cope, although Midas has his own demons to deal with ‘she nodded. “It’s all a shame Midas, nothing good ever came from my marriage to your father.” And I think that Midas is gaining more from Denver than she is from him. Her advice? “I don’t think there is being brave, anyway. I used to not tread in puddles in case I fell in them and died like Mummy did. But then in the autumn when it flooded I got stuck and had to splash through one. It didn’t feel safer or worser. I just had to splash through it or wait until the sun came up and it all dried out”.

Before I started this book I assumed that it was going to be another fairy tale story, even though it’s not actually based on a fairy tale, as far as I am aware of. And it is, a girl is turning into glass and it’s happened before, there are flying dragonflies that are actually cows, and a mysterious creature that turns you albino if you look in its eyes. But, the more I read the more I realize that that’s not really the point of this story. This story is about loss and coping with loss when you don’t want to and you have no idea how to keep living, but you don’t have a choice. My only real complaint about the book is that it seems that Shaw is trying too hard. The language is a little hard to get used to, it is overly descriptive at the beginning although it seems to have toned down, either that or I am just more used to it now. And I am really looking forward to finishing it, but I don’t think that it’s going to be a very happy ending so I am trying to not get my hopes up – beautiful and melancholy don’t very often lend themselves to happy endings.

I wanted to choose a melancholy tea with which to accompany this book, but since tea makes me so happy, it was hard to find one. Instead I chose David's Midsummers Night Dream - a tea named for a story that is also beautiful and melancholy.

The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey

This book is probably the one that I have been most excited about in a while. I have always loved fairy tales and when I discovered that there is an entire sub-genre of adult fiction out there dedicated to the modern retelling of fairy tales… well, it’s not an exaggeration to say that I may have swooned. Because there are so many of these books out there, I have decided to start a little series of these reviews so that I can share this magical world with you, and hope that it catches your imagination and enchants you like they have enchanted me.

The particular fairy tale that this story is based on is actually not one that I am familiar with, which made it more interesting to me. It’s about an older couple who want desperately, but are unable to have children. One day they make a child out of snow and then that snow child comes to life and for a little while fills their lives with love and happiness. One of the things that I am really appreciating about Eowyn Ivey’s re-telling is that she talks about the original story; the main character references it when a similar thing happens to her and her husband. Jack and Mabel are the older childless couple in this story, recent immigrants to the Alaskan wilderness from Pennsylvania in the 1920s. After the stillborn birth of their child and years of internal torment they have decided to try to start their lives over. But as the old adage goes, you can run away but you still have to take yourself with you, and life in Alaska is hard and doesn’t help to ease the couples suffering.

Silence and depression seem to be Jack and Mabel’s constant companions out in the woods and so when an impromptu snowball fight erupts between the two of them one night, the joy it brings is a wonderful change. They start to build a snowman and without any sort of external communication that snowman starts to resemble a small girl with Mabel adding some mittens and a scarf as a final touch. It seems that night that the broken pieces of Jacks and Mabel’s lives may finally start to be mended, but the tale takes an interesting turn when the next day their snow child has been ruined, the mittens and scarf are missing and they both swear they have seen a small child running through the woods.

I don’t want to give too much away so I’ll hold off on the synopsis there. I’ve been finding with these midpoint reviews that there are mostly two types of books – ones that the story progresses linearly and mostly straight forward and I can kind of see what going to happen and where the story is going; and the other ones where I have no idea what’s going to happen and the second half of the book throws everything on its head. Sometimes this doesn’t happen dramatically, but the impact is the same. I think this story is going to be one of the latter ones. When the mysterious child appears Mabel remembers a story she was told as a child about The Snow Child. As I mentioned before, this is something that I really appreciate and also find completely fascinating. I wouldn’t begin to presume Ivey’s reason for doing this, but to me it grounds the story, Ivey is acknowledging that something fantastical is happening which allows one to believe that it could happen to you; that if you want something desperately enough it can happen. It might not be the way you want or expect it to be, but still, it could happen. Ivey has also done a brilliant job of keeping all her cards to her chest. At this point in the story you don’t really know what’s going on. There is a somewhat plausible explanation for the mysterious child’s existence and also a fantastical one; when Jack and Mabel talk with the child there is no quotation marks, yet when they talk amongst themselves or others, there are. Any sort of proof that the child exists seems to disappear before it can be seen by others, but at the same time there are tangible reasons to believe that the child is real; so I really have no idea what’s going on!

Ivey also does a wonderful job of making you feel the loneliness and isolation of the Alaskan wilderness; which is probably in part because she lives there, but mostly she is a wonderful writer. She completely captures the cold and the fear of not making it through the winters as well as how important it is for the community to come together so that they can all survive.

I’m glad that I chose this story as my first fairy tale. It’s brutal and beautiful; and even though I am only halfway through I recommend this book to anyone who has ever wanted to believe in magic!

I think a good tea to drink with this book would be Teavana's Gingerbread Tea. It tastes just like gingerbread which is a perfect companion for reading a fairy tale on a cold winter's day.