attackfish

Really good fantasy isn’t about monsters, magic, and other worlds, it’s about people and the relationships between them. No matter how many dark lords a hero defeats, readers won’t care unless he feels real. Websters' Leap by Eileen Dunlop exemplifies this. It is first and foremost about Jill Weaver, little sister to Tad Weaver.

Jill and Tad’s parents divorce when they are children, and not knowing that Tad, who she worships, wants to live with their father, Jill chooses to live with their mother because she is a better cook. When her father and Tad move to Scotland, Jill takes it as a personal insult and refuses to speak to her brother. After one very tense holiday gathering, their parents decide its best to keep them apart until they can grow up. Every summer, the two switch parents for the holiday, and Jill goes to live with her father in a flat attached to a crumbling Scottish castle where her father gives tours. Jill couldn’t be less happy about leaving London and her friends behind to spend months surrounded by her brother’s things, but no sooner does she arrive then strange things begin happening, and after messing with her brother’s computer, she is sucked into the past. Stranger still, everyone there seems to know her, and the second person she sees is Tad.

Jill Webster, as she’s known in the past, arrives in the midst of the Yule celebrations and the preparations for the arrival of Mary, Queen of Scotts. The lord of the castle’s brother, Rollo, has just arrived from France as well. He hates Kate, the lady of the castle, and her baby son, Archibald, because the son is now heir and Rollo will never be a lord. Jill is Kate’s maid and childhood playmate, and when she finds out that Rollo has spread a rumor that Kate is a witch who killed the miller’s son and spirited away the body, she and Tad try to stop him before he can kill Kate’s baby son and accuse her of vanishing him with magic.

But, after a grand speech, Tad does nothing, and Jill learns that Kate plans to send her back to their old home for her own safety. Panicking, Jill hunts for clues on her own. The more she looks, the more she finds and the more her brother dismisses her. Yet, they do manage to stop Rollo and rescue the baby. The morning after, Jill wakes up in her own time in her brother’s room. Only to find out that her brother has run away from their mother’s and is waiting at the airport for their father to pick him up.

Tad tells her that she didn’t fall into the past at all, but into the historical fiction novel that he had been writing where they had become the ultimate author insertions. The promptings and memories she had been getting weren’t from the mind of Jill Webster at all, but instead from Tad. Even more surprising to Jill was the fact that her brother had lost control in the middle when, during a bout of writer’s block, Jill took over. So upset was he that he tried to have her sent away. Still, they finished the story before he could write her out of it.

There are so many things I like about this story that it’s hard to know where to begin. As the youngest of four, I’m used to wishing I didn’t have any siblings, or that they would at least go away, and then missing them fiercely when they were gone. When Jill remembered walking into her brother’s room the year before and seeing signs everywhere saying “don’t touch this”, I could empathize. When she went from adoring her brother to resenting him, I knew exactly how she felt. I liked it best, though, when at the end, their adventures together put them in the mood to reconcile and try to repair their tattered friendship.

Their rivalry played out in the story they wrote together too. When Tad tried to push Jill to the sidelines, she fought back, wresting the story away from him and refusing to be another character in his novel.

“‘When I started the story I intended to be the cool resourceful hero who would outwit Rollo and save Kate and Archy. You were supposed to be my cute little sister, thrilled to bits to have such a clever big brother.’

‘Fat chance,’ hooted Jill derisively.”

Probably the most important thing about this book to me, however was that it was a revelation. Like most bookish isolated kids, the library was a place of wonder and magic, full of comfort. I didn’t devour books as a child; I absorbed them through my pores. Yet I didn’t think that my own books could join the ones on the shelves. For some reason, I never imagined that the reason that the main characters in all my favorite books were awkward friendless kids was because their authors were once awkward friendless kids themselves. Jill and Tad changed that for me. They were so normal and so imperfect, that for the first time, I could see myself as a writer and the stories I was writing all of the time weren’t something I would stop doing when I got older.

I recently bought my own copy (used, it’s out of print) and reread it. In doing so, I saw things I’d missed when I was a kid, like the way Dunlop wrote grandiose dialogue for the characters in Tad’s novel and more realistic dialogue for Jill and the people in the present. It’s a wonderful example of characterization and foreshadowing. Now that I have reread the book, I am gladder than ever that I bought it.