Philbrick, author of Freak the Mighty (1993) has again created a compelling set of characters that engage the reader with their courage and kindness in a painful world that offers hope, if no happy endings. Enriched by Ryter’s allusions to nearly lost literature and full of intriguing, invented slang, the skillful writing paints two pictures of what the world could look like in the future-the burned-out Urb and the pristine Eden-then shows the limits and strengths of each. Moving from one peril to the next, they survive only with help from a proov woman. When Spaz sets out to reach his dying younger sister, he and his companions must cross three treacherous zones ruled by powerful bosses. Only the “proovs,” genetically improved people, have grass, trees, and blue skies in their aptly named Eden, inaccessible to the “normals” in the Urb. Nearly everyone around him uses probes to escape their life of ruin and poverty, the result of an earthquake that devastated the world decades earlier. Ryter feels a kinship with Spaz, who unlike his contemporaries has a strong memory because of his epilepsy, Spaz cannot use the mind probes that deliver entertainment straight to the brain and rot it in the process. The old man, Ryter, one of the few people remaining who can read and write, has dedicated his life to recording stories.
In this riveting futuristic novel, Spaz, a teenage boy with epilepsy, makes a dangerous journey in the company of an old man and a young boy. This will surely enthrall those who loved Berlie Doherty’s Daughter of the Sea (1997). Writing in a diary format, with saints’ and solstice celebrations marking the movement of the Folk, Billingsley makes a rich metaphor of Corrina’s rejection of food and warmth, and weaves the discovery of her magic into the unfolding of her selfhood and her true history. With Lady Alicia’s son, Finian, Corrina learns from and loves the sea, which speaks to her in new ways, but mysteries of a former Lady, a buried child, and the sinister Sir Edward cloud her understanding. Still in her boy’s disguise, she becomes Folk Keeper at Lady Alicia’s Cliffsend by the sea. She has no training but she listens and learns, and when she is summoned to a great estate, she seizes the opportunity.
She has made herself into a Folk Keeper by cutting off her silver hair, which grows wondrously, and passing herself off as a boy, for only boys perform this task. Corinna is crafty and sullen: she lives in the cellar of a foundling home whose dark and damp she loves, and keeps the Folk quiescent by offerings of food, and circles of iron and salt. From Billingsley (Well-Wished, 1997), an inventive and romantic fusion of the selkie tale with that of a nameless, hungry Folk who must be kept at bay.
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