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bookgazing) wrote2011-01-21 10:43 am
bookgazing) wrote2011-01-21 10:43 am
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Experiment Part Two: 'The Replacement - Brenna Yovanoff
‘In the story, Emma’s four years old. She gets out of bed and pads across the floor in her footie pajamas. When she reaches her hand between the bars, the thing in the crib moves closer. It tries to bite her and she takes her hand out again but doesn’t back away. They spend all night looking at each other in the dark. In the morning, the thing is still crouched on the lamb-and-duckling mattress pad, staring at her. It isn’t her brother.
It’s me.’
For a short plot synopsis of ‘The Replacement’ please see yesterdays post. This is the second chattier post I promised which explores the three elements of this novel that I thought were really well created.
‘The Replacement’ is really successful in three areas:
World building and atmosphere
This is my favourite thing about the whole book and there are two elements that make it so.
The atmospheric tone created by the books descriptions is creepy and everything about Yovanoff’s choices in this book enhances its creepiness, from subtle things like her setting (Gentry is an old, industrial town) to her descriptions of the fey. Here’s an excerpt of the creepy tone:
‘He held it to Carlina’s cigarette and she breathed in, making the flame waver and gutter. She started to pace back and forth and the lead guitarist followed her, playing a solo that made me think of cracked glass and scrambled wires. He was wearing a black top hat and the shadow of the brim made his face look hard and hungry.’
And here’s a descriptions of part of her fey world under the slag heap:
‘I was standing in a kind of lobby, with a stone floor and a high ceiling. Torches burned in rows along the wall and the smoke had a black, oily smell like kerosene. The handles were mismatched, made from dead branches and baseball bats and one that looked like the handle of a garden shovel or an ax.’
I think the feeling of fear she conjures up has a lot to do with the way she co-opts the normal and twists it to fit into an abnormal situation. It’s the details stolen from a familiar human world, like the baseball bat which is often associated with innocent pleasure and how strange it feels to see them fitted into the fey world that add to the reader’s feeling of unease, like watching a film about a serial killer who dresses as a bride.
Brenna Yovanoff got her book into my reading list with that US cover. The composition and the contrast between violence and innocence that is depicted makes it instantly stunning. It clearly indicates that Yovanoff is interested in some of the old traditions surrounding the fairies/faerys/elves or whatever you want to call them, like their vulnerability to iron. I love the way that Yovanoff builds her story on the old stuff of scary fey legends. She doesn’t just reference the legends, she takes the references and twists them into something with a feeling of newness and then builds her book out of that stuff. So the alternative name for fairies becomes the town’s name, the hill the fey traditionally live under becomes an industrial steel slag heap. Those who know a little about fey folklore get that gleeful feeling that comes with reference spotting and those who don’t, get a contemporary tour through fairy/evish legend without feeling like traditional legend is being unnaturally glued onto a new story. There were characters I knew came from legend (The Lady, replacements) and characters where I wasn’t familiar with from legend, who may or may not have come from Yovanoff’s head (The Cutter, The Morrigan).
Characterisation
I wasn’t expecting to like a book told from the first person perspective of one of the replacements, Mackie, just because, eh it’s a fairy, fairies should be evil, but he’s all...talking, making us sympathise with him...sometimes I do not want my monsters monstrosity deconstructed! ‘The Replacement’ was a reminder that of course I do in fact want all traditional supernatural monsters to be de and re constructed, as long as we can still have those other books where supernatural monsters are traditionally evil and cunning. And duh how did I forget that I love books written from the supernatural characters direct point of view – Sam the werewolf is he main reason I’m going to read the rest of the Mercy Falls trilogy. Mackie’s character is the reason why I think so many people are going to fall for ‘The Replacement’ because he’s so vulnerable, real and interesting. Despite being paranormal he’s not a super hero, but he’s still so far from any approximation of normal that he’s not just some coded device for teenagerhood and its awkwardness. He’s a character readers can relate to, but he’s not the same as readers. That makes him both exciting and sympathetic. Crucially in a post vamp world he is not unnecessarily emo, instead he has reasons for lying in bed all day and being less than personable.
I have to talk about Roswell, Mackie’s best friend, too. I love that boy, not only for his devotion to Mackie, but for his fully developed character. Roswell may be a participant in Mackie’s story, who will drop everything to help his friend, but he’s also a person with interests and romantic ambitions. I think what I personally like about him so much is that he’s not your standard underdog secondary male character – he’s not a Ron Weasley. As much as I love me some Ron, or some Edmund ‘If only I were the hero’ supporting characters it’s refreshing to meet a secondary male character who is the cool one, the one with all the powers that matter (despite not being the supernatural character in this book he is the one who can talk to girls and surely that’s the most important power when you’re a straight, teenage boy).
And Tate, eh Tate. The way she pushes Mackie until he cracks and helps her is so dedicated and great, her for punching someone out also great and a little bit verging on cool psychotic. The way that she gives herself over to her dark feelings (because Gentry is so determined to make people hide and change their feelings) is fantastic, but I’m not sure that she feels real to me at times. Her relationship with Mackie feels odd, ethereal and somehow unconnected from natural human reaction. And there is probably lots of digging I will be doing in my head into this book (so perhaps I’ll talk about that at a later time) and what seems like Mackie’s strange irresistibleness to the opposite sex, but mostly when I think about who is the heroine of this book I keep coming back to Emma, Mackie’s sister rather than Tate, the female romantic lead. Maybe if I’d been given more access inside Tate’s head I’d have been able to connect more with her choices (like taking up with a guy who is part of the community that stole her sister) but as it was, sometimes Tate felt more like a character created around a dark literary feeling, rather than a person.
Strangely Yovanoff manages to keep the dark, artistic tone of her book from overwhelming her fey secondary characters better than she keeps it from dominating Tate’s character. Characters like the Morrigan, Emma’s lab partner Janice, the fey musicians Luther and Caralina and even the villains the Lady and the Cutter (who is just creeptastic, you are going to love to fear him) feel like characters rather than embodiments of a gothic tone, although their inclusion also contributes to deepening the dark descriptive aesthetic. Their actions make sense for them and they each feel like they have their own stories outside of Mackie’s tale, due to hinting descriptions like this one about the Cutter:
‘ “What is he?”
She looked at me over the lacy edge of her handkerchief and her answer was muffled. “A sadist and a masochist. He endures tremendous suffering because it pleases him to see the suffering of others.” '.
I guess because they’re paranormal creatures they get more leeway in what can be considered realistic actions, but still they feel right – individual and like they’re all operating on their own contextually realistic rules.
I could talk about characters all day though. If you’ve read the book, do you have a favourite?
I’m not quite sure what to say about these relationships, except that they feel really full of depth. Feelings, this book has them. I think I fell almost harder for the relationships between characters than I did for individual characters (and probably the point of making Mackie the focal point of so many warm relationships is to humanise him). So much warmth and friendship in such a desperately unhappy world. I mean who doesn’t want that?
So the experiment is over. Did you enjoy the double post? If you did not all the books I read will get multiple posts, how exhausting would that be, but some of them will. How did you find my chatter?
It’s me.’
For a short plot synopsis of ‘The Replacement’ please see yesterdays post. This is the second chattier post I promised which explores the three elements of this novel that I thought were really well created.
‘The Replacement’ is really successful in three areas:
World building and atmosphere
This is my favourite thing about the whole book and there are two elements that make it so.
The atmospheric tone created by the books descriptions is creepy and everything about Yovanoff’s choices in this book enhances its creepiness, from subtle things like her setting (Gentry is an old, industrial town) to her descriptions of the fey. Here’s an excerpt of the creepy tone:
‘He held it to Carlina’s cigarette and she breathed in, making the flame waver and gutter. She started to pace back and forth and the lead guitarist followed her, playing a solo that made me think of cracked glass and scrambled wires. He was wearing a black top hat and the shadow of the brim made his face look hard and hungry.’
And here’s a descriptions of part of her fey world under the slag heap:
‘I was standing in a kind of lobby, with a stone floor and a high ceiling. Torches burned in rows along the wall and the smoke had a black, oily smell like kerosene. The handles were mismatched, made from dead branches and baseball bats and one that looked like the handle of a garden shovel or an ax.’
I think the feeling of fear she conjures up has a lot to do with the way she co-opts the normal and twists it to fit into an abnormal situation. It’s the details stolen from a familiar human world, like the baseball bat which is often associated with innocent pleasure and how strange it feels to see them fitted into the fey world that add to the reader’s feeling of unease, like watching a film about a serial killer who dresses as a bride.
Brenna Yovanoff got her book into my reading list with that US cover. The composition and the contrast between violence and innocence that is depicted makes it instantly stunning. It clearly indicates that Yovanoff is interested in some of the old traditions surrounding the fairies/faerys/elves or whatever you want to call them, like their vulnerability to iron. I love the way that Yovanoff builds her story on the old stuff of scary fey legends. She doesn’t just reference the legends, she takes the references and twists them into something with a feeling of newness and then builds her book out of that stuff. So the alternative name for fairies becomes the town’s name, the hill the fey traditionally live under becomes an industrial steel slag heap. Those who know a little about fey folklore get that gleeful feeling that comes with reference spotting and those who don’t, get a contemporary tour through fairy/evish legend without feeling like traditional legend is being unnaturally glued onto a new story. There were characters I knew came from legend (The Lady, replacements) and characters where I wasn’t familiar with from legend, who may or may not have come from Yovanoff’s head (The Cutter, The Morrigan).
Characterisation
I wasn’t expecting to like a book told from the first person perspective of one of the replacements, Mackie, just because, eh it’s a fairy, fairies should be evil, but he’s all...talking, making us sympathise with him...sometimes I do not want my monsters monstrosity deconstructed! ‘The Replacement’ was a reminder that of course I do in fact want all traditional supernatural monsters to be de and re constructed, as long as we can still have those other books where supernatural monsters are traditionally evil and cunning. And duh how did I forget that I love books written from the supernatural characters direct point of view – Sam the werewolf is he main reason I’m going to read the rest of the Mercy Falls trilogy. Mackie’s character is the reason why I think so many people are going to fall for ‘The Replacement’ because he’s so vulnerable, real and interesting. Despite being paranormal he’s not a super hero, but he’s still so far from any approximation of normal that he’s not just some coded device for teenagerhood and its awkwardness. He’s a character readers can relate to, but he’s not the same as readers. That makes him both exciting and sympathetic. Crucially in a post vamp world he is not unnecessarily emo, instead he has reasons for lying in bed all day and being less than personable.
I have to talk about Roswell, Mackie’s best friend, too. I love that boy, not only for his devotion to Mackie, but for his fully developed character. Roswell may be a participant in Mackie’s story, who will drop everything to help his friend, but he’s also a person with interests and romantic ambitions. I think what I personally like about him so much is that he’s not your standard underdog secondary male character – he’s not a Ron Weasley. As much as I love me some Ron, or some Edmund ‘If only I were the hero’ supporting characters it’s refreshing to meet a secondary male character who is the cool one, the one with all the powers that matter (despite not being the supernatural character in this book he is the one who can talk to girls and surely that’s the most important power when you’re a straight, teenage boy).
And Tate, eh Tate. The way she pushes Mackie until he cracks and helps her is so dedicated and great, her for punching someone out also great and a little bit verging on cool psychotic. The way that she gives herself over to her dark feelings (because Gentry is so determined to make people hide and change their feelings) is fantastic, but I’m not sure that she feels real to me at times. Her relationship with Mackie feels odd, ethereal and somehow unconnected from natural human reaction. And there is probably lots of digging I will be doing in my head into this book (so perhaps I’ll talk about that at a later time) and what seems like Mackie’s strange irresistibleness to the opposite sex, but mostly when I think about who is the heroine of this book I keep coming back to Emma, Mackie’s sister rather than Tate, the female romantic lead. Maybe if I’d been given more access inside Tate’s head I’d have been able to connect more with her choices (like taking up with a guy who is part of the community that stole her sister) but as it was, sometimes Tate felt more like a character created around a dark literary feeling, rather than a person.
Strangely Yovanoff manages to keep the dark, artistic tone of her book from overwhelming her fey secondary characters better than she keeps it from dominating Tate’s character. Characters like the Morrigan, Emma’s lab partner Janice, the fey musicians Luther and Caralina and even the villains the Lady and the Cutter (who is just creeptastic, you are going to love to fear him) feel like characters rather than embodiments of a gothic tone, although their inclusion also contributes to deepening the dark descriptive aesthetic. Their actions make sense for them and they each feel like they have their own stories outside of Mackie’s tale, due to hinting descriptions like this one about the Cutter:
‘ “What is he?”
She looked at me over the lacy edge of her handkerchief and her answer was muffled. “A sadist and a masochist. He endures tremendous suffering because it pleases him to see the suffering of others.” '.
I guess because they’re paranormal creatures they get more leeway in what can be considered realistic actions, but still they feel right – individual and like they’re all operating on their own contextually realistic rules.
I could talk about characters all day though. If you’ve read the book, do you have a favourite?
Relationships
Mackie is involved in several deep, caring relationships: a sibling relationship with his sister Emma, a friendship with his best friend Roswell, a parent/child relationship with his father. In these three relationships the affection goes two ways. Although due to the book’s set up (where Mackie is a supernatural creature struggling to survive in a hostile world) the text concentrates on the support Mackie receives from people, there are hints at how deeply Mackie feels for all three of these characters throughout the book and his tone towards them is generally one of love.
Then there are the relationships which go deep, but are more conflicted, such as Mackie’s relationship with his mother. This relationship is sketched in briefly and only fleshed out more once Mackie’s mother is required to provide both a big plot hit and a big emotional hit to the book. Mackie’s romantic relationship with Tate is also conflicted as he fights what she wants him to do and she locks him out when he doesn’t behave in the noble way she seems to expect him to.I’m not quite sure what to say about these relationships, except that they feel really full of depth. Feelings, this book has them. I think I fell almost harder for the relationships between characters than I did for individual characters (and probably the point of making Mackie the focal point of so many warm relationships is to humanise him). So much warmth and friendship in such a desperately unhappy world. I mean who doesn’t want that?
So the experiment is over. Did you enjoy the double post? If you did not all the books I read will get multiple posts, how exhausting would that be, but some of them will. How did you find my chatter?