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This is one of the most unusual books I've ever read. And if you've been reading my reviews for a while, you know what a strong statement that is. Here's the buries-the-lede back cover:
The town's teenagers are dying. One by one they are mysteriously disappearing but Meggie Alexander refuses to wait in fear. She and her boyfriend Matthew decide to get to the bottom of all the strange goings-on. And they discover a horrible secret.
Now someone is stalking them - but who? There's only one thing that can save Meggie now - the stories a tarantula told her as a baby.
Bet you weren't expecting that, huh?
This was a Scholastic novel from 1988. I'd seen other Thomas novels in that period but never read them, because they all looked like depressing historicals about the black experience - the one I recall seeing specifically was Touched by Fire. I sure never saw this one. I found it in the used children's section of The Last Bookstore in downtown LA.
Any description of this book won't truly convey the experience of reading it, but I'll give it a shot. It starts with a prologue in omniscient POV, largely from the POV of a talking tarantula visiting Meggie soon after she's born, chatting and spinning webs that tell stories to her:
"I get so sick and tired of common folk trying to put their nobody feet on my queenly head. Me? I was present in the first world. Furthermore," the spider boasted, squinting her crooked eyes, "I come from a looooong line of royalty and famous people. Millions of years ago I saw the first rainbow. I ruled as the Egyptian historical arachnid. I'm somebody."
As I transcribe that, it occurs to me that she shares some DNA with The Last Unicorn's butterfly.
The prologue ends when Meggie's mother spots the spider and tries to kill her, believing her daughter is in danger. Chapter one opens when Meggie is fifteen. Briefly, it feels like a YA novel about being black and young in (then)-modern America, and it kind of is that, except for the very heightened writing style, including the dialogue. Thomas is a poet and not trying to write in a naturalistic manner. It's often gorgeous:
She ended [the sermon] with these resounding words falling quiet as small sprinklings of nutmeg whispering into a bowl of whipping cream.
The milieu Meggie lives in is lived-in and sharply and beautifully drawn, skipping from a barbershop where customers complain about women preaching to a quick sketch of a neighborhood woman trying to make her poor house beautiful and not noticing that its real beauty lies in her children to Meggie's exquisitely evoked joy in running. And then Meggie finds the HEADLESS CORPSE of one of her classmates! We check in on a trio of terrible neighbors plotting to do something evil to the town's teenagers! The local spiders are concerned!
This book has the prose one would expect to find in a novel written by a poet about being a black teenager in America, except it's also about headless corpses and spider guardians. It is a trip and a half.
The neighbor trio, who are not going gracefully into old age, hired a doctor and a pair of goons to kill local teenagers for organ transplants. The headless corpse got HIS HEAD ACCIDENTALLY KNOCKED OFF by the goon whose weapon of choice is a tree stump.
Meggie escapes and brings them to justice. The spiders approve:
As she played the guitar the spiders responded. They moved with her down the hill, thousands and thousands of spiders following the sound of a mahogany guitar just blessed in the ceremony of cedar.
I am so glad that Thomas wrote this amazingly weird novel, and that someone at the bookshop bought it, and that I just happened to come in while it was on the shelf. It's like Adrian Tchaikovsky collaborated with Angela Johnson and Lois Duncan. There has never been anything like it, and there never will be again. Someone ought to reprint it.
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I am not sure I want to read about black coming-of-age with spiders, but by golly, I loved reading about reading about it!
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I could so have used this book in my teens. A poetic telling of a story about a teenage Black girl. Especially at a time when the voices saying that Black teenagers and Black women weren't sapient humans were even stronger than now. *saves this book in my files*
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It would have been so up your alley!
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One of these days I should tell you how I was raised on Anansi stories. :)
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I wondered that! Almost seems like they have to be. Maybe her queenly self saw the Great Akan as well as Egypt :)
I was agog at 'the weirdest book I've ever read' and the post didn't disappoint!
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