Weight of Feathers Review

This week's novel is The Weight of Feathers, fantasy with traveling circus acts and rival families, by Anna-Marie McLemore.

The Palomas are a Hispanic family of traveling performers, where the girls dress like mermaids and swim for an audience.  The Corbeaus are a French-Romani family of traveling performers, who wear giant wings and do acrobatic stunts in tree branches for an audience.  They hate each other.  When they end up preforming in the same town, Lace Paloma ends up being unknowingly rushed to the hospital by Cluck Corbeau, and when her family finds out that a Corbeau touched her (to bring her to the hospital), she's banished from the family.  Lace sets out to remove the curse she thinks Cluck cast over her so that she can return to her family.


The two cultures presented here are rich and deep.  Not only does McLemore show cultural traditions that feel authentic and respectful, but she also shows generational differences within the families and cultural differences between those born into the families and those that married in.  It gives both families a sense of place in a larger world.

I enjoyed the performances much more than I thought I would.  I've talked before about how much atmospheric magic leaves me unfulfilled, but this framed the atmospheric aspect in a way I really liked.  Yeah, people come and watch mermaids swim around and there's no big finale or show stopper or rising tension or anything, but this story describes it like watching fireworks.  The applause comes and goes in bursts.  This is relatable and understandable, and I buy it completely.


The love story was also nice and refreshing.  It's a star-crossed lovers scenario with the addition that she knows they're from feuding families while he doesn't, so I was waiting for them to have a falling out when he inevitably discovered the truth or for her to back out at a crucial moment because what would her family think??  But that didn't happen.  They weren't overly enraged or biased against each other, and at the same time they weren't ready to throw everything away for a fling.  They were both reasonable, listening to each other and putting things in perspective.  This is remarkable considering the feuding families trope and how unreasonable the other characters act. 

Speaking of which, the families in this blow my mind with how unreasonable they are.  The Paloma matriarch engages in what can only be described as gross victim blaming when she banishes Lace, and the rest of the family just goes along with it.  Meanwhile, Cluck's mother treats him like dirt because he's left handed and has red feathers growing out of his head instead of normal black feathers growing out of his head like the rest of the family.  It's cruel and insane.  Love your children unconditionally, you jerks!  I think this was supposed to emphasize how superstitious the families were, but it pushed it past the realm of believability, which says something when the characters have feathers and scales.

***

Next week: The Magician King, the sequel to The Magicians by Lev Grossman.