Laura Winter, Soul Forgotten

This week’s swap: Laura Winter’s Soul Forgotten (book 1 of Soul Series). I enjoyed this one, so here at last is a partial review of new fiction!

The Amazon description reads:

After waking up in a clearing with no memories and a dead body, Clara attempts to piece together her past with the help of Nate and Glitch. Between balancing powers, headaches, and a mysterious Blue Star, the three friends struggle to keep hope alive as more of Clara’s past is revealed.

~

Going by what she assumes is a fake name, Clara attempts to fill in her past after waking up with no memories, a bleeding cut on her forearm, and a dead body... all while balancing mind reading and telekinetic abilities she can’t remember having. As the questions keep building about her past, so do the voices in the back of her head that belong to the mysterious Blue Star, calling for her to give in. Will someone be able to pull her out of the cold?

Nate’s shadow tricks aren’t that impressive considering his best friend Glitch can teleport. Still, it’s a secret they’ll keep, especially when a new girl with purple hair shows up in their senior class. As Nate’s relationship with her grows, Clara and Nate discover they have a lot more in common than the secrets they hide.

With the looming threat of death, an evil power within the Blue Star, and more past than Clara wants to learn, the three friends try to balance their relationships and keep hope as their history reveals a dark future ahead.

When my son was about 10, he became a voracious reader of YA fantasy. At first my wife and I worried that he might stumble on something that would be inappropriate for him, so I made a point of reading along with him. This wasn’t as time-consuming as it sounds: I only read volume 1 of each series, unless I actually liked it, and sometimes it seems like all YA fantasy books come in 5+-volume series, each book being as thick as a phone book (remember those?). Ultimately, I came to like the genre, but I also became sensitive to its tropes and clichés, to the rather lazy way most YA writers create more or less the same books time and again.

The first thing I noticed about Laura Winter’s book is that it’s very workmanlike. The prose isn’t likely to win prizes, but a careful reader won’t get jogged out of it by infuriating typos, usage errors, and grammar screwups. The only thing I spotted was a misuse of “laying” for “lying,” which drives me nuts, but then it occurred to me that the narrator is a teenager, so I let it go on the strength of the rest.

Like everything YA these days, the book is in first person, with periodic chapter-based shifts of perspective; that is, if chapter 5 is Clara narrating, chapter 6 is probably Nate. As far as I’ve gotten in the book, there are only the two of them doing narration, with clear but not mechanical switches. I don’t find the two to have very strong personal voices, but they don’t sound exactly the same either—and since they’re both 18 year-olds who go to the same high school, I can readily accept something of the same sort of internal voicing. At least they’re not the same-old tired wiseass Percy-Jackson-wannabes.

So far, the plot isn’t especially unusual in itself. A girl who has no idea who she is or what’s going on wakes up in a field lying next to a dead man. Her blood is blue, she has some kind of magical (?) house that will take care of her daily needs, and increasingly she comes to realize that she has telepathic and telekinetic powers. She attends the local high school, in part because she can’t avoid it, and soon encounters two boys who also have strange, secret powers (as she knows via telepathy). They become friends, deal with standard high school interpersonal stuff, and slowly work toward figuring out what the heck is going on, etc. Nothing ground-breaking there, though for all I know the last third goes off the rails or is total plotting genius or both.

But the thing is, YA doesn’t have to be ground-breaking. That’s not the point. It’s about striking a tricky balance between familiarity and novelty. Percy Jackson is enough like Harry Potter to get some of the same thrills and also to grant Harry-lovers more of what they love; at the same time it’s different enough that it’s not predictable how either the adventures or the protagonists’ personal interactions will develop. Indeed, while Soul Forgotten is, as far as I’ve gotten, entirely familiar to anyone who’s read a bunch of the genre, I genuinely do not know where it’s going. I could guess, certainly, but to be honest I have several mutually-exclusive guesses, so even if one of them is right, I can’t claim that it was all obvious.

I had enough of a good time reading the free sample, in fact, that for $5 I bought the Kindle complete book. I haven’t done that in a while, but Winter’s cool, professional handling of a genre I enjoy struck me as worth supporting, and I suspect that my son and daughter will like the book, so why not?

Rather than stop there, I thought I’d briefly muse on one thing I found genuinely striking: the exposition—a.k.a. the Hermione Problem.

YA fantasy commonly runs on a “secret world” principle, in which there’s something going on that the protagonists know about (the wizarding world, the demigods, etc.) and almost everyone else doesn’t. The hero is thrown in and has to figure out the situation in order to handle the challenges it poses, but at the same time the basics of how young people relate to one another don’t change, and that’s challenging enough. To make the figuring-out process work, somebody has to provide exposition: who are the big players, what’s the background, who are the bad guys? In the Harry Potter books, this is almost exclusively Hermione saying, “Hasn’t anyone read Hogwarts, A History?” followed by exposition of what everyone is supposed to know but doesn’t.

Soul Forgotten takes an unusual approach to the problem. Initially, everything seems to be handed to Clara on a plate. She has this magical house that has a huge library and all kinds of notes and scraps (left, it seems, by herself before her amnesia-causing incident) through which she reconstructs the outlines. Some people get powers at 18, there are trials held by something called the Complex, the Complex is probably out to get her, etc. This takes almost no time to figure out, which seems too easy, and we expect that all of this will gain flesh and dominate everything. That is, we expect that as soon as she runs into these two other kids with powers, the rudiments of the Complex and the powers system will get filled in right away.

Instead, Clara chooses—I didn’t find this implausible or problematic—to hide her powers and not tell her new friends that she knows about theirs. She reads their surface thoughts, but nobody is thinking about the Complex; their powers just seem to be there, not something they think about constantly. And this creates an interesting effect.

On the one hand, you might read along and start thinking, okay, but can’t we get on with the real plot? On the other, you might note constant small oddities and figure they’re hints of something, though the narrators never mark them so: Why don’t any of these kids have parents looking after them? Is it significant that Nate’s mostly-absent dad is something military-intelligence? Isn’t it odd that Clara and Nate, without prior connections of which they’re aware, have exactly the same tastes in music, movies, sports, and so on? It all seems very easy… unless it’s evidence of something creepy going on.

I must say that I like this approach, Winter is taking a big risk. It’s a slow burn. So long as the Real Story remains frustratingly distant and ungraspable, we focus on the characters for themselves and for the nagging sense that there’s something nasty in the works, building up to a dreadful future situation. But the longer the Real Story remains entirely unknown, the greater the pressure on its payoff. Everything’s got to click into place perfectly to be satisfying.

Compare The Sting and Watchmen. The ultimate plot behind everything in Watchmen is a letdown, because it’s just not cool or clever enough to carry the vast setup. The final reveal in The Sting is utterly satisfying, because suddenly everything makes sense: every little bit wasn’t just events but hints, clues to what’s really going on, and when we get it, we think, Oh, I see, I get it!

I don’t know if Winter pulls it off, because I haven’t finished the book yet, but I hope so. Sure, some YA readers may bail on the way because the Real Story isn’t out in the open early, but if the payoff is worth it, others should get to the end and immediately want their friends to read the book too.

And with that, I’m going back to Soul Forgotten to find out what’s going on!

While I’m in a YA mood, next time I’m going to talk about China Miéville’s Un Lun Dun. If you haven’t read it, you absolutely should.