'Demonglass' - Rachel Hawkins

When Sophie Mercer first arrived at Hex Hall, the magical borstal for delinquent members of magical Prodigium society, she felt like her mixed parentage and her father’s status set her uncomfortably apart from the other pupils. Her mother is human, her father is a witch, whereas her classmates all come from two magical parents. Her father is Head of the Prodigium Council, so people initially mistrusted, her even though she’d never had much contact with her dad. By the end of ‘Hex Hall’, the first book in Rachel Hawkins debut trilogy, Sophie found out that there was another secret difference between the Mercer family and all the other Prodigium. Her father is one of the last demons in existence. He is descended by birth from the spirit of an angel who fought on Lucifer’s side before the Fall and his heritage is a closely guarded secret among the other members of the council. Sophie’s magical powers are demonic, just like the powers of her crazy ass great grandmother Alice who rose from the dead in ‘Hex Hall’ and killed some of Sophie’s classmates.

Sophie wants to have her demonic powers removed so she can never hurt anyone like Alice did and as ‘Demonglass’ opens (with a scene nicely balanced between comedy and peril) she’s waiting for her absent father to summon her to see the council in England. As going through the Removal can potentially kill Prodigium everyone who loves Sophie is against her decision. Her father asks Sophie to spend some time learning about demons in England while they get to know each other better. So, she flies to England taking her vampire roommate Jenna and her strong, silent, ‘ever so dreamy’ caretaker friend Cal, for support.

When she arrives at Thorne Hall, the new headquarters of the council, Sophie discovers she and her dad are not the only demons in the village. Someone is raising new demons to use as potential weapons against Prodigium’s enemies, L’Occhio di Dio (The Eye). That’s not all Sophie has to deal with. Archer, Sophie’s crush who turned out to be a covert member of the The Eye, may be in England. And, oh yeah, she and Cal are betrothed - sixteenth century style. Those damn Americans bringing hilarity, deadly mayhem and romantic angst into our sedate isle.
It’s obvious that there’s a lot that readers need to know about the events from ‘Hex Hall’ to understand ‘Demonglass’. It’s not the kind of second book that can be read as a standalone novel. I have a really bad memory for plots and names, so I want the next book in any series (if it can’t be read as a standalone book) to refresh my memory of events without making me feel that the author would like to throw copies of the previous book at me in a dodge ball style book barrage. Although there is a lot of detail the reader needs to be reminded of, character and event reminders are brought up too fast, as Sophie recaps characters and events from ‘Hex Hall’. In just the first three pages she reminds us that Cal ‘was the schools groundskeeper even though he was only nineteen’, that ‘by the end of last term I’d watched my great-grandmother kill my best frenemy, and the boy I loved had pulled a knife on me.’ and ‘I hadn’t had a dream last night that re-created in vivid detail the one kiss Archer and I shared last November. Only, in the dream, here was no tattoo on his chest, marking him as a member of L’Occhio di Dio…’. However Hawkins manages to merge frequent reminders and clarification of what happened in ‘Hex Hall’ into the rest of the novel without slapping her readers over the head with her previous book, so overall I recommend this as a series that people with memory issues can read as it’s being published. You don’t have to wait until all the books come out and read them back to back to keep from forgetting what happened in each novel.

In ‘Demonglass’ Sophie continues to narrate in the same delightfully snarky tone she uses in ‘Hex Hall’. One of the best things about this trilogy is how integral Sophie’s narrative voice feels to Hawkins telling of the story. ‘Demonglass’ is written in a way that almost precludes my imagining it written in any other way and because it’s so much fun to read Sophie’s account in her snarky, first person voice that she almost is the ‘Hex Hall’ books. To think about them being written in any other way (third person, from another pov) automatically makes me think of those other options as ‘the wrong way’ for these books, even though the story of a magical correctional school written in say, third person would have probably been just as interesting. What Hawkins has achieved is to create a narrative voice that feels like the optimal way for this particular story to be presented to the reader. It’s the only way, I want to see this story written and it’s rare for me to not be thinking about how fun it might be to hear a book written from another point of view.

I also like how the comedic way Hawkins writes creates such a distinct, natural narrative voice for Sophie. The sarcastic lines seem to come from her as naturally as breath and Hawkins has created a heroine whose cynical confidence is entirely believable. Hawkins comedy writing is crafted to avoid snags that might disrupt the flow of the humour and cause the reader to question if Sophie’s constant whipping comments are part of her real persona. The comedic scenes never feel contrived, because Hawkins writes them so well. By writing such a clean, genuinely funny, sarcastic voice Hawkins has believably established Sophie as a character who describes her whole world as if it is always ripe for sarcastic commentary, so it never feels unnatural to see a comedic set piece appear in Sophie’s description of an event. Hawkins has created a positive, circular situation where because she writes comedy so well Sophie’s sarcastic voice sounds natural and because Sophie’s sarcastic voice sounds so believable readers find Hawkins comedic writing as being well created.

‘Demonglass’ is fun just like ‘Hex Hall’ was, but there’s a weightier feel to this second book. It feels like more is at stake, probably because the reader knows that the things happening around Sophie in this book will directly affect her. In ‘Hex Hall’ the attacks on girls she sort of knows happen around Sophie and she is aware that The Eye’s members attack Prodigium, but she never fully feels that these things may be linked to her life. By the end of ‘Hex Hall’ Sophie knows the attacks are all to do with her and The Eye is actively trying to harm her. So, in ‘Demonglass’ the reader is more keenly aware that Sophie is at the centre of the story, surrounded by potentially harmful forces.

There are also more emotional conflicts in ‘Demonglass’, which add to the complexity of the relationships between characters. ‘Hex Hall’ is a pretty straightforward novel in terms of the relationships it presents: Sophie makes friends, has enemies, meets a cute boy and is in contact with her mother who she’s pretty close with. In ‘Demonglass’ her relationships with Jenna and Cal become more conflicted, her main parental contact is with her dad who barely ever contacts her and it’s harder for Sophie to identify her enemies. She’s operating in general a state of mistrust, as at the end of the last book she found out her parents and Archer had seriously lied to her. While she is still quick witted and bouncy in general, many of her decisions are now based on the lessons she has learnt about trust from other people. As Jenna says ‘Sophie’s spent the last sixteen years of her life having people lie to her’ which makes it hard for her to trust people, or to ask them to tell her the truth. Sophie’s desire to make sensible decisions and avoid being conned again often wars with her romantic inclinations, as Archer, the demon hunting love of her life is not a sensible romantic choice. Again this sense of internal conflict adds complexity and interest to ‘Demonglass’.

Just a note about the romantic developments in ‘Demonglass’. Personally I have written Cal off as a viable love interest, even though he and Sophie seem to be developing hot, nice to watch chemistry. As soon as I learnt about the arranged marriage, I decided the lovely Cal would be better off with someone else. The arranged marriages between Prodigium families sound as if they are set up solely by male members of the families and are used to strengthen these men’s allegiances. Cal agrees to the match (notice that he is consulted about the match while Sophie only learns about it in this novel and the reader can probably think of lots of logical reasons why her parents never mention the bargain, but it’s still kind of weird behaviour on their part) because he thinks he and Sophie would make a good pair from what he hears about her, not because he is actively invested in patriarchal dominance. There’s genuine feeling between them in ‘Demonglass’. At the same time it is unsettling that Cal would consent to this match and to the way no one tells Sophie about the arrangement. Hawkins comes up with plausible reasons to explain why Cal never told Sophie about the match and readers can take into account Cal’s self-contained personality that keeps him from saying much to Sophie at the best of times if they need further reasons for his silence. Still, his involvement in what is essentially a marriage deal that his fiancé is unaware of, disturbs my idea of Cal as the noble, selfless hero character that Hawkins presents him as. If Cal and Sophie get together I feel like their relationship would validate Prodigium’s patriarchal social convention: ‘Oh well it worked out fine, no need to think about how male controlled the system of arranging marriages is when it appears in this world’. Just to clarify: I don’t mean to make a statement about all arranged marriages in the real world, just the way arranged marriages work in ‘Demonglass’.

Then again Hawkins might find a way to seriously critique the system while showing a positive individual romance springing between Sophie and Cal. She clearly shows Sophie being opposed to an arranged marriage in ‘Demonglass’, so I’ve no reason to think that she couldn’t pull off critique of arranged marriage and romance. I’ve said before that sometimes in series you have to put a bit of trust in authors that they’ll work out some of the kinks you don’t like in future books and I’m essentially making guesses about something I can’t know, so I will put faith in Hawkins skills and await the results of the love triangle in the final book. I continue to be in the part of Sophie’s cheering section that wants it all to work out with Archer.

So, I look forward to the final book of the trilogy and to finding out who is still alive. The end of ‘Demonglass’ is the cruellest cliff hanger known to humanity, as it places all the main characters in England in proximity of immediate death (apart from Sophie, what would be the point of a cliff hanger like that – she is a first person narrator). It seems likely that at least one person will die forever (really do not want it to be Jenna, not fussed if it’s Sophie’s dad). The last book is not even available for pre-ordering yet. I’m just saying, proceed with caution those of you with cliff hanger issues.

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