I read Cuckoo Song

 This week's novel is Cuckoo Song, YA fantasy by Frances Hardinge.  I'm a Hardinge fan (The Lie Tree, Face Like Glass), and I'm slowly working through her novels.

Triss wakes up after falling into a river with most of her memories missing.  Her parents assure her that she's just a sickly person and she'll be well again if she just rests, but she's also overwhelmed by hunger that has her eating all of the food in the house and then rotten apples off the ground and then inanimate objects.  She's also seeing things as all her dolls come to life and try to stab her.  Her angry and terrified sister is convinced that she's not the real Triss, a prospect that grows more concerning as it becomes more certain. 

I really liked the family dynamics in this book.  Triss's older brother died in the war, and her parents have reacted to their grief and helplessness in how they treat their two daughters: protective and infantilizing, but also dismissive and blaming.  The reader gets a sense of what's happening and that the brother's death is the epicenter of the family well before Triss is able to articulate it.  Sometimes being that far ahead of the characters can feel irritating, as if the characters are too stupid.  But here it made sense that Triss wouldn't be able to see the relationships from inside it, and it made sense that as she distanced herself from her family, she was able to see them clearly.  There's also a cathartic moment (which is a theme in Hardinge's work) where Triss is able to articulate not just that it's happening, but also that it's wrong.

This is a book about fairies, and it uses fairy tropes and conventions, which you may know is usually not something I enjoy.  But this story never assumes that I have prior knowledge of fairies or how their society works or all the tricks to dealing with them.  It never names them as such, and the reader learns about them as Triss learns about them, so we have a nice gateway into things being explained. It's gotten me thinking that sometimes I bounce off a story about fairies because there is so much lore around them and creatures like them, lore from from different countries and different eras, and there's not a "standard" set of rules.  There are overlapping rules and stories that contradict each other and stories that don't fit together.  It's what I love about folklore: the many iterations and metamorphoses.  So any story that assumes I'm familiar with just one set of fairy tropes and that I'll know where the boundaries are between true-in-this-story and not-true-in-this-story without it being spelled out is making a pretty big assumption about the folklore I've been exposed to.  And that assumption shows that either they haven't done their research to know there's more to fairies, or they're assuming that, well, of course everyone will assume this is the Gaelic version.  And then if you want to get silly, it's also making an implicit statement about what's a "real" fairy, which is kind of ridiculous.  These are issues you have to navigate if you deal with any kind of folklore, it's just that fairies have a big, sprawling history that make them more difficult to navigate than some other monsters.