Vassa in the Night
By Sarah Porter
When Vassa’s stepsister sends her out to buy lightbulbs in the middle of the night, she knows it could easily become a suicide mission. Babs Yagg, the owner of the local convenience store, has a policy of beheading shoplifters―and sometimes innocent shoppers as well.
But Vassa has a bit of luck hidden in her pocket, a gift from her dead mother. Erg is a tough-talking wooden doll with sticky fingers, a bottomless stomach, and ferocious cunning. With Erg’s help, Vassa just might be able to break the witch’s curse and free her Brooklyn neighborhood. But Babs won’t be playing fair….
I really wanted to like this one, but almost from the beginning I found myself disenchanted with it. Part of my problem I think, is that the author assumes more familiarity with the original Russian folk tale than I had. Even though we had flashbacks to Vassa's mother, father, Babs/Bea's relationship and Picnic and Pangolin, none of them really explained what was going on with the BY franchises, why Babs and Bea weren't friends (or how they'd become friends in the first place, and what kinds of powers each had), or how Vassa fit into the continuation of these events from the past. Erg, the doll, tied Vassa to the magical world, but also, Erg was where Vassa put her own feelings in when her mother died? So, then, if the Erg feelings are absorbed back into Vassa, does that mean that Vassa is no longer drawn to the magical world? Because that's the reverse of how those things usually work: you have to become a complete person before your magic works correctly is a time-honored trope of the genre. And for good reason! It makes sense, unlike this book.
Characters just float in and out of the book, and frequently we'll be in the middle of a scene just to cut away and be abruptly transferred to a "night/dream" sequence and never really resolve or wrap up the first scene. It was very disjointed, and didn't feel intentional. If it was intentional, great, I hated it.
I also objected to the dialogue and characterization. Is this chick fifteen? Why does she sound so stilted when talking to people? Why is she so casual about the decapitated people in the bodega parking lot (why is everyone so casual about the decapitated people in the parking lot)? Apparently magic is acknowledged and recognized in this world, but when obviously bad magic is extending night-time and a local franchise is murdering people, uh, the reaction is to watch more tv? Okay, fine, I guess. But seriously, everyone's frankly ho-hum attitude is a really weird choice to make for the author. It's like, how serious is this problem? Clearly no one else cares, so why should we? Even to the point that teenagers are playing games with the store where the potential risk is getting their head (or other parts) cut off? Everyone's decisions and thought processes in this book are just...confusing. In a bad way.
Dexter and Sinister, the disembodied hands for example. Are they unwilling agents of Babs Yagg? Cooperative villains? Dexter has a change of heart and decides to help Vassa and get itself killed in the process for.. what reason, exactly? Because Babs is mean to him (again)? Or is it because the plot required it?
And there's a lot of people complaining that Vassa didn't actually do much (or anything) herself to solve the tasks given to her, which is also true. Vassa's primary purpose was going into the store in the first place, and after that... unclear how she derives any character development since she blacks out a lot and the problem gets solved without her involvement. And frequently, she creates these problems, by having no damn sense. She see-saws between unbelievable naivety about her situation and the dangers, and some sort of "inner understanding" of all things.
I think there's the germ of a good book in there, but I was pretty disappointed by this one.
