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This book was praised by several people whose taste I respect as one of the best of the year, and it’s about mutants (and disabled people, mentally ill people, and gender-nonconforming people) living in the sewers in a world that hates and fears them. It sounded right up my alley. It’s certainly ambitious, different, and thoughtful. But (you knew this was coming) nowhere near as much to my taste as I expected.
Matthew, the the community Teller (storyteller/historian) and the first child ever to be born in Safe, the sewer home of mutants (Cursed) and disabled (Sick) people who have fled Above due to persecution by Whitecoats (the medical and psychiatric establishment), has the scales down his back and claws on his feet, but he can hide them to Pass. You may see one of my issues already: an overabundance of Capitalized Words. This seems minor, but it’s distracting when there are several in one sentence, and there often were.
He is in love with and lives with Ariel, the beautiful bee-winged woman whom he took into Safe, but whose mental illness manifests in constantly weeping and running away. One night the spooky, shadow-controlling Corner, the only mutant to ever be exiled from Safe, returns and slaughters everyone in sight. Matthew, Ariel, and two others flee Safe for the terrifying Above, take refuge in the home of a doctor who knows about Safe, and… don’t do all that much for quite some time, other than hang out and contemplate their problems and how they arose, and their personal history and the history of Safe.
Incidentally, this is marketed as a YA novel. I am baffled by this. While many adults will (and do) love it, I think it’s a rare teenager who would. Also, I don’t recall if we’re ever told Matthew’s age, but if he is a teenager, that’s not essential to the story. He could easily be in his early twenties.
The book is told in Matthew’s semi-illiterate steam-of-consciousness narrative. It’s well-done and sometimes quite poetic, but it also had the effect of removing nearly everything I was interested in from the narrative. I wanted to know all about the mutant ensemble at Safe; Matthew already knows them all so well that, with a few exceptions, he doesn’t bother describing their mutations or personalities in much detail. I wanted scenes which revealed character and setting; Matthew, a Teller, was big on tell not show. I wanted to be able to follow what was going on; Matthew was extremely naïve and often confused. I wanted to know more about Ariel; Matthew idealized her as his beautiful, fragile love-object. This was all, or at least mostly, clearly a deliberate choice by Bobet, but it had the effect of making all the characters seem paper-thin (since Matthew didn’t understand them) and much of the action and motivations confusing or glossed over.
The politics came through loud and clear, but since that was the only thing that did, that ended up taking over the story. If you want to read a fantasy which carefully and thoughtfully deals with disability issues, mental illness issues, ableism, racism, sexism, homophobia, domestic violence, gender issues, intersex issues, and the persecution of people outside of the norm by the medical and psychiatric establishment, and the point made that some disabilities and illnesses really do need medical treatment and that separatism is not necessarily the answer and that you can still be unhealthily paranoid even if people really are after you, Above is for you. If you want to read about mutants in the sewers, it’s not really about that.
Above
Matthew, the the community Teller (storyteller/historian) and the first child ever to be born in Safe, the sewer home of mutants (Cursed) and disabled (Sick) people who have fled Above due to persecution by Whitecoats (the medical and psychiatric establishment), has the scales down his back and claws on his feet, but he can hide them to Pass. You may see one of my issues already: an overabundance of Capitalized Words. This seems minor, but it’s distracting when there are several in one sentence, and there often were.
He is in love with and lives with Ariel, the beautiful bee-winged woman whom he took into Safe, but whose mental illness manifests in constantly weeping and running away. One night the spooky, shadow-controlling Corner, the only mutant to ever be exiled from Safe, returns and slaughters everyone in sight. Matthew, Ariel, and two others flee Safe for the terrifying Above, take refuge in the home of a doctor who knows about Safe, and… don’t do all that much for quite some time, other than hang out and contemplate their problems and how they arose, and their personal history and the history of Safe.
Incidentally, this is marketed as a YA novel. I am baffled by this. While many adults will (and do) love it, I think it’s a rare teenager who would. Also, I don’t recall if we’re ever told Matthew’s age, but if he is a teenager, that’s not essential to the story. He could easily be in his early twenties.
The book is told in Matthew’s semi-illiterate steam-of-consciousness narrative. It’s well-done and sometimes quite poetic, but it also had the effect of removing nearly everything I was interested in from the narrative. I wanted to know all about the mutant ensemble at Safe; Matthew already knows them all so well that, with a few exceptions, he doesn’t bother describing their mutations or personalities in much detail. I wanted scenes which revealed character and setting; Matthew, a Teller, was big on tell not show. I wanted to be able to follow what was going on; Matthew was extremely naïve and often confused. I wanted to know more about Ariel; Matthew idealized her as his beautiful, fragile love-object. This was all, or at least mostly, clearly a deliberate choice by Bobet, but it had the effect of making all the characters seem paper-thin (since Matthew didn’t understand them) and much of the action and motivations confusing or glossed over.
The politics came through loud and clear, but since that was the only thing that did, that ended up taking over the story. If you want to read a fantasy which carefully and thoughtfully deals with disability issues, mental illness issues, ableism, racism, sexism, homophobia, domestic violence, gender issues, intersex issues, and the persecution of people outside of the norm by the medical and psychiatric establishment, and the point made that some disabilities and illnesses really do need medical treatment and that separatism is not necessarily the answer and that you can still be unhealthily paranoid even if people really are after you, Above is for you. If you want to read about mutants in the sewers, it’s not really about that.
Above
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There were way more capitalized words in the book than the ones I mentioned in the review. As far as I could tell, things either specifically associated with Above or specifically associated with Safe (as opposed to present in both places) were capitalized: Freak, Beast, Normal, Dealer, Doctor, Company, etc.
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I wonder if there's an audiobook?
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That line alone would make me flee the other direction, honestly. Especially in regards to mental illness; from my experience dealing with such, most mentally ill people are persecuted by their own bodies and chemistry, and the fact that our methods of dealing with such are still incredibly primitive.
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It's also not set in our world, exactly; this wasn't really clear, but I think what Bobet did was to take some unethical medical/psychiatric practices which used to happen but don't any more, some which do still happen now, and some which happen now but in different contexts than what occurs in the book, and mash it all together.
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I also tend to not get along with prose that is overstylized, which is sounds like this might be... BLOOD RED ROAD is in my tbr pile and I have reservations about it for that same reason.
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She looks back over her shoulder, hair whipping to and fro, and for a second the red clears and it’s oh god bee’s-wings, candle flame, everything good and clean and sweet in the world touching gentle on my eyes and nose and lips. Then she looks back at me with red-lined eyes and a tight-lined face and it’s gone, that thing that lights without burning, that thing that makes me want to touch her cheek soft nighttimes. She lowers her chin even more than it’s tilted down. Hiding.
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Thanks for the heads-up! :)
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I also really disliked the way that the main character was clearly putting Ariel on a pedestal, but that may just be my issues, growing up with a dad that had a very serious case of madonna/whore syndrome.
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My notes from my reading log:
"Oh, I wanted to like the plot so much more than I did! The language is superb. The obsessive objectification of the hero's love interest (can't call her a heroine)... less so. A for effort, though."
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I was really annoyed that (spoilers!) the intersex? genderqueer? genderless? character is also the psychotic killer who Just Wants to Be Loved.
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SPOILERS!
(I think Bobet intended that character to end up seeming sympathetic and somewhat justified. But I don't think being oppressed, dumped, and even framed for murder and exiled gives one the right to randomly slaughter hapless bystanders.)
On the one hand, everyone in Safe was some kind of oppressed minority, so the villain had to be as well. On the other hand, the villain could have simply been a mutant whose particular oppression doesn't exist in the real world.
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Re: SPOILERS!
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Bobet has had that problem before, IIRC. She promised to do better. :(
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http://wiki.shadowunit.org/index.php/Fiv
http://www.shadowunit.org/autopsies.html (plenty of triggers for violence, transphobia, etc.)
http://www.shadowunit.org/smf/index.php?t
She apologized later and seemed to get it, but her good intentions of doing an after school special about trans people kind of went horribly wrong. For bonus Unfortunate Implications she gave the mutant a power that inflicts telekinetic violence akin to beating someone from the inside (horrible symbolism) and had main characters misgendering victims at autopsy time. I wrote a few comments at the time debunking the Psycho Trans Killer meme Hollywood & slasher book authors are so fond of since people brought up the Ed Gein murders with the thoroughly wrong claims that he was a frustrated transsexual. Would it be appropriate to post a cut down version of that here?
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Above, however, is actually the previous time, as it was written first. It looks like it's after because of publishing lag, which SU has almost none of.
ETA: Forgot the link.
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I replied with more info and links, but it's caught in moderation due to the spam filter triggering on links to the Shadow Unit web-serial site. If you want to google it the story was an episode entitled "Five Autopsies" that she completed after "Above" featuring a trans serial killer who'd been denied transition and killed other trans women out of jealousy with a mutant power that basically beat them to death from the inside (a metaphor with more than a few Unfortunate Implications). The intent was clearly to dramatize the suffering of trans women denied transition, but it ended up perpetuating both the "psycho trans serial killer" trope Hollywood is so enamoured of (viz. "Silence of the Lambs", various interpretations of the crossdressing in "Psycho", etc.) and the trans women as murder victims trope that's even more common. For added fun viewpoint characters who knew the difference misgendered throughout. The whole thing was a classic example of a cis person who's got some idea of the issues and a degree of sympathy not thinking things through far enough and operating within a societal framework of transphobia with the added bonus of reinforcing the thoroughly debunked idea of trans women as serial killers (Ed Gein & co. having been rather a lot _not_ what the public perception has become). For the discussion googling "4x02 "Five Autopsies"" should get you it as the first hit, if not "Shadow Unit" and possibly "smf" will narrow it down.
Bobet's handling of the whole thing was actually rather better than you might expect - she listened to the criticism, acknowledged their truth, and apologized apparently sincerely. There was more than a little fail on the part of the usual Emma Bull/Elizabeth Bear-associated crew including He Who Shall No Be Named, but Leah herself wasn't really part of that and a decent number of people put time and effort into education and pushing back.
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If you're interested in evidence for debunking the trope next time it surfaces, the most relevant paper is K.E. Sullivan's "Ed Gein and the figure of the transgendered serial killer". It's a horrifying read even at that somewhat academic remove, but it's pretty thorough on both research & citations as well as entirely damning. The whole association of his murderous behavior with anything transgender appears to have been largely made up out of whole cloth by people who were not directly involved in the case and contradicts the actual psychological assessments and the available evidence.
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What is it with the lesbian sad endings, dammit. ARRRGH.
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Yeah, I had a lot of emotional investment wrapped up in Daphne. When she went, I lost most of the investment I had in the series -- and I had a lot. I still read it, but not very closely, and I care a lot less.
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But yeah. They drove their black woman crazy, gave severe physical trauma to their black and multiracial men, and killed their queer woman. It gets to be a bit much after a while. But Daphs was the big one for me. :(
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Shadow Unit SPOILERS
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Re: Shadow Unit SPOILERS
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