Author: Erin Bow
Publisher: Arthur Levine
Rating: worthy
This is Erin Bow's first novel. I already reviewed her second, Sorrow's Knot and liked it well enough to want to read more by her. There may be a third, Wood Angel but Bow's website is particularly obtuse, so I couldn't tell if this is something upcoming, or a different name for something I've mentioned or what!
The author made me realize (see comment below) that I had made a really unforgiveable mistake in confusing Erin Bow with Erin Bowman who wrote an appallingly bad dystopian trilogy, the first two volumes of which I will review before too long. The only reason I actually picked up those volumes was that I thought it was this same author! Ugh! How could I make such an appallingly brain-dead mistake!!! I am so relieved this isn't the same author. So a sincere thanks to Erin Bow for setting me straight. Now I can continue to read her material without shuddering!
Plain Kate is a fairy tale about young girl who works with her father Poitr, who is a wood carver, in an obscure European village (judged by their names, this was in Russia) several centuries ago. Katerina Svetlana is, according to their neighbor, the butcher, "plain as a stick", but at carving, she's "better than any apprentice and as good as many a master". She becomes Kate Carver, or just plain Kate, and unfortunately, her life is about to fall apart at the joints.
A sickness, considered by most to have been visited upon them by a witch, takes her father. The carver's guild seizes his shop and tools, and Kate is forced to live in the stall her father maintained (why I don't know) in the market square, where a drawer in a cabinet is large enough to serve as her home and bed. One night she hears mewing, and adopts the three kittens she discovers living in a drawer above her. In time, two of the cats adopt other owners, but the big grey, Taggle, stays with Kate.
Kate is shunned by most of the village's population, many of whom consider her to be a witch because of her mis-matched eyes. She scrapes a hard living by carving objarka (amulets offering protection against witchery, and which clearly do not work!) and selling them when she can. She's also favored somewhat by a milkmaid and the baker, so she can get some food and drink. But her life is about to take a turn for the worse, as Linay, an albino who is also a witch, comes to town and takes a shine to her - or rather to her shadow.
I didn't appreciate Bow's picking on albinos here. It makes no sense to the story, either - that Kate is a pariah because of her eyes, but the albino has no trouble with the locals at all? He offers to buy her shadow in return for granting her deepest wish, but she refuses him, even as she takes his business: carving a new bow for his violin. Erin Bow seems to like writing stories which feature namesakes. In Sorrow's Knot she writes about native Americans, who are associated with bows, and here, she has a character carve a bow.
Linay won't take no for an answer, and he starts turning people against her even more so than before, so eventually she feels she has no choice but to make the deal. She gets what she needs to leave town and strike out on her own, whilst Linay gets her shadow. What the significance of this is, is never really made clear, but what it entails is her shadow slowly fading, becoming ever more nebulous, dwindling away until it's gone entirely. Linay advises her to find a home before that happens.
Kate discovers that her deepest wish was apparently to have her cat talk to her. Taggle starts speaking, which is inconvenient at best and hilarious at worst! He proves to be one of the best and most amusing parts of the novel with his little feline needs, observations, and wishes, and while I appreciated an animal companion which wasn't nauseating and embarrassing or irrelevant, it made no sense to me that this was her deepest wish, given that she'd lost her father not long before; however, Bow does a really good job of personifying the cat to my mind.
The baker advises her to join the travelers (Romany people who occasionally visit the town), if she wants to leave town and be secure, and he affords her an introduction. She's taken in conditionally, with a proviso that a final decision will be made when they reach the big city towards which they travel, but it gets worse. Within the clan, Kate is befriend by Drina, the daughter of one of the most paranoid guys in this Romany group. The two of them spend a lot of time together, sharing chores, and inevitably Drina learns that Taggle, not the most discreet of guys, can talk, and that Kate has sold her shadow. She resolves to help Kate erase the witch's curse and get her shadow back.
When they arrive at the city and the two of them go into town, Kate's plan is to try and sell objarka and earn some money (and thereby her place in the clan). Drina, meanwhile, plans on trying to find a witch who knows how to undo the curse. This brings trouble down big time as people corner Drina, claiming she's a witch. Kate has to buy their freedom with the money she's earned, and she flees back to the camp, with the badly injured Drina in tow. Now she lives in terror of being burned as a witch by the very people with whom she sought to make a home and a life.
The ending to this story is quite as good as the beginning, so I recommend it. It's well-written, particularly Taggle, and has a good ending, if not a traditionally good one. I'd like to have seen a bit more from this tale, but one cannot have everything, can one? Where would one keep it?
