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attackfishI did actually read Unspoken and Untold one right after another, in the parking lot of the grocery store while my grandmother left me in the car without the keys I would have needed to make her car alarm shut up, while she shopped for groceries in a store full of pumpkins (just a few more days, and they’ll all be gone!) before I even thought about writing a review, but I figured in the interest of not swamping you all with two book reviews in one day, I would hold off on writing and posting my review of Untold. By the way, this is where you want to stop reading if you don’t want to be spoiled for Unspoken.
Kami and Jared have been bound together since before they were born, and now, just as they have found each other, that bond is suddenly, painfully broken. They no longer have each other’s comforting voice in their heads, they no longer can tell that the other is thinking and feeling, and they no longer know when the other is lying. And now that Rob Lynburn has given the town of Sorry-in-the-Vale an ultimatum, and his deadline is drawing near, they could each really use somebody to talk to. Worse, people in Sorry-in-the-Vale are dying, and and Jared’s friends and families are at the top of Rob Lynburn’s list.
Trigger warning again. This time there’s less animal cruelty and more attempted suicide. There’s still murder, abusive families, and really f***ed up childhoods, though. I would like to note that the trigger warnings I put on my reviews are for the books I’m writing about, not necessarily my review. For example, in my Unspoken review I listed child abuse and animal cruelty, neither of which I went much into, but are very much a part of the book.
Sarah Bees Brennan has written on her blog that the Gothic novel as a genre could be described as “girl meets house” which I think can be taken a little more generally, for example, “girl meets small town with dark secret” or “girl meets creepy boarding school” or really any “girl meets (possibly dangerous, definitely intimidating, probably secretive) place that she can’t easily leave” which is a good thing, because the introductions between Aurimere House and Monkshood Abbey are pretty perfunctory. But either way, the heart of a Gothic novel is the meeting between the main character and the place, and the journey into the unknown that the place represents as the heroine ferrets out its secrets. In Untold, that process has already taken place. There really isn’t a lot of uncovering of mystery to be done. And Sarah Rees Brennan reminds us of this fact in the first chapter of Untold. If Kami thought Rob Lynburn was the kind of villain who wants to keep quiet about the whole magic and sorcery thing in order to maintain some sort of pretence of normalcy, he proves her wrong when he and his minions sic animated scarecrows after the townspeople, including Kami and her friends in broad daylight within the first few pages. If Unspoken is about secrets, Untold is about what happens when secrets aren’t secret anymore.
This is part of the reason that Untold is weaker in parts than Unspoken. There’s less of a pattern for it to follow. Also, since I personally can’t stand romantic misunderstanding conflicts, they are a massive pet peeve of mine, and a fair chunk of the beginning of Untold is taken up with Jared and Kami’s inability to sit down and tell each other the truth, it just wasn’t as much fun as the beginning of Unspoken.
Also the pretense is gone. Since people reading Untold have (hopefully) already read Unspoken, we already know that however many jokes the characters crack, Sarah Rees Brennan is going to stomp all over our hearts and leave us crying in a ball. So it’s hard not to spend the beginning of Untold waiting for the other shoe to drop. But if Untold is less lighthearted delicious fun than Unspoken, it’s also, at least to me, more interesting. Sarah Rees Brennan has always been excellent at showing the difficult, unpleasant sides of literary tropes most of us take for granted, and using this to add realism to her work. Untold is all about the consequences of Unspoken, about what it actually means to live in a world where a Gothic story has happened, the secret was uncovered, and things were even worse than the heroine feared. Jared and Kami have to deal with the end of the bond they have had their entire life, the way that what is normal for the rest of us is not their normal. Jared has to face that the man he saw as a possible surrogate father, who was pretty much the only positive adult force in his life, is in fact a power hungry monster, bent on human sacrifice. Oh, and his mother’s right there with him on the human sacrifice thing. Ash has to deal not only with the fact that his father’s a murderer, but that he almost became a murderer too because it took him too long to have the courage to stand up to him. He can no longer think himself better than everyone else if this is his real self. Angela has to deal with almost dying, at Ash’s hands no less, and the way the world has suddenly become unsafe around her. Holly has to deal with her own deep dark secrets, some are mundane, and some are not. Kami has to deal with the fact that her mother let her believe she might be crazy for years rather than tell her about what she had done, and about what most of the rest of Sorry-in-the-Vale already knew, and with the fact that she’s not alone in being in danger. Her parents and her little brothers are in danger too. Everybody has to deal with the fact that people are dying, and that Lillian Lynburn is a horrible leader, and just because she’s not up for human sacrifice doesn’t mean she’s a good person.
I mentioned in my review of Unspoken how the way Jared was just as much an outsider to the secret at the heart of Unspoken as Kami put them on an equal footing, unlike most Gothic heroines and their love interests, which was something I liked. This is maintained in Untold, and deepened, as it’s made clear that Rob is just as willing to kill Jared as he is Kami. Whereas the love interest of most Gothic Heroines is the one with the secret, the one who is a threat to her and also her protection (and some truly fascinating essays about the place of women in 18th century society and the way this made women extremely vulnerable to the real physical threat of their fathers and husbands, and how marriage was coming under the power of a man a woman could never be fully certain of until she was trapped, and how this fed into and was expressed by Gothic literature) whereas in Sarah Rees Brennan’s modern Gothic, Kami and Jared are allowed to be equals, equally overwhelmed, equally at a loss, equally afraid, and because of this they aren’t Gothic heroine and love interest, but instead Gothic heroine and Gothic hero of their separate but closely entwined Gothic mysteries. In the same essay where Sarah Rees Brennan (note, I don’t know whether to call ber Brennan or Rees Brennan, so full name it is) talks about Gothic literature being about “girl meets house”, she talks about how women aren’t trapped socially and physically in the house anymore, and how this changes the Gothic novel. One of the things she mentioned is that children still are trapped in the home. If your parents move you somewhere, that’s that. Well, Kami and Jared are both children, and both stuck in Sorry-in-the-Vale, unless Jared wants to go back to living on the streets, and Kami wants to join him. They have very little recourse, and Sarah Rees Brennan doesn’t make any bones about this.
Which is actually something that made me really angry while reading. In most YA Gothic inspired fantasy, the parents don’t actually know anything’s going on, at least for a while. In Unspoken, Kami’s mother has known the whole time. She knew before Kami. She let Kami believe she was crazy her whole life, believe her mother thought she was crazy, her whole life rather than tell her daughter and husband what she did and the truth about the town. She acts shamefully long before Unspoken takes place and continues to act shamefully throughout both books. If I were living in a small town with a powerful sorcerer who along with his minions is gunning for my daughter and wants to sacrifice people for more magic, I wouldn’t be trying to appease him, I would have packed up and moved my kids away so fast my old house would be spinning on its foundations. Kami doesn’t have the freedom to do this, but her mom and dad do. Interestingly, Sarah Rees Brennan doesn’t shy away from this, and in fact part of the emotional burden placed on Kami, and part of why she feels so lost, is that she can’t rely on her mother the way she always thought she could. A lot of YA novels use parental abandonment, incompetence, or abuse of some kind as a way to allow the kids to have their dangerous adventures without adult interference. Sarah Rees Brennan takes this out of the realm of excuse and makes it into something that makes her characters’ pain and fear worse.
I have a few things to say about both Unspoken and Untold that I should have said in my review of Unspoken, but didn’t because I wrote it at midnight, which is not when I do my best thinking. First, Kami and her father are about as far from any of the stereotypes about East Asians as they can be. He’s a joke cracking graphic designer who is a warm, safe presence in his daughter's life and one of the few people in Sorry-in-the-Vale brave enough to stand up to Lillian Lynburn. Kami is a chubby, mystery loving girl with more enthusiasm than sense, and she might love books, but she’s anything but an “Asian geek.” She’s unpopular because she’s weird, because there’s good reason to believe she’s the kind of crazy for which there is a diagnosis and medication. She’s loud, extroverted, and reminds me of some of my friends when they here high schoolers. Second, I’m so happy to see a straight girl/lesbian girl friendship where sexuality is a non-issue. Angela and Kami are wonderful friends, and I just want to smish them. Third, Holly is the possibly bisexual, pretty but not necessarily popular girl of my heart. I was her once. I’m busty with big hips and a little waist, I developed young having a C cup by the time I started middle school, and false modesty aside, I was a good looking girl. Middle school and high school for me involved a lot of unsubstantiated rumors about who I was sleeping with, male and female, and a lot of bullying because of my supposed promiscuity. The narrative of both books talks about this form of bullying, and I love that Holly is so happy to have female friends to do girl things with in high school.
I also wanted to note that the cover blurbs call Unspoken and Untold “darkly funny”. This is not true. They are not black comedy. They will not make you laugh at horrible things. No, they’re dark and funny, separately and simultaneously. They will make you laugh, and then hit you with something dark, and then they will make you laugh, and then hit you with something even darker, over and over and over again. Be warned.
Damn it, now I have to wait almost a whole year before the last book in the trilogy comes out. I need it. I need it like air.
Sarah Rees Brennan can be found all over the internet, for example, as![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sarahtales on livejournal, on tumblr at sarahreesbrennan.tumblr.com, and on her own website, sarahreesbrennan.com. If you like her books, I advise checking out her web presences. She likes to post short stories in the universes of her novels.
Kami and Jared have been bound together since before they were born, and now, just as they have found each other, that bond is suddenly, painfully broken. They no longer have each other’s comforting voice in their heads, they no longer can tell that the other is thinking and feeling, and they no longer know when the other is lying. And now that Rob Lynburn has given the town of Sorry-in-the-Vale an ultimatum, and his deadline is drawing near, they could each really use somebody to talk to. Worse, people in Sorry-in-the-Vale are dying, and and Jared’s friends and families are at the top of Rob Lynburn’s list.
Trigger warning again. This time there’s less animal cruelty and more attempted suicide. There’s still murder, abusive families, and really f***ed up childhoods, though. I would like to note that the trigger warnings I put on my reviews are for the books I’m writing about, not necessarily my review. For example, in my Unspoken review I listed child abuse and animal cruelty, neither of which I went much into, but are very much a part of the book.
Sarah Bees Brennan has written on her blog that the Gothic novel as a genre could be described as “girl meets house” which I think can be taken a little more generally, for example, “girl meets small town with dark secret” or “girl meets creepy boarding school” or really any “girl meets (possibly dangerous, definitely intimidating, probably secretive) place that she can’t easily leave” which is a good thing, because the introductions between Aurimere House and Monkshood Abbey are pretty perfunctory. But either way, the heart of a Gothic novel is the meeting between the main character and the place, and the journey into the unknown that the place represents as the heroine ferrets out its secrets. In Untold, that process has already taken place. There really isn’t a lot of uncovering of mystery to be done. And Sarah Rees Brennan reminds us of this fact in the first chapter of Untold. If Kami thought Rob Lynburn was the kind of villain who wants to keep quiet about the whole magic and sorcery thing in order to maintain some sort of pretence of normalcy, he proves her wrong when he and his minions sic animated scarecrows after the townspeople, including Kami and her friends in broad daylight within the first few pages. If Unspoken is about secrets, Untold is about what happens when secrets aren’t secret anymore.
This is part of the reason that Untold is weaker in parts than Unspoken. There’s less of a pattern for it to follow. Also, since I personally can’t stand romantic misunderstanding conflicts, they are a massive pet peeve of mine, and a fair chunk of the beginning of Untold is taken up with Jared and Kami’s inability to sit down and tell each other the truth, it just wasn’t as much fun as the beginning of Unspoken.
Also the pretense is gone. Since people reading Untold have (hopefully) already read Unspoken, we already know that however many jokes the characters crack, Sarah Rees Brennan is going to stomp all over our hearts and leave us crying in a ball. So it’s hard not to spend the beginning of Untold waiting for the other shoe to drop. But if Untold is less lighthearted delicious fun than Unspoken, it’s also, at least to me, more interesting. Sarah Rees Brennan has always been excellent at showing the difficult, unpleasant sides of literary tropes most of us take for granted, and using this to add realism to her work. Untold is all about the consequences of Unspoken, about what it actually means to live in a world where a Gothic story has happened, the secret was uncovered, and things were even worse than the heroine feared. Jared and Kami have to deal with the end of the bond they have had their entire life, the way that what is normal for the rest of us is not their normal. Jared has to face that the man he saw as a possible surrogate father, who was pretty much the only positive adult force in his life, is in fact a power hungry monster, bent on human sacrifice. Oh, and his mother’s right there with him on the human sacrifice thing. Ash has to deal not only with the fact that his father’s a murderer, but that he almost became a murderer too because it took him too long to have the courage to stand up to him. He can no longer think himself better than everyone else if this is his real self. Angela has to deal with almost dying, at Ash’s hands no less, and the way the world has suddenly become unsafe around her. Holly has to deal with her own deep dark secrets, some are mundane, and some are not. Kami has to deal with the fact that her mother let her believe she might be crazy for years rather than tell her about what she had done, and about what most of the rest of Sorry-in-the-Vale already knew, and with the fact that she’s not alone in being in danger. Her parents and her little brothers are in danger too. Everybody has to deal with the fact that people are dying, and that Lillian Lynburn is a horrible leader, and just because she’s not up for human sacrifice doesn’t mean she’s a good person.
I mentioned in my review of Unspoken how the way Jared was just as much an outsider to the secret at the heart of Unspoken as Kami put them on an equal footing, unlike most Gothic heroines and their love interests, which was something I liked. This is maintained in Untold, and deepened, as it’s made clear that Rob is just as willing to kill Jared as he is Kami. Whereas the love interest of most Gothic Heroines is the one with the secret, the one who is a threat to her and also her protection (and some truly fascinating essays about the place of women in 18th century society and the way this made women extremely vulnerable to the real physical threat of their fathers and husbands, and how marriage was coming under the power of a man a woman could never be fully certain of until she was trapped, and how this fed into and was expressed by Gothic literature) whereas in Sarah Rees Brennan’s modern Gothic, Kami and Jared are allowed to be equals, equally overwhelmed, equally at a loss, equally afraid, and because of this they aren’t Gothic heroine and love interest, but instead Gothic heroine and Gothic hero of their separate but closely entwined Gothic mysteries. In the same essay where Sarah Rees Brennan (note, I don’t know whether to call ber Brennan or Rees Brennan, so full name it is) talks about Gothic literature being about “girl meets house”, she talks about how women aren’t trapped socially and physically in the house anymore, and how this changes the Gothic novel. One of the things she mentioned is that children still are trapped in the home. If your parents move you somewhere, that’s that. Well, Kami and Jared are both children, and both stuck in Sorry-in-the-Vale, unless Jared wants to go back to living on the streets, and Kami wants to join him. They have very little recourse, and Sarah Rees Brennan doesn’t make any bones about this.
Which is actually something that made me really angry while reading. In most YA Gothic inspired fantasy, the parents don’t actually know anything’s going on, at least for a while. In Unspoken, Kami’s mother has known the whole time. She knew before Kami. She let Kami believe she was crazy her whole life, believe her mother thought she was crazy, her whole life rather than tell her daughter and husband what she did and the truth about the town. She acts shamefully long before Unspoken takes place and continues to act shamefully throughout both books. If I were living in a small town with a powerful sorcerer who along with his minions is gunning for my daughter and wants to sacrifice people for more magic, I wouldn’t be trying to appease him, I would have packed up and moved my kids away so fast my old house would be spinning on its foundations. Kami doesn’t have the freedom to do this, but her mom and dad do. Interestingly, Sarah Rees Brennan doesn’t shy away from this, and in fact part of the emotional burden placed on Kami, and part of why she feels so lost, is that she can’t rely on her mother the way she always thought she could. A lot of YA novels use parental abandonment, incompetence, or abuse of some kind as a way to allow the kids to have their dangerous adventures without adult interference. Sarah Rees Brennan takes this out of the realm of excuse and makes it into something that makes her characters’ pain and fear worse.
I have a few things to say about both Unspoken and Untold that I should have said in my review of Unspoken, but didn’t because I wrote it at midnight, which is not when I do my best thinking. First, Kami and her father are about as far from any of the stereotypes about East Asians as they can be. He’s a joke cracking graphic designer who is a warm, safe presence in his daughter's life and one of the few people in Sorry-in-the-Vale brave enough to stand up to Lillian Lynburn. Kami is a chubby, mystery loving girl with more enthusiasm than sense, and she might love books, but she’s anything but an “Asian geek.” She’s unpopular because she’s weird, because there’s good reason to believe she’s the kind of crazy for which there is a diagnosis and medication. She’s loud, extroverted, and reminds me of some of my friends when they here high schoolers. Second, I’m so happy to see a straight girl/lesbian girl friendship where sexuality is a non-issue. Angela and Kami are wonderful friends, and I just want to smish them. Third, Holly is the possibly bisexual, pretty but not necessarily popular girl of my heart. I was her once. I’m busty with big hips and a little waist, I developed young having a C cup by the time I started middle school, and false modesty aside, I was a good looking girl. Middle school and high school for me involved a lot of unsubstantiated rumors about who I was sleeping with, male and female, and a lot of bullying because of my supposed promiscuity. The narrative of both books talks about this form of bullying, and I love that Holly is so happy to have female friends to do girl things with in high school.
I also wanted to note that the cover blurbs call Unspoken and Untold “darkly funny”. This is not true. They are not black comedy. They will not make you laugh at horrible things. No, they’re dark and funny, separately and simultaneously. They will make you laugh, and then hit you with something dark, and then they will make you laugh, and then hit you with something even darker, over and over and over again. Be warned.
Damn it, now I have to wait almost a whole year before the last book in the trilogy comes out. I need it. I need it like air.
Sarah Rees Brennan can be found all over the internet, for example, as
sarahtales on livejournal, on tumblr at sarahreesbrennan.tumblr.com, and on her own website, sarahreesbrennan.com. If you like her books, I advise checking out her web presences. She likes to post short stories in the universes of her novels.
no subject
Date: 2013-12-01 05:10 pm (UTC)And I spent a lot of the time I was reading these thinking , Lillian, dear, there's this woman named Narcissa that I just need to introduce you to...
I NEED more Holly and Angela. The books so fare have had precious little of it.
I love that about Kami and Jared myself. I've gotten really sick of the naive innocent heroine being lead into the mystery by a powerful, knowledgeable love interest.
no subject
Date: 2013-12-01 05:15 pm (UTC)It's always the secondary characters that suck me in. It's why I have read thousands of pages of Diana Gabaldon's novels when I only really care about Lord John and his adventures/romances. I think because we get so little of Holly and Angela I find myself reading into their interactions at a microscopic level, which ends up driving me up the wall.