Angelfall, or the problem with disabled younger siblings in fiction

You know how sometimes, there'll be a book that you pick up and put back again each time you go to the bookshop? One that draws you in but you can't quite make the commitment to buy and read? For a little while, that book for me was Angelfall, by Susan Ee. It looked cool - I liked the idea of the post-apocalyptic, angel-ravaged landscape, and the cover is pretty awesome. I also enjoyed the fact that it had a young woman as its main character and there wasn't any mention of a love triangle in the blurb. I picked it up, put it back, picked it up again, each time I went to the bookshop. Eventually, I bought it in ebook form, and read it that way.

Perhaps this pick-it-up-put-it-back cycle hyped it up too much for me, but I was kind of disappointed. Not in the plot, so much, or the world building, which I enjoyed a lot. Mostly I was disappointed by the way that disability was discussed in the book, both in terms of physical disability and mental illness, which I found pretty ignorant and kind of gross. (spoilers follow for the entirety of Angelfall)

The main character, Penryn, is the teenage daughter of a schizophrenic mother. The mother is constantly described as scary, dangerous, unhinged, unable to properly love her children. Certainly she is presented as unable to take care of her children, leading to Penryn having to effectively mother her younger sister. There is very little mention of a father - I don't remember it ever being clear where he was or why he was unable to help to raise his daughters. The mother is presented as having brief, rare moments of clarity where she is horrified at what she's capable of and does things like sign up Penryn to every martial arts class she can locate and pay in advance for the following couple of years. Then she's back to being scary, dangerous and talking to demons. My problem with this character is that she remains a distant stereotype, never becoming a real character. She is entirely defined by the fact that she is violent, scary, unpredictable, and ultimately a danger to everyone around her, including her children.

One of the results of their mother's mental illness is that, prior to the events of the book occurring, Penryn's little sister was gravely injured by their mother when nobody else was around to see it. This injury - which I infer to be a spinal injury of some description, though it's not stated explicitly - left Paige unable to use her legs, or, as Ee puts it "wheelchair bound". The wheelchair users I know really dislike that phrase - they're not trapped in their chairs, the chair gives them freedom to get about and do stuff. Ee also refers to Paige as having "lost her legs", although it's clear from the end of the book that Paige is not an amputee. I found this a strange and lazy way to say that she had lost the use of her legs.

Paige is kidnapped within the first five per cent of the book, and doesn't show up again until the very end. Rescuing Paige is the primary driving force of the novel, with Penryn as narrator making clear that everything she does is for her sister. The girls' mother cannot be trusted to find her young daughter, because she's too busy being scary and crazy, so Penryn, a teenager, has to find and rescue her younger sister. Paige is there only to motivate Penryn, basically a macguffin to drive the plot. Like their mother, she never evolves past her stereotype, which is inspirational disabled angelic victim. Paige is sweet, loving, beautiful and perfect, apart from the fact that she's a victim of their crazy scary mother. She's the infant version of Cousin Helen from What Katy Did, a woman with disabilities who is literally referred to as a saint.

There was one particularly troubling passage about Paige and how she was before the world ended. Penryn briefly describes her sister's friends - a kid with significant limb difference, a kid who drools, a kid who has a breathing pump - and then describes Paige: "Paige was their cheerleader, counsellor and best friend all rolled into one." I read this as presenting Paige through juxtaposing the difference between her and her friends - sorry, her 'flock'. Paige is clearly presented as the leader of this little group, more charismatic, smarter, more positive and optimistic than the other children. The way that the other kids' disabilities are described is in such a way that we, the reader, are supposed to understand the revulsion that people feel upon looking at Paige's 'flock'. By this contrast, we infer, Paige is much better. Less gross. She doesn't drool. She looks the most 'normal'. Of course this makes her the 'cheerleader' of the group, a role in American fiction that is intrinsically linked with beauty, attraction, charisma, popularity and success. The other disabled kids were invoked only to show us more about how perfect Paige is.

I think the main reason that Ee spent so much energy setting up how perfect/beautiful/saintly Paige is, is so that we would feel more of the wrench for Penryn when Paige reappears at the end of the book, transformed into a monster. Her spine has been operated on by the angels, returning her ability to walk, and somehow she has been given super strength, but her (previously perfect, angelic) face has been cut open to replace her teeth with vicious fangs, which also leave her unable to talk. I can see that, if we buy in to the depiction of Paige as this perfect child, her transformation into atrocity is deeply emotionally affecting. However, by the time this was revealed, I was already tired of the trope-y nature of the characters in the book, and ready for it to end.

One thing I probably should mention is that this novel is written in first person, narrated by Penryn. I suppose it could be argued that a teenager who hates her mother and adores her sister will not present them as anything more than the stereotypes as which they appear in this book. But I find it problematic and irresponsible that Ee didn't do more to depict these characters in a more three-dimensional way. Penryn is shown to be able to think in a complex way about other issues, but in terms of thinking about disability, it's the same old stuff.

Disabled characters in books seem almost always to be either saints or burdens, and almost never the main character in their own right. Penryn has both a burden and a saint to bear, in the form of her mother and sister, but the tropes around disability that Ee employed read to me as both lazy and ignorant. The disabled characters of Angelfall never get to be anything other than the stereotypes that are initially employed to describe them - the same tired, lazy tropes that we see everywhere. As described in this brilliant essay, the disabled characters of this novel exist purely to add difficulty, pathos and motivation to the life of the main character, an abled young woman.

This book is partly so disappointing because I wanted it to be better. I liked that the main character could generally take care of herself. I enjoyed the world building. The prose was pretty decent. That's what makes it such a shame that the characterisation let it down.

The Fifth Season, by NK Jemisin

Reading a book is an act of trust. I've frequently been heard to say, 'Life's too short to read bad books,' and it's something I wholeheartedly believe. If I start reading a book and find that it's not to my taste, I'm doing nobody any favours by continuing to read it. Carrying on with a book is, to me, saying that I trust that the book will be worth my time. If I'm not enjoying it, the author has not inspired that trust in me, and I'll give up. I've encountered many people who finish every book they start, on principle. I'm the opposite.

Finding an author I can reliably trust to deliver work I'll enjoy and want to read to the end is amazing - like meeting someone and knowing they're destined to become an old friend. As a child, Diana Wynne Jones was one of these authors; I would take any of her books out of the library without even glancing at the blurb, because I knew I would love it, whatever she wrote. The same was true of Joan Aiken. I read everything of hers that I could get my hands on and loved it all - this was begun with The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, which I was given for my sixth birthday by my former childminder.

A little over four years ago, I discovered a new author of the trustworthy kind: N K Jemisin. I'll buy anything she writes. I've loved all of her novels so far, and all of her short stories that I've read. I've given copies of The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms as gifts to friends and family at least half a dozen times. During my first Masters degree, I wrote a paper on her first published novel, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (it was about the fluidity of Nahadoth's gender and Heidegger's 'gift' and Da-sein), which means my paperback copy of the book is frilled with placemarkers and post-it notes with all my scribblings on them. When I wrote this essay, I emailed her letting her know that I had enjoyed her work and she emailed back so graciously that it really just cemented my enjoyment of her work. Not only is she a hell of a writer, she's either a really great person, or exceptionally good at pretending to be (I suspect the former).

I don't recall how long ago I preordered The Fifth Season - months, at least. I read about it on her blog when she was writing about curse words and the way they betray the values of a society, when it was still being called the Untitled Magic Seismology Project (UMSP) and I've been waiting for it with growing excitement since then. That was in 2012. So, three years? Ish?

Anyway, The Fifth Season was released this week, and it is amazing. I trust Jemisin to write stuff that I'll want to read, and will buy pretty much anything with her name on it. But this is her best novel yet. Even before I had finished it, I was enthusing to friends and theorizing and realising links and connections between characters and situations and it's just a triumph. It's amazing. I love it.

The Fifth Season is about three women - one child, leaving her family to be taken and trained to use her orogenic powers (magic based on and involving the earth and seismic effects); one young woman in control of her powers who has been sent away with a man she can barely stand, to do a job she doesn't want to do, and is expected to return pregnant if possible; and a woman fully grown into herself and her powers, facing the loss and death of her children. I was more than halfway through the book before I realised that it's the maiden, the mother and the crone, but of course all of these characters are more than that.

This book is about oppression and love and protection and identity and power and fear. It's about parenthood and childhood, family and strangeness. There are characters who are queer and poly and trans; there are characters who are hated and feared because of what they are and punished for what they cannot help but be; there are characters with black skin, brown skin, white skin, with straight and curly and kinky hair, with and without epicanthal folds. The world that she has built looks, in many ways, different from our own, but the diversity of experiences and people is there. And it's there because Jemisin has made it matter that it is there. She does this on purpose (I assume that everything in her books is there on purpose, because Jemisin is a very purposeful and thoughtful writer.) and it makes all the difference. It matters that there exist books where the main characters are bisexual and polyamorous, where there are prominent trans characters and gender fluid characters, where characters have disabilities of various types. Jemisin writes about oppression in various forms in all of her books, and she writes about it from the point of view of a person who notices things and thinks about them. There is no 'writing about the default' in her work. It is a thousand miles away from medieval-Europe-white-people-sword-and-sorcery, and so much the better for it.

It's impossible to express how much I loved this book. I'm composing a list of people who deserve or need to get this book for birthdays or solstice and currently the list stands at 'everyone.' I'm looking forward to buying it in dead tree version so I can reread it and still have a new experience with it. If and when the audiobook becomes available in the UK, I'll buy it and listen to it. I think it will become my favourite book by my favourite living author. It's amazing. I loved it. I loved it.

A mishmash

Karina has written some interesting thoughts on knitting/crafting and lifestyle blogs and curation of personal 'brand' and image. She refers to it as 'Gooping', as in Paltrow. I think that a certain amount of curation is not only advisable, but necessary. We don't need to know gnarly inside details of everything and everyone's life. On the other hand, allowing some 'mess' to creep in is needed.

There can, I think, be a temptation to avoid admitting when things are hard, to keep things light and bright and sparkling. Those blogging about knitting and quilting rarely blog about their mental health issues or the homophobia they face in the street or being victims of any number of crimes and microaggressions daily. It seems almost compartmentalised away from that, as though creating a creative space requires no allowance of negativity.

For me, when I have brainweasels, it's hard for me to create. I can tell I'm depressed when I have no interest in knitting or sewing or spinning. I only really do these things when I'm happy - maybe that's linked to it. But I certainly identify with what Karie says about the mint/peach blob. The lives of most of these people don't really resemble mine in any meaningful way.

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I'm looking for audiobook recommendations. I've recently listened to and enjoyed Tell the Wolves I'm Home and I've just read The Rabbit Back Literature Society which was quite good and Alif the Unseen which was wonderful. Heard anything great lately?

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I listen to this poem sometimes just on repeat. I think it's one of my favourites.

Have a good Monday.