Of Swords and Parasols

In New Avalon, everyone has a fairy that gives its human a special gift. Charlie, who is 14 and can’t drive, has a parking fairy that makes any vehicle she’s in always find the perfect parking spot. As a result, she’s frequently “borrowed,” even when she doesn’t want to be, and is trying to get rid of her fairy so she can get a new, better one by never getting into a car so that it will leave. Meanwhile, she has a crush on a new boy, Steffi, who doesn’t believe in fairies and thinks “New Avaloids” are too self-absorbed, obsessed with an impression that their better known residents and celebrities are amazingly famous and sought after. Despite that, he seems to like Charlie when not on the sphere of Fiorenze, who has an “all the boys like her” fairy.

May I just say that, from the start, a fairy that makes every person of the opposite sex who’s your age be in love with you regardless of their (or your) wishes or inclinations and without reservation or restraint sounded like the most horrific fairy ever? It created an almost immediate urge in me to side with Fiorenze regardless of her personality from the start. (Thankfully, I also liked her personality.) The setup with Fiorenze’s fairy also created something of a “girls hating the pretty (or reasonable magic facsimile) girl” dynamic that, even though it wasn’t narratively endorsed (the opposite, actually) made me a bit grumpy.

The book is considerably lighter than Larbalestier’s Magic or Madness trilogy, and not developed as in depth as even the first book, but it’s light and fun, and does have Charlie and Fiorenze bonding together to ditch their fairies in any way they can. I did find it odd, though, that no one else seemed to ever have any problems with their fairies.

Incidentally, I have the hardcover version of the book, which is the only one of Larbalestier’s (US edition) books to actually feature a person of color (Most-if not-all-of the characters are aboriginal Australians, and the main character of MoM is half-aboriginal, and of the two other leads, one was Hispanic, and I think the other was an albino. The paperback of HtDYF removes Charlie and has a fairy getting squashed by a hammer, and the MoM books have the “distant vague glowy woman” thing going, which is cool looking until you realize it’s probably to have the heroine on the cover without anyone noticing she isn’t white. Sigh.) without massive wank surrounding it.

Reason is a nomadic teenager who has lived all over Australia with her mother, with 4 months being the longest they ever stayed in one place. Her mother, always a bit off-kilter, has raised Reason to believe that her grandmother, Esmeralda, is an evil witch, and to reject anything that could so much as hint at magic, real or fictional. But now Reason’s mother has been institutionalized, and Reason is sent to live with Esmeralda. Her plans to runaway result in her meeting Tom, a neighbor whose mother is in the same institution as Reason’s, and who claims Esmeralda is his teacher, and Jay-Tee, a New York teen who takes Reason under her wing when Reason accidentally ends up in New York.

The book is told in first person for Reason’s chapters, and third person for Tom and Jay-Tee, and I particularly like how Reason and Tom’s chapters have Australian slang and spelling, but Jay-Tee’s have American slang and spelling. I like most of Larbalestier’s system of magic and how it’s different for each person and has consequences (though I’m not really comfortable with the consequences of denying magic) and with how it manifests for each person seems to be tied into their personalities (Jay-Tee is talky and a people-person, Reason is a math genius and can do Fibonacci sequences intuitively, and frequently does them as something of a comfort zone, and Tom is very design-minded). I also like how Jay-Tee, never having seen an Aborigine or a half-Aborigine\half-white person before, immediately assumes that Reason is Hispanic, because it’s the ethnicity she knows that Reason most resembles, and because she’s Hispanic herself. It felt very realistic.

And you know, looking at the cover, which is a shadowy back-view of a young woman (most likely Reason, possibly Jay-Tee) floating just above a snowy New York street, I kind of adore it visually, but wish I had seen it before the recent cover controversy regarding Larbalestier’s Liar, and before I would have realized that the cover design was probably to avoid putting a non-white lead on the cover of a YA fantasy.