A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

Lucy Culpepper, an orphan pianist with a heart condition and crossed incisors that make her look like a squirrel, was raised by her asshole uncle who squanders her inheritance. All she wants is to study piano from a dying pianist in England, but she can't afford to go... until said asshole uncle sends her on a wild goose chase to see if her ninety-something great-aunt Fenella, an unrecognized genius outsider artist who does painted/embroidered/multimedia Biblical paintings, is actually dead and someone else is cashing her minuscule pension checks.

Lucy goes and meets the dying pianist, and they fall in love. They then spend the entire book apart as he's too sick to travel and she's trying to track down her great-aunt, who lived her whole life with another woman who recently died falling off a cliff. Or maybe her great-aunt is dead and being impersonated by her partner. Or maybe it is the great-aunt pretending to impersonate her partner! A farrago of bizarre events follows, including many strangely charming meetings with a Turkish doctor (unless he's just pretending to be Turkish), several old people's homes, a trio of escaped convicts, a cat everyone wants to kill (which does get killed, FYI), a cat that may or may not have died years ago, and a live cat that may or may not be the killed-by-a-fox-years-ago cat.

I almost forgot to mention that Lucy becomes psychic when she has a migraine.

I'm calling this a Gothic because it was published as one and the cover depicts a woman fleeing a menacing house. However, as I guessed before reading it based on the author, it's actually very hard to categorize generically, is both very funny and very dark, and parodies everything from Gothics to British food to outsider artists to seductive Turks in romances to the sort of idyllic English towns also parodied in Cold Comfort Farm, which this book also slightly resembles. In fact I'm sure it contains many parodies that I didn't catch as I'm unfamiliar with the originals.

I enjoyed this a lot. It's funny, sad, and very very strange. Also very very Joan Aiken.

I am going to quote ALL the Goodreads reviews of this book, including one mostly in German, because all of them together give you a good idea of what it's like to read this book:

Three stars. What a strange novel. It drew me in immediately, and left me thinking after I finished it.

One star. So terrible.

Three stars. Such an odd book this, but written well...Joan Aiken is impressive. I wish I could have had a chance to hear her speak about her books and to ask her some questions. I do very much like definitive answers. lol. One thing is for sure, it is not the kind of novel that I forgot about the next day when moving on to my next. In this respect, she achieved something that other gothic novelists are not known for doing. Get to the ending yourself and we will "talk". :)

Four stars. ich würde auch 5 sterne geben wenn das ende nicht so...so...so "wait what? wtfh???" gewesen wäre. an sich war das buch toll, sehr leichtfüßig und spannend geschrieben, die netten charaktere waren sympathisch und die bösen böse wie es sich gehört. aber das ende, man, man, man.

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How to play: Fling means I spend a single night of passion (or possibly passionate hatred) with the book, and write a review of it, or however much of it I managed to read. Marry means the book goes back on my shelves, to wait for me to get around to it. Kill is actually "sudden death" - I read a couple paragraphs or pages, then decide to donate or reshelf (or read) based on that. You don't have to have read or previously heard of the books to vote on them. Please feel free to explain your reasoning for your votes in comments.

Italics taken from the blurbs. Gothics have the best blurbs.

I read one of Aiken's Gothics, Nightfall, a while back and was startled that it was not merely bad but conventional; but this one is exactly what one would expect from the sentence, "The author of the totally insane Dido Twite books, in which pink whales are spotted off New England and sinister plots to roll St. Paul's into the ocean are foiled by a girl on an elephant, writes a Gothic."

It functions perfectly well as a Gothic in the atmospheric and well-written Mary Stewart style: a young woman with a tragic past arrives in a gorgeously described Greece, and immediately something violent happens, attempts are made on her life, and romantic interests who might be villains appear. It's extremely page-turny.

It's also a hilarious parody of the form. The attempts on the heroine's life are extraordinary inventive and frequent. No one seems to care that people they supposedly love, or just people they know, are dropping like flies. The hero/villains are not physically attractive. There is an oubliette in the kitchen, and a sauna covered in bees; the heroine sings the bees to sleep, allowing her to make her escape. At one point I thought there was an army of clones, but that turned out to be a misunderstanding.

If you obtain this, do not read the inside or outside cover; my single favorite bizarre plot twist occurs on page 37.

Also, if you obtain this, standard warning for mysteries or Gothics written before 1980, ie, mild racial stereotyping (in this case, largely or possibly entirely parodying racial stereotyping in other Gothics) and now-offensive terminology like "Mongol" for "Downs syndrome."

( So, on page 37 )

Quite a bit of the best modern (and older) fantasy has been either written for or marketed to children and teenagers; it tends toward equally sophisticated themes and the prose is better, on average.

For a lengthy exploration of why that might be, see my essay “The Golden Age of Fantasy is Twelve,” which also has more in-depth discussions of The Darkangel and The Homeward Bounders than I will write here. However, it also has huge spoilers for both (and also for Ursula K. Le Guin’s Tehanu and C. J. Cherryh’s Rider at the Gate.) I suggest reading the intro section of the essay, then stopping before you get to the clearly marked sections where I discuss any individual books which you haven’t yet read.

http://www.strangehorizons.com/2002/20020708/twelve.shtml

Many of the books I recommend here are available in lovely new paperback editions from Firebirds or Starscape.

http://www.firebirdbooks.com/

http://starscapebooks.com/

Cut for even more extreme length than the last one.

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Note: Susan Cooper, Tamora Pierce, Elizabeth Marie Pope, Francesca Lia Block, E. Nesbit, Diane Duane, Will Shetterly, William Sleator, and Margaret Mahy will appear on the final list, the one on “further reading.” Alan Garner will appear on the unclassifiable/other list, because the book I want to mention is Red Shift—surely a watermark in the annals of “unclassifiable/other.