Plain Kate lives in a world of superstitions and curses, where a song can heal a wound and a shadow can work deep magic. As the wood-carver's daughter, Kate held a carving knife before a spoon, and her wooden charms are so fine that some even call her "witch-blade" - a dangerous nickname in a town where witches are hunted and burned in the square.
For Kate and her village have fallen on hard times. Kate's father has died, leaving her alone in the world. And a mysterious fog now covers the countryside, ruining crops and spreading fear of hunger and sickness. The townspeople are looking for someone to blame, and their eyes have fallen on Kate.
Enter Linay, a stranger with a proposition: In exchange for her shadow, he'll give Kate the means to escape the town that seems set to burn her, and what's more, he'll grant her heart's wish. It's a chance for her to start over, to find a home, a family, a place to belong. But Kate soon realizes that she can't live shadowless forever - and that Linay's designs are darker than she ever dreamed.
Okay, confession time: I have been reading, I swear, only I am trying to finish all the books I still have going on before starting new ones. This is a spectacularly bad plan for several reasons:
1. I am in the middle of like, five books, so it's going to take me awhile.
2. I am in the middle of these books (and not finished with them) mostly because I don't want to read them. (Warning sign #1).
3. I keep cheating and starting (and sometimes finishing but sometimes not) new books anyway. My bad.
So, here's the thing: I have been trying very hard to read A.S. Byatt's Possession (ironically, this book has taken over my life, but in a really bad way, like the way debt creditors take over your life) but only, not really trying, because I hate it so much, I can barely force myself to crack it.
So I can't read it, and at the same time, can't not read it, so other books have been kinda getting the short straw as a result. Luckily, Plain Kate was like, two hours of nonsense, so it was a very small detour on the Possession takeover of my life.
Verdict: It was okay. I guess part of the problem was the summary I read in the NYT got my hopes up, because it sounded interesting and adventurous, but it was a lot of Kate, wandering around being stubborn, and people beating up on her. She leaves town after a mob comes after her with axes, then falls in with gypsies, ahem, Roamers, then they find out she sold her shadow, so they try to set fire to her, and then she gets "rescued" again by Linay, who then bleeds her periodically so the ghost of his dead sister can live. She takes a lot of abuse, is what I'm saying. So at least part of the issue is that I didn't empathize with her. Mostly I was just irritated by her somewhat hapless meanderings. She sort of goes through the book like a pinball, bouncing against barriers and changing directions only to hit up against something else. She's not at all a "take charge" kind of person, until maybe, maybe at the very end, but I wasn't invested in her at that point, so it was wasted.
I think, looking back, that that was my biggest peeve: honestly, after I finished it, I was like, nothing happened in that book, but really, stuff did happen, only it never felt immediate to me, I never got into the scene. It was as though I was watching the action from behind a dirty dirty window - I could see, but the effort of looking to the other side meant that I couldn't really focus completely on the immediacy of the events.
The book does "pick up" (and again, let me say, stuff happens in the first 4/5ths of the book, but it made no impact, so for me, it was very blah for awhile) at the end, but it's a bit of a jumble. FYI, total SPOILER ALERT.
First Kate's talking cat offers to die for the Cause, and they decide against it, then Linay totally wrecks havoc on this town in the name of vengeance, and then Kate tries to kill him, but he actually just commits suicide, but then his formerly dead sister comes back and then Kate's talking cat dies, and then the sister decides to die, and the cat comes back to life. But then it can't talk anymore! Phew. I will be honest, the only character I cared about was that talking cat. Rule #1: Kill all the people you want, but god forbid you kill a single dog or cat! So I was pleased that the cat lived. But in killing him and then bringing him back, it ruined the sorrow that the death had created. And perhaps Ms. Bow thought to make it a bittersweet reunion because the cat came back, but only as a dumb animal rather than as the friend it used to be, but I was just glad it came back, and cats don't generally talk anyway, so it failed on that level for me.
The setting. . . was okay. It is "clearly" set in Russia (as the dead sister is a rusalka until she comes back to life) but like, the same way that Sleeping Beauty and Rapunzel are set in Europe: barely. I would have liked more flavour to the setting, more infusion of that specific time and place, more because I like reading about things I don't know very much about and learning something new than for any need to have cultural trappings in this type of tale. Although at one point Kate calls her cat a "panther" and I was all, "Did they even have panthers in Russia?" and spent like, twenty minutes on wikipedia looking at leopard habitats.
Plain Kate wasn't terrible, it just doesn't really sock you in the gut. The saddest part for me was the acknowledgments, and let me just say that if you all don't read the acknowledgments and similar in books, you are totally missing out. They're great, sort of like how previews are to movies. Anyway, that's why it was just okay.
P.S. Panthera is a genus that contains tigers, lions, leopards and jaguars. Most people (or possibly just me) think black South American jaguars when they think panthers, but those aren't really a whole separate cat, they're just jaguars, which only live in South and Central America. Panther could also mean black leopard, and leopards are currently only found in like, sub-Saharan Africa and southeast Asia, but they used to be all the way up to Mongolia and Korea parts. Snow leopards also live in Russia a little, mostly in the areas by the Himalayas, although I don't know if those ever get black. Also, they are FUZZY, and don't really make me think of "panther" when I see them. And because panthers are not a separate cat, but are just odd colorations of jaguars and leopards, you can have white panthers, too, although these have not been bred like the black ones have, even though it's harder to live in the wild as a white panther than a black one. The More You Know!
No comments:
Post a Comment