The Brides of Rollrock Island

This week's novel is The Brides of Rollrock Island, selkie fantasy by Margo Lanagan.

This novel is a series of interconnected short stories, each from a different point of view and different point in time.  Together, they cover the history of the rise and fall of the witch Misskaella's power and influence over the island.  Her connection to the seals makes her an outcast and leads her family to mistreat her, so she strikes back by bringing a seal woman (a seal who sheds her skin and becomes a beautiful woman, who stays docile and submissive as long as she can't find her skin) to the island, who enchants everyone.  Soon all the men of the island come to Misskaella for a seal wife and all the women of the island leave for the mainland.  Only seal women, their husbands, sons, and Misskaella remain, making the sons' views of how the world works weirdly skewed.

I really liked how the magical weirdness permeated every aspect of the society on the island.  When all the wives are seal women, all the meals on the island becomes more seal like.  For instance, the wives cook "sea hearts," which are a kind of gross smelling thing in a shell that the boys have to collect.  The boys associate red hair with men and black hair with women, they've never seen girls their own age and (on rare trips to the mainland) have even less understanding of how to talk to them than normal boys.  The affect the seals have on the island also changes over time.  In Misskaella's childhood, people had prejudices against families that had seal blood from long ago.  The wives change from family shame to secret obsession to common place to shame again.  It's quality world building: one change that affects everything in organic, mailable ways.

The short stories get at the situation from every angle: the sons watching their mothers' sadness without understanding, the men who seem reasonable until they're bewitched, the witch and her depressing motives (I cried), the human wives whose husbands abandon them for seal women, the human women from the mainland who think the island is unnatural.  So you get to see it from several angles, most of which are sympathetic.  But the glaring omission is that we don't get to hear from the seal women, who are essentially held captive.  On the one hand, it's kind of neat that we don't get a chapter from their perspective because it maintains the alien qualities of their seal-ness.  Maybe they don't think in ways that would translate to a chapter.  But on the other hand, it feeds into the poor treatment of women at the heart of the book.  The seal women aren't given a voice even in a book about them.  Don't get me wrong, I don't think this sexism on the part of the author, but it's rather the author showing sexism in order to talk about it. 

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Next week:  Where Futures End, YA sci-fi (or is it fantasy?) by Parker Peevyhouse