Plain Kate by Erin Bow

Title: Plain Kate
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?

Sorrow's Knot by Erin Bow

Title: Sorrow's Knot
Author: Erin Bow
Publisher: Scholastic
Rating: WORTHY!

How could anyone not want to read a novel written by someone named Bow, which has 'knot' in the title? It’s too precious - especially since this story has roots in native American culture with which the bow is also associated. Fortunately, the blurb made this sound worth reading, and even more fortunately, here is a novel written by a woman about a girl, and it isn't in first person PoV - see, YA authors? It can be done. You don’t need to be hide-bound by trope!

I'm not one of these people who worships native American culture as something magical. To me they are and were no different from any other culture: neither more nor less in tune with nature, neither more nor less "savage", noble or otherwise, than any people living in the same conditions. I don't believe they lived in harmony with nature in any way different from any other, similar culture. They would have exploited it just as much as any other culture had their numbers compelled them to. They were neither wiser, nor dumber than other cultures, and they fell pray to brutality and inter-tribal warfare, and to disease, just as other peoples did. This is not to say it wasn't evil, and a shameful tragedy, the way western Christians moved in on the land, and abused the natives chronically, but that's organized religion for you.

This is the first Bow novel I've read, and from what I read in the first 100 pages or so, I really felt that it was definitely not going to be the last. This is how to write a novel. Bow knows what to do and how to do it, and she has no qualms about getting to it. She has a previous novel titled Plain Kate which is now on my list to read and will probably be reviewed next month. That one is set in Europe.

I don’t know where Bow got her chops, and I'm about as far from an expert on native American culture as you can get, but every paragraph in this novel made me believe this was real; that this is how the people in the novel lived their lives day to day. She made me feel that this is how they thought and how they felt, but Bow doesn’t lecture or sermonize. She starts off with an almost unnoticeable prologue, but wisely, she includes it in chapter one as any decent author ought. This briefly describes the arrival of Otter into the world - not the animal, but Otter the daughter of Willow, the Binder-in-training of the tribe of Shadow people, who live in the village of Westmost, in Earthen dwellings right on the edge of the forest which harbors the shades of the not-so-benign dead.

And therein lies the story. Otter loves to hang out with Kestrel and Cricket, and girl and a boy her own age who are assigned to undertake various tasks in the village. One day, hauling up the decapitated corn stalks from the muddy ground in preparation for the next planting, the three of them encounter one of the shadows of the dead lurking in the dark in the corn roots. It enters Cricket's body and it’s only Otter's binding skills - advanced for someone her age - which draw out the shade and save Cricket's life. Her mother arrives very quickly, alerted by Kestrel's warning, and the shade is dispatched.

Cricket is very weak and is observed closely. If it was a white-hand shade, Cricket will be killed, because there is no cure for it (unless you count madness as a cure), but he's fortunate again: it wasn't. The real problem is that when the village binder dies and Willow, no longer the apprentice, takes over, Otter expects to become her apprentice in turn, but her mother rejects her own daughter. Otter has to go and live now in her own lodge, a dismal construction of wattle and earth, which has been empty for too long. As she's beginning to bemoan her unexpected and unwelcome fate, Kestrel and Cricket move in with her, and soon announce to Otter their own intention to become bound to each other, becoming Okishae, which is rare in this village of mostly women.

Their ceremony takes place after the water walkers - a tribe of mostly men - has made its annual visit to exchange children, the men giving up most of their young girls, the Shadow people giving up most of their boys in exchange. Amongst the new girls is Fawn, a binder who Willow adopts quickly as her apprentice, offering a further slap in the face to Otter.

In time Otter comes to accept Fawn, and Fawn Otter, yet even though they share some secrets, Otter still understands that she is effectively a nobody, with no skills to offer her village. That is until the night that the White Hand shows up at the village and manages to touch Willow. To protect the children sheltering in Willow's lodge - the best warded lodge in the village - Otter creates a binding on the lodge door, but she cannot undo it. Fawn attempts to do so, but she's tired after the night-long battle against the White Hand, and doesn't have the power to undo Otter's work. Despite Otter's help and warnings, the ward costs Fawn her life, and with Willow bearing the shape of a white hand over her heart and having only nine days to live, the only person in the village who can assume the task of being the Binder is Otter herself.

Sorrow's Knot is not only about a knotty problem, it’s about a world where people are tied in knots: they're bound, and constrained, and pinched, and restricted, and confined and pigeon-holed, so you may end up feeling some claustrophobia in reading this. I know I did, and that actually does contribute to the atmosphere of discomfort and unease which also pervades the novel - and not because it’s poorly written. Quite the contrary: it's beautifully written, and that's precisely why we feel uncomfortable: because the characters feel that way. Their whole life is lived in fear of the shadows which surround their village. This is why it's so ironical that these people are referred to as free women when they're anything but.

The village is called Westmost because it's the west-most village known - on the edge of the world so it seems, but the area it occupies is referred to as The Pinch - a suitably constrictive term for the life they lead. The village is encircled and circumscribed by slips and gasts and the White Hand, each form of spirit more dangerous than the last. These are malevolent shades of the dead who have not moved on, but which remain in the shadows, seeking to invade the body of anyone who is insufficiently aware and sufficiently right there. It’s funny because the shadows are constrained with colored yarn and this novel is a colorful yarn about rigid constraint.

The women are bound by tradition and are cruelly restricted in their choice of "profession"; for example it seems that Otter can only be a binder and if not that, then nothing. Kestrel can only be a ranger, never a binder. Cricket can only be a story-teller, and in the end is robbed even of that. No one can leave the village in safety because of the spirits, so they're confined to The Pinch and even there they feel unsafe at times. They're restricted to living in dark, dusty, or dank earth lodges, almost like they're living underground. The lodge can only be entered through a tunnel, curtained at either end. When Otter is rejected by her mother, she's forced to make her own home in a lodge which has been abandoned by someone else in this purportedly shrinking village. And she's one of the fortunate ones.

The only people who have any power over these haunting, tragic, creeping, heart-stopping shadows are the Binders - women of the tribe who are specially gifted and trained, and who can ward off the shadows by creating complex knots in leather cords. These knots can both repel and dispel the shadows, as well as harm the living. Even the dead are bound. A dangerous ceremony is conducted - only during the day - when a villager dies. The body is carried down the river (the spirits cannot cross running water) to the burial ground, but the body is not lowered into the earth; it is elevated into the trees, having been tightly bound hand and foot to prevent the spirit from haunting the village. But apparently this system is not working, and Otter slowly begins to realize why this is.

This is unquestionably a female-centric world, with strong women and very few males involved or even required (for the most part), but one problem I had with this was that even presented as such, there was a powerfully masculine ethos pervading the story. We're taught - for those of us who are willing to listen and learn - that women have a tendency to be better at cooperation than men typically are. That doesn’t mean, of course, that women cannot lead and that men cannot cooperate; it’s a tendency, not a law of nature! The problem then with this novel was that we saw so little of that; instead, we found that the powerful women were contentious and almost tyrannical in their behavior. A nauseating example of this is when a major character is expelled from the village, at the risk of his very life. This represents appallingly callous treatment for a compatriot - treatment that smacks more of masculine than of feminine behavior.

There are some problems with this novel. It’s never really explained how this rather Amazonian world endures. Marriage is almost non-existent. If there are so few men, how are the children born? Do a handful of village men service all the women, or when the mostly male traveler tribe comes up the river to visit once a year is there an orgy?! We don’t know. We do know there are a lot of children, but we're never advised or even offered hints as to how this circumstance came to be, and given what we are offered, how it can be said that the village is dying or shrinking!

Despite this novel being largely female-centric, there are two males who play a huge role, yet the two are essentially interchangeable, and it seems to me that the two main female characters are diminished by this, because they're so dependent upon, and moved by these men. This, for me, rather undermined the strong female presence with which we’re presented at the beginning. Having the one, I can understand, and it works well, but there comes a disturbing and thoroughly unexpected part where one character is effectively is switched out for another one who was just the same, like changing a light bulb, and I saw no sense in this. It was very effectively a betrayal of both the girls at the same time, especially since it effectively weakened the one, although the other continued strongly.

That said I liked this novel, and I consider it a worthy read.