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This was one of my favorite books of last year, and I have no idea how to review it.
It's best read entirely unspoiled, but it contains some elements that 1) I would normally warn people about, 2) might not be dealbreakers for people for whom they normally are, due to spoilery reasons, 3) even saying what they are is going to be either spoilery or misleading, 4) but I actually do want to warn people because they really are disturbing, but then the book goes in a completely different direction after that.
Also, most of what I liked about the book is extremely spoilery, but a lot of what made it so enjoyable was that I wasn't expecting it. I can say what happens in the first fourth or so, but again, the first fourth is really different in both tone and content from the rest of the book. ARRGH.
Okay, so, the book contains creepy body horror and a really disturbing (non-sexual) scene of a parent attempting to harm their child. There is an in-book reason for both that may or may not mean that readers who normally wouldn't touch a book containing such things would actually be OK with them in-context. The child is not actually harmed (though scared and upset) and the rest of the book is not disturbing at all, or at least it wasn't for me. Effectively, there is a genre-switch about a fourth of the way in. It starts as a mystery, quickly goes to horror, and then goes somewhere else entirely that is definitely not horror (though it has elements of… um… spookiness, I guess.) Also, it is almost entirely about women and girls and their relationships; there are important male characters, but they're secondary.
Setting is 1920s, post-WWI; I don't recall if we get an exact date, but the time period, like basically everything else in the book, initially looks like a colorful detail but turns out to be crucially important. 11-year-old Triss falls into the river and gets sick. She's sickly in general, so this isn't new; what is new is that her sister acts really weird around her, alternately angry and frightened and generally strange. And Triss herself feels changed, different, with bizarre cravings. Not for blood or flesh, but for much stranger things. Rotten, fallen apples. Doll's heads. Pincushions. And then her parents start whispering about her behind closed doors.
Triss is sure something happened to her in the fall in the river, but she doesn't remember it. Her doctor says this is normal after a shock. But she's not so sure...
And everything on out is giant spoilers for the entire rest of the book.
This is a changeling story, from the POV of a changeling who doesn't know she's one. Triss leans that she a changeling in an absolutely horrific scene in which her father tries to throw her into a fire - it's an old folk remedy from British folklore: throw the changeling into a fire, and it will fly up the chimney unharmed, and your real child will be returned to you. So he doesn't think he's harming his daughter - he knows Triss isn't his daughter, but a construction of straw and spiderwebs and magic. He's right. But Triss the changeling isn't a thing, but a person, albeit a constructed person.
She goes on the run, accompanied by her sister Pen, who wants to get her real sister back (though that relationship in itself turns out to be more complicated than one might expect) and Susan [ETA: I mean Violet], a flapper with an odd curse and a connection to the family that just might fix everything, if they can get everything assembled exactly right-- the original Triss included-- before the fake Triss, the Triss the readers knows and loves, collapses into a heap of dead leaves and nothingness.
In other words, this is not horror, it's fantasy and quite redemptive, uplifting fantasy at that. But since Triss doesn't know what she is for quite some time, the reader sees it as horror at first, because her predicament - in a body that isn't what she thinks it is, an unknowing imposter in a family that comes to hate and fear her and not even see her as a person - is horrific. But once she and Pen are forced to work together, and Triss learns what she is, the tone changes to one of adventure.
Highly recommended, even in you do need to hastily skim some horrific sections near the beginning. Very vivid and original, with great characters. Definitely not a downer, despite the cover and intro.
Cuckoo Song
I feel bad for the cover artist. They went with the "creepy horror" (very off-putting to me) cover, but a more representative cover would have been spoilery. Probably something that just signaled 1920s; unsettling/non-realistic/odd would have been better.
It's best read entirely unspoiled, but it contains some elements that 1) I would normally warn people about, 2) might not be dealbreakers for people for whom they normally are, due to spoilery reasons, 3) even saying what they are is going to be either spoilery or misleading, 4) but I actually do want to warn people because they really are disturbing, but then the book goes in a completely different direction after that.
Also, most of what I liked about the book is extremely spoilery, but a lot of what made it so enjoyable was that I wasn't expecting it. I can say what happens in the first fourth or so, but again, the first fourth is really different in both tone and content from the rest of the book. ARRGH.
Okay, so, the book contains creepy body horror and a really disturbing (non-sexual) scene of a parent attempting to harm their child. There is an in-book reason for both that may or may not mean that readers who normally wouldn't touch a book containing such things would actually be OK with them in-context. The child is not actually harmed (though scared and upset) and the rest of the book is not disturbing at all, or at least it wasn't for me. Effectively, there is a genre-switch about a fourth of the way in. It starts as a mystery, quickly goes to horror, and then goes somewhere else entirely that is definitely not horror (though it has elements of… um… spookiness, I guess.) Also, it is almost entirely about women and girls and their relationships; there are important male characters, but they're secondary.
Setting is 1920s, post-WWI; I don't recall if we get an exact date, but the time period, like basically everything else in the book, initially looks like a colorful detail but turns out to be crucially important. 11-year-old Triss falls into the river and gets sick. She's sickly in general, so this isn't new; what is new is that her sister acts really weird around her, alternately angry and frightened and generally strange. And Triss herself feels changed, different, with bizarre cravings. Not for blood or flesh, but for much stranger things. Rotten, fallen apples. Doll's heads. Pincushions. And then her parents start whispering about her behind closed doors.
Triss is sure something happened to her in the fall in the river, but she doesn't remember it. Her doctor says this is normal after a shock. But she's not so sure...
And everything on out is giant spoilers for the entire rest of the book.
This is a changeling story, from the POV of a changeling who doesn't know she's one. Triss leans that she a changeling in an absolutely horrific scene in which her father tries to throw her into a fire - it's an old folk remedy from British folklore: throw the changeling into a fire, and it will fly up the chimney unharmed, and your real child will be returned to you. So he doesn't think he's harming his daughter - he knows Triss isn't his daughter, but a construction of straw and spiderwebs and magic. He's right. But Triss the changeling isn't a thing, but a person, albeit a constructed person.
She goes on the run, accompanied by her sister Pen, who wants to get her real sister back (though that relationship in itself turns out to be more complicated than one might expect) and Susan [ETA: I mean Violet], a flapper with an odd curse and a connection to the family that just might fix everything, if they can get everything assembled exactly right-- the original Triss included-- before the fake Triss, the Triss the readers knows and loves, collapses into a heap of dead leaves and nothingness.
In other words, this is not horror, it's fantasy and quite redemptive, uplifting fantasy at that. But since Triss doesn't know what she is for quite some time, the reader sees it as horror at first, because her predicament - in a body that isn't what she thinks it is, an unknowing imposter in a family that comes to hate and fear her and not even see her as a person - is horrific. But once she and Pen are forced to work together, and Triss learns what she is, the tone changes to one of adventure.
Highly recommended, even in you do need to hastily skim some horrific sections near the beginning. Very vivid and original, with great characters. Definitely not a downer, despite the cover and intro.
Cuckoo Song
I feel bad for the cover artist. They went with the "creepy horror" (very off-putting to me) cover, but a more representative cover would have been spoilery. Probably something that just signaled 1920s; unsettling/non-realistic/odd would have been better.
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This is a changeling story, from the POV of a changeling who doesn't know she's one.
Ahahahah *SHUDDER* thaat's the part that's actually the dealbreaker for me. The reality/non-reality body-swap/changeling trope was a frequent feature of my not-technically-night-terrors-but-way-worse-than-what-most-people-call-'nightmares' that left me hypnophobic and insomniac for parts of my teens and a chunk of my early twenties.
And like I will never say that I could never read a story with any trope featured, because anything's possible, but the extent to which it would be easy for even a side-note in the narrative to throw me into wanting to scrub my skin off is HUGE, so it's not something I'd seek out for fun.
(I mean I could sort of guess from the title, given "cuckoo", but still.)
Although this is totally also an example for "M's triggers are hard to even warn for", come to think of it.
/BABBLE
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The central idea of "they will figure out I am not one of them and kill me for it", wherein I never got a choice ABOUT being one of them or not, and didn't come here on purpose, and can't go anywhere else, is baaasically the centre of a huge chunk of my PTSD, so the idea that it's not his daughter doesn't fix it for me, because I'm still Triss: so (conceptually) it's still the person I think is/love as my father trying to kill me.
Which rams right into more or less the other part of the PTSD, which is "people doing what they honestly think is best and even absolutely necessary which when turned on me is violating/gaslighting/harmful/fatal."
(Or conversely me doing the same to someone else, which for me is an even more nauseous idea especially since YOU CAN'T AVOID IT: it can catch you no matter how carefully you think because there will always be things you didn't/couldn't know and you never know when one of those is going to make the difference between helping someone or poisoning them.)
I can deal much more easily with deliberate hideous cruelty. I mean it's not my favourite, but.
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My fictional and RL triggers are really different - I should say, actually, that it is really, really hard to literally trigger me in a PTSD sense with fiction. In fact I don't think it's ever happened with written media. I have occasionally been triggered with images, but it's both really rare and I'm not sure why that specific thing got to me when other similar things didn't. (The movie Aria had a scene that actually gave me a panic attack - I literally leaped up and ran out of the theatre. It was gory but I've seen way gorier things that didn't bother me at all. I suspect it was a combination of the scene, some pre-existing upset which I've now forgotten, and being in a hot, crowded room, but I really don't know and that's the only time that's ever happened.)
Fiction, it's more of a squick thing. I don't like reading about rape or child abuse. But I will if the book is otherwise good. Graphic gross-outs, I can't read at all, but it's a squick, not a trigger.
I have a giant squick/creep out for all sorts of images, which is why I have to turn off images before reading cracked.com - they often feature creepy images that wig me out. But not in a PTSD way, in a "fuck why did I see that, now I can't unsee it way." And I am totally cool with seeing a lot of stuff in real life (like, surgery) that freaks me out in photos.
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Which is more where this would risk coming under. (Like I can't guarantee it would - I can imagine ways in which a couple friends I have whose writing I adore could run with the plotline and not hit Hissing M Territory - but it would be SO EASY for it to and it would just trash at least an afternoon if not longer.) (Which again: I am actually grateful you put up the review! Because I am trying to pick up reading again and I might otherwise've picked it up and got blindsided. Now if I do, I at least know what I'm reading and can prep.)
/overexplain!
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I also liked the cover, but I'm probably more inter creepy horror than you are.
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I was also in some genuine suspense over whether Triss would survive the book. Normally I wouldn't be, but the book was already cross-genre. In a fantasy, she would definitely survive. In horror, she might not. The book had already switched genres; it could switch back.
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Did you hear that Hardinge's The Lie Tree won the Costa Prize for Book of the Year? Not the best children's book of the year, the best book period!
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Maybe Narnia, because (before wearing lipstick and going into denial) older sister or sister-figure, accomplished / capable, and (?) sensible (I haven't read those books in ages)?
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Triss was six at the end of WWI, which puts the date of this book around 1925, with a little leeway for birthdays.
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Definitely not a downer, despite the cover and intro.
Helpful though the specific spoilers were, that sentence is actually what sealed the deal on convincing me to keep this book on my TBR.
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Also too, the part where it was ALL about women and their relationships with one another, was part of what was so satisfying about it. (I, too, am madly in love with Violet. <3)
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Just so great. I'm very happy you liked it as much as I did for similar reasons, too. :D
Also--eee, very much looking forward to Rebel!
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Is the spoiler that spoilery? I knew right away from the title.
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I always thought a better cover would be something architectural.
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Have you read any of Hardinge's other books?
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If I get to it (or anything else) before you do I will report back. I do have rather a lot of books on my to-read stack though...
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It's good, if not as good as Cuckoo Song. It also changes genres partway through, and it handles that fine, but the protagonist's plight doesn't have the same immediacy as Triss' existential crisis, and the world is much more ordinary.