Title: Impossible
Author: Nancy Werlin
Publisher: Speak
Rating: WARTY!
This one is about a girl called Lucy (yes, another one) whose mother, Miranda (yes another one!), is a nut-job. Lucy was raised by some caring foster parents, but she occasionally sees her mother, who left Lucy only one thing (not 'thong' as I originally typoed!): new lyrics to the Yorkshire folk ballad Scarborough Fair. Yep, it's that kind of novel. Since the cover image shows a long-haired maiden by the ocean, and since Scarborough is a seaside town (which I've actually visited) in one of my favorite English counties, I'm starting to think that this is a novel about mermaids. I sincerely hope I'm wrong; or that the novel is good enough that I don't care if I'm wrong!
Lucinda Scarborough's mother appears to be insane. Given that she was impregnated evidently against her will, or at least against her better judgment, and that neither parents nor father figure were in sight, this may be understandable. Miranda had it seems, a horrible life drifting from one care system to another, one hated foster family to another, until she finally busted out on her own after she became pregnant. Lucy is the result of that pregnancy, and she was raised by Leo and Soledad. They've been the best parents Lucy could have hoped for. Soledad was the one who helped Lucy's mom get through her pregnancy, so she feels a warm bond with them, but her biological mother hasn’t disappeared. She randomly shows up at Lucy's school, tossing out meaningless comments, and singing the words to the old Yorkshire folk ballad Scarborough Fair - words which are not in the commonly known version of the song.
Fortunately for Lucy, no one at school knows this bag lady is her real mom. As Lucy's prom approaches, Miranda disappears and Lucy forgets about her, focusing on what she will wear for her date, who is absurdly called Gray, as in those characters in a color comic book who are rendered in gray scale because they're really not important. Enter the villain: a mysterious and good-looking man who has very recently charmed his way into a job with Soledad (she's a midwife) wangles himself an invitation to eat with her and her family that evening, including an old friend of Lucy's, Zach (yes, another one), who is staying with them for the summer. Zach is like a brother to Lucy, but it’s Padraig, the charmer, who plays photographer, taking pictures before she leaves. She looks beautiful, but as she walks down the path to her date's car, Miranda shows up with a shopping cart full of bottles, which she uses to pelt everyone, especially Padraig.
Miranda is arrested and removed, and after changing clothes, Lucy heads off to the prom. Her date seems really promising, and Lucy can picture herself seeing him again, but as everyone is leaving, he lures her into the rest room, and there he rapes her. As this happens, Lucy tries to fight back but despite her strength and his diminutive stature, she cannot overcome him. She notes how different he seems: when she looked into his eyes to plead with him she didn’t see him there. There was clearly someone else inside him. Afterwards, she only imagines she saw this out of her shock and distress. Her date leaves her there and later she finds that despite the fact that he'd had nothing to drink that evening, he drove straight into a tree and killed himself.
Following up on a promise to her foster parents, Zach shows up at the prom to pick up Lucy and drive her to the after party. He's the one who finds her, bleeding and distraught in the rest room. She pleads with him to tell no one, and he keeps her secret. Over the next month, she strives to bring her life back to normal. Just as she seems to be succeeding, two events occur: the first is that Zach finds her mother's diary in that shopping cart (which had been parked in the garage temporarily); much later, the second event is that Lucy discovers she's pregnant at 17. She's amazed how much her life has turned out exactly like her mother's - a life she's discovered from reading the diary. The only difference is that she has friends and supportive parents which her mother apparently did not.
At one point when talking about her pregnancy, Lucy berates Zach in a very mean manner for no good reason, and yet it's Zach apologizes. I was actually liking Lucy up to that point. I hope she doesn't deteriorate. Since her mother evidently went through exactly the same thing Miranda did, perhaps Lucy's disturbing meanness is coming from the evil which has obviously infected her. This is evidently what Miranda was trying to warn her about, although why she confined herself to the asinine singing of an obscure song, is a complete and utter mystery. Perhaps that's all her insanity allows her to do? So this story isn't about mermaids, which is in its favor, but it's still being annoyingly obscure, which I detest, so there is still lots of opportunity for it to go to hell in a hand-basket.
So the family (Leo, Lucy, Soledad, and Zach) sit down to discuss the situation so far. Lucy declares that she will have the baby and she's convinced that it's a girl. She gives no thought whatsoever to what the Elfin King wants with his continued rape, impregnation, and abuse of this endless string of teenage victims or how it could well destroy his evil plans were the fetus never to be born. Note that this isn't a real case of real life rape, where the victim is entitled to decide what she wants; this is fictional rape by an evil serial rapist who plans on continuing to rape every progeny of every daughter every time they turn 17. And Lucy has decided to let him have his way with her and her progeny after he's already had his way with her and her ancestors!
Let's take a moment here to consider the ballad as sung by Miranda, shall we? For comparison, here's Simon & Garfunkel's definitive version
Here's Werlin's rather inelegant mash-up: Are you going to Scarborough Fair? Tell her she'll sleep in a goose-feather bed Tell her tomorrow her answer make known Her answer it came in a week and a day From the sting of my curse she can never be free Tell her to make me a magical shirt Tell her to find me an acre of land Tell her to plow it with just a goat's horn | Here's the original version: Are you going to Scarborough Fair? Tell her to make me a cambric shirt, Tell her to wash it in yonder well, Tell her to dry it on yonder thorn, Now he has asked me questions three, Tell him to buy me an acre of land, Tell him to plough it with a ram's horn, Tell him to sheer't with a sickle of leather, Tell him to thrash it on yonder wall, When he has done and finished his work. |
The four of them agree that whether this is a real curse or Lucy's imagination gone wild, they will follow up in every way they can. Zach takes it upon himself to try and trace Lucy's genealogy, and he succeeds in doing so for several generations, and the pattern is consistent: each daughter becomes pregnant at 17 with another daughter. So young are the rape victims that they conclude that it isn't out of the realm of possibility that Lucy's grandmother and perhaps even great grandmother are alive somewhere.
Leo resolves to research the song and all it's variants to see if he can find clues. Basically this means he gets to hang out at home and pay his guitar all day. Soledad is trying to discover how to make a shirt which has no seam and no needlework. Easy! Grab a garbage bag and cut off the sealed end, cut out two arm holes and there you go! Failing that, buy a 3-D printer and print one up. She way over-thinks this. But she's focused on entirely the wrong thing! The problem is not creating the shirt, it's making it magical. Even in Werlin's version, the description runs, "...a magical shirt...without any seam or needlework." So where will the magic come from? I suppose we could be generous and have 'magical' mean nothing more than it would have to be magical to make the shirt thus, but even back then when the ballad originated, it would have been possible to simply use an animal skin: no seams, and the legs, cut short, would be the sleeves.
But they're more focused on the other two requirements, the first of which has been changed dramatically from the real version of the ballad: "...find me an acre of land...between the salt water and the sea strand." But even with the wording changed to make it easier to beat, Lucy is still obsessing on buying the land rather than simply finding it! The strand can have many meanings. it was the name of the magazine in which Arthur Conan Doyle first published his Sherlock Holmes stories, it's a street in London, and it's also the name of a particular type of swamp land in Florida. Strand is a word which goes back at least a thousand years, coming from a root meaning 'strew'.
The final challenge is to "...plow it with just a goat's horn...and sow it all over with one grain of corn." Why she changed the ram's horn into a goat's is a complete mystery. Both goat and ram are represented in the constellations and are related species. Lucy considers the sexual meaning of plowing and sowing, but it doesn't seem to fit the rhyme very well. It does, however, fit Lucy's early onset of not-so-cute nymphomania.
That is to say that Lucy, who has almost literally lived with Zach since she was quite young, and who, despite being a healthy, perfectly normal teenager has never given him the time of day, now suddenly cannot think of anything other than rippling Zach muscles and Zach body heat. Yep. Clearly in Werlin World™ rape is not at all a debilitating, traumatizing event, and pregnancy changes nothing, neither your hormones nor your priorities, unless those hormones are really whore moans and your number one priority is whatever organ covered with Zach-flesh looks most like the number one. In Werlin World™, the only thing rape, consequent pregnancy, and a real and present threat to the safety of your child and your own sanity result in is an obsessive-compulsive need for Zach-meat. The novel could go only downhill from this point onwards, and rest assured it did.
Now I fully understand how Lucy feels when she gets the morning sickness. I must have Impossible sickness! So Soledad gets a mannequin torso to facilitate the creation of this unseemly shirt, but Lucy pitches a fit and orders her to take the mannequin back - she declares she'd rather use Zach. Now there is absolutely no reason whatsoever for this other than the shamefully 100% transparent reason (which is why it's no reason whatsoever) of artificially putting the two of them into an intimate position, but why do it so ham-fistedly? So Lucy and Zach become almost orgasmic over this, and the shirt gets made, and they plight their troth, after Lucy is a jerk and makes him wait interminably for any kind of answer.
Later, Padraigeous breaks into the house using his Elfin magic and he finds he can't touch the shirt, but the shirt is felt! If he can't touch it how can it be felt? Just messin' with ya. But this means all felt hats are also magic by definition. Since he can't touch it, this constitutes a certification that the first of the three tasks has been achieved.
The couple marry a couple of weeks later, and Lucy has the bright idea of plowing (or is it ploughing?) the Bay of Fundy when the tide is out. This she does, and despite the Hell Fin King taunting her, she finishes it, the king is defeated, all the Scarborough girls are freed of their curse in retrospect, including her mom who gets her sanity back, and she and Zach live happily ever after, blah, blah, blah. Definite warty.
