[bala · home]
[okadenamatī · reviews]
[mesaramatiziye · other writings]
[tedbezī · languages]
language: English
country: Canada
year: 2024
form: novel
genre(s): fantasy, romance
dates read: 8.1.26-10.1.26
the first thing that bugged me about Alistair Reeves’s A Spell for Heartsickness is a throwaway description of the city of Wishbrooke in the first chapter:
Built upon a slim finger of a peninsula on the southern sea, the city could not sprawl outward, so it stretched upward, everything built upon the old foundations in a game of architectural Jenga.
now, the setting of the book is roughly contemporary (albeit perhaps a slightly lower-tech contemporary), but apparently in a secondary world. there are cars and cell phones and thinly-veiled analogues of social media — “Alakagram” — and what seems like maybe some kind of trademarked scrying system called “SoothSight” —
— and, apparently, in this secondary world, Jenga exists. not a thinly-veiled Jenga analogue, but Jenga™.
this is not the only such primary world intrusion; at the end of the second chapter, our protagonist, Briar Wyngrave, has an argument with his rich, obnoxious ex-boyfriend, who says: “Christ, you’re such a diva lately.”
I’m sorry? Jesus existed in this secondary world? Christianity exists in this secondary world? excuse me? was Jesus a witch? is anyone else seeing this? I guess in some ways one must admire the audacity of not even bothering to reskin it — they fully just celebrate Christmas in this world — but come on.
Briar is a newly-graduated witch who has been assigned not — as he hoped — to the bustling city of Pentawynn but instead to the isolated island settlement of “Coill Darragh” (obviously just Irish coill dharach/Gaelic coille dharaich “oak wood”). this, you may guess, is the second thing that bugged me, because Reeves’s descriptions might as well be transcribed from Iain Crichton Smith’s “Real People in a Real Place”:
Built into the hills, the thatched cottages stumbled into one another haphazardly. The streets twisted such that you could never see all the way down a lane. There was something nostalgic about the place. Old and yearning, stretched across time. Few cars parked along the lanes, and even fewer neon lights lit the storefronts. People walked at an amble, unlike the brisk, purposeful strides of city-goers.
setting aside the malapropism at the end (not the only one in the book), the key here is the situation of Coill Darragh, inhabited by people with names like “Rowan O’Shea” and “Éibhear” and “Sorcha”, in the past. it brushes up against the present, to be sure, so that residents of the present can visit it (tourists are a constant), but it is both physically — being an island — and metaphysically — being surrounded by a magical ward that is impenetrable without a protective amulet; being “[i]n the middle of nowhere, with no one” — separated from the (novel’s) contemporary world. it is perhaps worth noting here that Reeves is a Canadian anglophile (his bio describes him as “indulging his addictions to hot beverages and rainy weather” now that he lives in England).
ironically, the treatment of Coill Darragh as “a small Irish town wearing the scars of its magical history, auras of the past bleeding into the present” was apparently inspired by seeing the bullet holes at the GPO in Dublin. the problem here is that the “magical history” that Reeves imagines “bleeding into the present” is devoid of the material historical content — or its fictional equivalent — that makes the scars of the Easter Rising so powerful, namely the violence of colonialism and resistance thereto. it feels telling that while some characters have Irish names, apart from the name of a local holiday (“Saor ó Eagla”, which of course Briar struggles to pronounce — perplexingly, we are told that “[h]is accent didn’t wrap around the vowels the same way”??) no Irish actually appears in the novel; there is certainly no indication that any characters speak Irish, or whatever fantasy language is being represented by Irish.
so much for (most of) the bad.
the novel follows Briar as he attempts to establish himself in Coill Darragh — just for the year, he hopes — but quickly finds himself caught between two people: Rowan, the softhearted lumberjack of an alderman, and Linden Fairchild, a celebrity fashion designer and potion-maker who seems to promise fame but is frustratingly distant. I think the characterization and the handling of emotions is solid; Reeves does a particularly good job of capturing the exhilaration of the early days of a relationship with Briar and Rowan, who start hooking up ostensibly just as friends with benefits but in a way that quickly spirals, though Linden’s presence throws a wrench in things. that Briar’s response when Linden invited him on a “precursor” date was “hm, we might have to have a conversation about exclusivity” was a nice change of pace, although later the novel falls back into using jealous monogamy, which was a bit of a disappointment.
I think it’s fair to say that this love triangle is the main plot of the novel; its secondary plot, though parts of it are closely connected to the love triangle, revolves around Coill Darragh and around Briar, who is cursed. I went back and forth on the idea of curses as a diagnosable (and sometimes treatable) medical condition, and while I’m still not a hundred percent sure how I feel about it I do at least think it’s handled interestingly here. Briar has, effectively, a terminal illness that he has been hiding from everyone around him, and this adds a much darker note to the otherwise fairly conventional love triangle: Rowan may offer him happiness — perhaps even something like True Love — but Linden wants him, too, and — crucially — Linden offers Briar the possibility of a cure.
meanwhile, the curse is connected in some way to Coill Darragh, whose woods are angry at outsiders who take while giving nothing in return, threatening to consume Rowan and, indeed, everyone in the village in order to exact their revenge, as they consumed Rowan’s father ten years ago in an incident that also left the previous inhabitant of Briar’s storefront — a young witch named Gretchen, now a frustrated poltergeist — murdered. looming over the love triangle and the curse is a prophecy given to Briar by a seer that ties together both plots.
I do wish more of the focus had been on the curse plot and less on the love triangle, but I think for what it is the love triangle plot is well-executed, with some turns I did not expect, even if the end result was obvious (not least from the cover).
part of the problem is just that all of the mostly little things that didn’t work — the lazy or twee world-building (Jesus, “SoothSight”), the at times too-cutesy dialogue, the excision of anything resembling real Irish history, the dramatic scene where Briar goes to the woods for a potion ingredient and makes a blood bargain with the forest only for there to be no follow-up on the potion he almost died to be able to make beyond a single sentence a hundred pages later, … — add up, and the result is a whole that didn’t quite hold together for me.
more bluntly, too, I think that, in order to feel like it all paid off, Briar needed to die at the end. given that the review quote on the cover describes the novel as “[c]omfy and satisfying”, I knew from the get-go that this was not in the cards. sometimes, though, death is the logical endpoint of a character’s arc. I am thinking about one of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s fragments —
So I go out: my little sweet is done:
I have drawn heat from this contagious sun:
To not ungentle death now forth I run.
the could-have-been-compelling narrative tension created by the dichotomy the novel presents Briar with — love or live — is undermined by the structure of the romance genre, which can only lead, inevitably, to both. so I watch the curse plot unfold more or less as I predicted it would a hundred pages ago, knowing that, in the end, actually none of the tension was real. I don’t even think I would have minded if he’d, like, died and been resurrected! but while I smiled at the end, sure, I was neither charmed nor delighted nor otherwise Moved the way I was clearly meant to be.
another way of putting this whole review is: I just don’t think the romance genre writ large Works For Me, even when there’s fantasy afoot. there are exceptions, and I’ll probably keep trying, if only to be able to better identify what makes an exception, but this didn’t manage to be one of them. I will say, however, that I’m (“morbidly” feels unfair) curious to know how “book two” in this series(?) can possibly be connected to this first book — which ends so utterly enclosed within itself — particularly because the blurb for book two sounds completely unrelated. so I might still read it, if only to find out if Jesus exists in that one, too.
moods: emotional, hopeful, horny (in a good way!), lighthearted