What I’m going to do here is basically an All-You-Can-Eat Buffet riffing. Take what you like, leave what you don’t. You see, logically speaking, adding magic unravels the entire sweater of history into a big ol’ tangle of yarn, and even “just” eliminating two continents’ worth of people completely trashes pretty much everything that happened since 1492. But Wrede’s insisting she’s still got something basically sweater-shaped here. Except where it’s obvious (changing two of the first 5 presidents, for example), I am not even going to try to guess at her logic as to which changes are intentional and which were oopsies. I’m just laying all the inconsistencies out, and you can decide for yourself which to write off as magic and/or intended, and which are just messed up.
I’ll roughly go through a chapter at a time, but I’ll pull in examples from later chapters as appropriate.
So, diving in:
Chapter 1
Enjoy this chapter for all its worth, because nothing even remotely interesting will happen again until Chapter 6.
1. Family Size
It really appears that Ms. Wrede is writing her mid-19th-Century huge family from the perspective of a modern small family. First page, Eff talks about families giving up on trying for 7th sons because “there’s plenty enough work in raising eleven or twelve childings.” (I will do my best not to groan at the unnecessary fantasy word changes. Don’t expect me to use them myself very often, though.) Actually, from what I’ve read written by modern people with large families, once you get to six-ish it gets easier. You’ve got the older kids to help take care of the younger ones, and of course by the time you’ve popped out number 10, the first few are usually out of the house. (That many kids, they’re often pretty eager to flee. ^_~) Twelve isn’t terrible much worse than six, and 20 isn’t all that different from 12.
Later in chapter 2, Jack and Nan are declared too young for child minding. It’s already established that Eff has a sibling who’s 8, which means Jack and Nan are at least 9 and probably 10 or older. In this time period in a society where huge familes are the norm, that would be more than old enough to be watching younger siblings. Again, looks like it was viewed from a modern standpoint instead of a period one.
Furthermore, let’s talk child-mortality rates. We are nicely before germ theory here. In the real world, statistically speaking, 3 to 7 of the Rothmers' children wouldn’t make it to age 18. Yes, this world has healing magic. However, Eff’s rheumatic fever, Mama’s broken leg, and the settlement magician who died of fever all suggest that it’s fairly limited in what it can do. Instead of losing 3 to 7, maybe instead we’re talking 1 to 4. Can we at least acknowledge the issue, attribute it to Papa’s own Seventh Son luck? Personally, I think it would have been stylish if a sibling had died of disease shortly after Eff’s birth -- see, unlucky 13th-- even though that means losing the part later where Eff vaguely hopes a sibling she hardly knows will die so she’ll no longer be 13th, and then immediately feels horrible.
2. Mama’s clothes.
I actually don’t have a problem with Mama’s clothes, but half my history trivia comes from a historical costuming interest, so I use these to help date the action and for a later complaint -- and just to get down with my nerdy self.
On page 4, Mama finds Eff so upset that “she got right down on the floor beside me”. Wow. Obviously she is not wearing a crinoline; otherwise this would have been fun to watch. That puts us before 1855-ish. If it’s 1840s, I don’t know how she managed it with the period’s corset. At that time, they were to the hips and over the belly, tightly laced, and busked. A woman could not bend at the waist. So, I gotta give Mama some serious credit here. With 14 kids, the woman’s got to be in her 40s at least. She’s fully corseted with busk, wearing a bodice that’s second-skin tight, 2 to 6 full petticoats, and a day dress that weights at least 20 lbs on its own, but she’s getting down on the floor with her daughter. I bet getting back up took some work.
Later, her skirt is described as being “navy blue pleats”, which supports an 1840s date. However, I want to point out the color. Aniline dyes haven’t been invented yet, so popular colors were “dull” blues, browns, and greens. Navy was absolutely doable, but it was more expensive than the more common duller shades.
3. Sugar cookies
To make Eff feel better after the 45 minutes it takes Mama to stand back up after getting on the floor in her full-length corset, they go and make sugar cookies, and Mama doesn’t even scold Eff when she spills the milk.
Milk? Who uses milk for sugar cookies? My sugar cookie recipe doesn’t call for milk.
Snark off, there are sugar cookie recipes that do call for milk, although it’s usually only a few tablespoons, not an amount you’d let a five-year-old try to measure out of a heavy stoneware jug, glass bottle, or metal milk can. (Personally, I couldn't even lift a plastic gallon jug of milk when I was five.) I don’t know if those recipes would have been common before refrigeration. The real reason I bring this up, though, is because there was fairly extensive debate over on ldragoon’s review about whether sugar would be readily accessible without either heavy mechanization or an extensive slavery system. They debated it, so I don’t have to. ;)
4. “Witch” as a pejorative.
This is neither a snark or complaint. I just find it really interesting that there are accusations of witchcraft in a society with widespread magic use. I was really hoping that Ms. Wrede would explain her terms, but no. That never happens.
Chapter 2
1. The Rothmers are freaking rich!
I already mentioned Mama’s expensive day dress. Now we find at that the Rothmers have one son at a University other than the one Papa teaches at, another either at boarding school or also in college, and a third going to University in fall. And all this on a professor’s salary. Wow! On top of that, in chapter 4 as a part of the job benefits, the family is given a nine bedroom house. Minimum. There might be more; we just know there’s at least 9. No wonder they can afford to make sugar cookies despite a lack of heavy mechanization or extensive slavery system.
2. The Secession War
One of the dangers of writing alt history is giving in to the temptation to just plunk your story bible down on the manuscript and let it carry the book on its own while you go get a sandwich or something. That unfortunately is what happens here with the bit about the Secession War, which ended in 1838.
First, credit where credit is due. I don’t know the details, but my understanding is that the United States actually did come very very close to having a civil war in the 1830s, so this is not wholly arbitrary. (Renaming it the Secession War is, though. That almost makes it sound like the South won, doesn’t it? But they didn’t.)
However, that almost 30 years would make a huge difference in the course of the war. You see, in the 1830s, England didn’t care so much about slavery in the Americas. Hell, they didn’t abolish it themselves until 1833. So if the southern states wanted to hold slaves, England didn’t really care as long as they were getting cheap cotton out of the deal. It wasn’t until Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published in Britain in 1852, selling 200,000 legal copies (and probably at least that many pirated copies), that the British people really got their feathers ruffled by it. Because of this new popular opinion against slavery, in the 1860s, the British government did not enter the war on the side of the South, which meant the South had funding problems. If the civil war had happened in the 1830s, hell yes the British would have been willing to break the Northern blockade and continue trade.
However, with South America controlled by one or more African countries instead of Spain and Portugal, Spain never imports massive quantities of gold, which means they never build their Armada to invade England, which means England never builds their Navy to counter and doesn’t have pirated Spanish gold to do it with anyway, which means the British Empire never happens. So maybe it doesn’t matter that the Brits didn’t have a problem with American slavery in the 1830s, and thus the South loses anyway.
And actually, with one or more African countries being Major world powers with capital M now, how did widespread slave trade even come about? Doesn’t the Middle Passage fall on its face? I suppose that depends on which African countries we're talking about, but with the entire power dynamic of Africa completely changed, and one or more countries in it having control of the gold that in our world went to Spain and was pirated by other European nations, you gotta at least seriously consider the possibility.
See what I mean about unraveling the sweater of history? I’m going on to the next topic before I hurt myself.
3. When and Where Our Book Is Set
So, we’re heading to a brand new, still under construction land-grant college not terribly long after 1838 in a territory bordering the Mississippi River. Well, there’s a little problem here. Most of that land already had statehood by 1838. Let me go dig out a statehood map. Let’s see. Illinois was 1818, Kentucky was 1792... Wisconsin, 1848! We’re going to Wisconsin, and it’s the 1840s! W00t!
4. Invisible Indians
Obviously we’re not calling it Wisconsin, because Wisconsin is a Native American word. Wrede has done a decent job of removing the Native American minutia from her world -- the names, the crops. Of course, we’re still a democracy (evidenced by presidents), the Enlightenment still happened (evidenced by mention of Jefferson’s voracious reading), and somehow we’ve managed to settle this country nearly in the same amount of time despite it not being cleared and cultivated for us by previous civilizations and being filled with mammoths and saber cats and nasty ass magical stuff on top of that.
It’s kind of creepy, actually. It’s like if one day you woke up, and there were absolutely no men. But no one was saying anything and we were all pretending nothing had happened and that there had never been any men.
I’m only going to touch on this, because this rabbit hole has no bottom. It’s been extensively discussed all over the internet. I wouldn’t be here if not for it. Nonetheless, I’m really disgusted with Wrede’s combination of laziness and racism. She didn’t want to use the pre-1980 stereotypes, she didn’t want to use the current stereotypes, and GOD FORBID she do some research into the vast array of actual Native America cultures. There was not a hive mind over here. There were vastly different societies, from the militaristic Aztecs to the socialist Incan empire, from the successful farming societies to wandering hunters to resource-hungry city dwellers whose over-harvesting of resources eventually caused their own downfall. If the Mississipian empire hadn’t collapsed on its own, their society had at least some resemblance to European considering they developed wholly independently. The choices are not limited to “warlike savage” and “pacifist environmentalist”.
This "didn't exist" bit? Worst possible way to handle things.
Chapter 3
We move West. It’s mainly just a boring train trip followed by a boring wagon trip. Mama won’t let anyone go off to explore during stops because then something interesting might happen. :P
1. Population Density
Blocking off everything west of the Mississippi River basically cuts American land area in half during this period. The population is probably not smaller, however. In fact, with the norm of huge families and the bizarrely low child mortality rate, it’s probably bigger. So I don’t really buy the smaller, more widespread population centers that Eff alludes to, and I really don’t buy the old growth forest the train passes through. With the Louisiana purchase almost completely off limits, Columbians would be packed to the gills.
2. Miss Ochiba’s clothes
When we first meet Miss Ochiba, she’s wearing “a high-crowned hat trimmed with cherries”, a “white lace neck scarf” and a “close-fitting blue jacket”. In other words, she’s dressed at the height of fashion -- in 1878.
Mama’s clothes have already established that we are pre-crinoline. Separates didn’t even become fashionably tolerable until hoopskirts were at their largest, and jackets didn’t come in until hoops had given way to bustles. Hats were the same; before the 1860s/1870s, they were mannish or at best childish, and no woman over the age of 16 would ever wear one. Bonnets were de rigeur.
I don't care what period our clothes are from. Well, OK, I do, but I'd give a pass as long as they were consistent. However, Mama’s clothes and Miss Ochiba’s clothes would never be worn in the same time period.
3. Miss Ochiba
I’m calling it now. Miss Ochiba is a quintessential Magical Negro(TM). She has no life of her own. She’s not married, we never even see her out in the town except the first time she came out to meet the new professor arrival, she has an amazingly subdued personality, she exists in the story solely to teach and guide our main characters, and when she’s no longer needed she’s sent off to a vague Star Trek reference. Holy crap, I think I just got Bingo.
4. The Racism Paradox
There is apparently exactly one black person in town. Sometimes Washington Morris visits, and then there’s two. Yet at the same time, we also don’t see any overt racism. Oh, Dean Farley and Prof Jeffries are kinda “ih” around Miss Ochiba. Maybe it’s racism. Maybe it’s indigestion, or “you’re bringing students to my university! Ew! Stop that!”
Guys, we are less than 10 years after a slavery-triggered Civil War here. I will grant that removing that almost 30 years I talked about in 2-2 takes with it some of the worst decades of moral push-back and race-based justification rhetoric, but nonetheless, ya don’t enslave someone you think is your equal. By choosing to still have African slavery in America, Wrede has chosen to make this an especially racist period in our history. By then denying that, she is denying the real suffering from history. Not cool.
Chapter 4
1. “Long and hot and boring”
This is how Eff describes the first graduation ceremony at Northern Plains Riverbank College. It’s also almost exactly my sentiment towards the book at this point. Including this one, we’ve got 2 more chapters and some sizable change before something even considers happening.
2. Mills
Eff briefly talks about the lumber industry and how some of the logs coming down the Mississippi are milled “right in Mill City”. Hence the name, I suppose. But then she says “most of them got piled onto flatcars and shipped east to the mills there.” Is Wrede crazy? Waste all that space stacking cylinders and all that weight sending bark and unusable edges? No, I think they would at least be roughed into blocks in Mill City before being shipped for further work.
Chapter 5
We finally actually see some magic, 48 pages in, despite it being talked about constantly. The kids are absolutely shocked by it, even though we later learn that in an average day even someone who isn’t much of a magician will do 5 or 10 spells without hardly thinking about it.
1. Revolutionary War Dates
Either William is full of it (and I do give good odds), or Wrede didn’t really do her math here. Everything she says about the Revolution suggest that it happened about the same time as in our world, but William says it was “almost a hundred years ago”. Either it’s really more like 70 years, or it took 30 freakin’ years to get this university thing going, in which case why doesn’t our location have statehood yet?
Chapter 6
Lan comes in to his natural magic by almost killing William. There, something happened! Here’s a voucher for more happening later. It’s on backorder right now. We might have something in stock in Chapter 10, but don’t get your hopes up.
Chapter 7
Mammoths actually do something. Off camera, of course. Our characters, on the other hand, continue to do nothing. Eff says that she would give her “best Sunday dress and a year’s growth” to be able to see what happened when Mama goes to go rip someone a new one. I would too, because it’d be something happening.
1) “Best” Sunday dress?
It’s the 1840s. That’s her only Sunday dress. If it gets too faded or worn, it’ll then become a day dress and she’ll get a new one. If she outgrows it first, Mama’ll let out the growth pleats, and she’ll be good for another year.
Of course, the Rothmers are freaking rich...
2) And Canada Bites the Dust!
We now establish that it’s “suicide” to go north of the Mississippi’s headwaters due to all the various scary critters running around. Good-bye, British North America! So long.
I’ve seen some impressive Americentrism in my fiction reading, but when an author can’t even stand to leave Canada on the continent... So, did she leave anyone down in Mexico, or is it just us?
3) Jackals
Why jackals as scavengers over here in Columbia? Are coyotes suddenly not good enough for the job? Or is it that Wrede couldn’t think up an alternate name to replace the lost Nahuatl root, so she just called them a completely different, utterly unrelated species? The coyote evolved over here along with the Dire Wolf; it is not originally Eurasian.
Chapter 8
Our heroine has not actually done anything, but the risk that she might is too great, so she comes down with rheumatic fever. This guarantees she can’t do anything whatsoever for an entire year. Because, you know, the action so far has just been too overwhelming and we need some downtime. :P
Honestly, giving it to Lan would have been a much better call. Then Eff could be fretting and blaming herself and maybe even go do something to try to make it right. But that would be doing something, wouldn’t it? (I swear it’s like the author had 180 pages of story and a contract for 350.)
1. How Long Have You Been Living Here Again?
Eff enjoys when William visits because “it was nice to see a face that wasn’t one I’d seen every day of my whole life.” No, just every day of half her life. She’s 10 years old, they’ve lived her when she was five, and William has come around to play with her brothers basically every single day. As she says herself, he’s practically part of the family.
Also, from this point forward we must all politely pretend that it’s not Really Freaking Obvious that William is sweet on Eff.
2. Brant’s Logic
Brant is the young Rationalist working to set up a settlement on the bad side of the Great Barrier that doesn’t use magic. “It will prove to everyone that we don’t need magicians to settle the plains, and the government will have to open the territories for settlement.”
Um... Wha? That’s a bit of a non sequitor, isn’t it? I mean, they haven’t opened the territories because it’s freakin’ dangerous and we haven’t figure out a way to fix that reliably. Matching the reliability of a magician, it’s nice to know that we can, but it doesn’t fix the “freaking dangerous” bit.
Chapter 9
1. Eff’s whining
a. “I don’t get to see my friends!”
Because she was on Turbo Load mode for a while there, our heroine is now a year behind where she was in school. However, the classes are mixed together by ability level, not age. So, doesn’t she just see her friends in different classes? Instead of seeing What’s-Her-Face in reading and composition, now she sees her in history. Some friends she might actually see more often this way.
b. “Waah, I’m a thirteenth child!
I swear to God I will remember the title of the book if Eff will just shut the hell up. Yes, she got crap for it every day until she was 5. Then she moved, and hasn’t heard another single solitary thing about it since, and won’t until she’s 13. It’s not going to be in the forefront of her mind anymore; children’s minds just don’t work that way. It’s mostly-forgotten “mean aunts and uncles” stories by now. If Wrede wants to keep this up, there ought to have been a reason to keep it in mind. Maybe a town ne’er-do-well that everyone looks at, gives one of those nods, and says “Well, you know, he was a 13th child.”
Personally, it would work a lot better if Eff did put it completely out of her mind now, and then it all nearly unexpectedly comes crashing down on her later when they go back to Helvan Shores. Believe me, if you have someone who was a pariah, and then they got to live a normal life, they will absolutely react violently if someone tries to drag them back into being a pariah again. And in the meantime, it is getting really annoying.
In any event, it really should stop right now on page 98 because Miss Ochiba tells her plain as day that being the goodness and good luck of being a seventh daughter more than cancels out the badness and bad luck of being a thirteenth child. But no, Eff just keeps constantly whining about it for several more chapters. Ironically, what finally shuts Eff up is almost blowing her uncle off the map. Coming thisclose to doing something evil actually makes her shut up about being destined to become evil. I don’t get it at all.
Chapter 10
Something actually happens! Kinda. Well, we see a dragon for a couple of seconds. We don’t actually see it doing anything. Someone kills it before it makes much of a mess. We don’t get to see that, either. Our heroine is all but dragged to go see the body. They don’t get anywhere near it -- big surprise.
Nothing happens again until the very end of Chapter 14/beginning of Chapter 15.
1. Slavery, and Africa as homogenous uber-country
I’d be remiss if I didn’t bring attention to the only discussion about pre-Civil War slavery in the book. I already talked about this a bit; I still don’t see how it comes about with one or more African countries taking the place of Spain and Portugal. I’d at least like to know which countries they are. I could buy slavery remaining more easily if they were already resource-rich counties known at the time as the Gold Coast and Ivory Coast, than I could if it were the area known as the Slave Coast.
Also, you ever notice an annoying tendency people have of talking about “Africa” as though the entire continent is basically one big homogeneous society, rather than as a landmass containing many very different countries with very different cultures? Guess what Wrede does. They’re “Aphrikan colonies”; not, say, Nigerian colonies or Ghanan colonies. I mean, Africa’s basically the same all over, right?
2. Lack of foresight
Come spring, that dead dragon starts to smell really bad, so they start casting preservation spells on it.
...
Is Wrede really trying to tell me that it didn’t occur to them to do this any earlier, say before it started rotting?
3. Milk paint
One of Eff's brothers paints a bunch of garter snakes with grey milk paint and sells them as "baby dragons" the next spring. Milk paint is paint made with a combination of milk, lime, and pigment. The milk and lime react to form a coating of calcium caseinate, which after curing time bonds very well with wood and other porous surfaces. However, they are very sensitive to water (which means easy clean-up, but poor results on surfaces that get wet during the curing), and they’ve got a curing time. I don’t buy milk paint sticking reliably to garter snakes. On top of that, milk paint is somewhat caustic, more or less so depending on the amount of lime used. Those poor snakes.
Chapter 11
Eff’s resolute refusal to do something interesting is almost kind of a funny, in a head shaking trying not to cry sort of way. She sits here wishing that Dr. McNeil would bring back more of the strange North American animals so she could see them, never even remotely thinking it’d be cool if she could go out into the wild and see them herself some day. A little bit of an adventurous streak would be really nice in our heroine.
1. St. Louis
It’s stated that Lewis and Clark went up the “Grand Bow River” from just north of St. Louis.
Um, what state is St. Louis in?
Which side of the Mississippi is that?
If you said the side with no cities in this world, take a cookie.
(If you tried to mention East St. Louis, you have to give the cookie back. Not founded until 1820, 16 years after Lewis and Clark and many decades after St. Louis itself, and not renamed “East St. Louis” until 1861.)
Chapter 12
1. The boy’s clothing
Eff complains in here about her mending chores because the boys can’t go three 3 days without tearing a shirt and ripping out pants knees.
Yeah. After the third time, each and every one of them would get a beating and a single play outfit to keep wearing all summer long. It’s the 1840s. Cloth mills are bringing the prices down, but clothing is still too expensive to be destroying the way the boys are described as doing. It would be like if your kid had to have a laptop for school, but over the summer every three days it was so loaded with viruses and spyware from irresponsible use that it wouldn’t run anymore. Would you keep fixing it, or would you say “this is the last time, Sport. You mess it up again, you’re stuck with it until September.”
Also, Eff calls them “pants”. The word pants was first recorded in 1840, so probably would not have been in common use yet. She would say “trousers”.
2. Starter Trunk
With the announcement of Diane’s upcoming wedding, all the females in the family set to work sewing things for her “starter trunk”. I have never hear that term in my life, and I’ve not been able to find a reference to it. It would usually be called her “trousseau”, or more colloquially her “cedar chest” or even “dowry chest”.
Chapter 14
(No, I didn’t forget a chapter; there’s so little happening in Chapter 13 that there’s not even anything to point out.)
1. The Gray Wedding Dress
The gray wedding dress mocks me, because this is right around when the trend went from “best you can afford” to “must be white”, and I don’t have the documentation I need to say what side of that we’re on. My pattern books start in 1867, “Dressed for the Photographer” doesn’t have any wedding portraits in this decade, and I can’t find my big brown book of fashion plates (or indeed even remember if I actually bought it or just borrowed it from the library a zillion times). By 1868 (when I do have documentation), white was norm, especially for a first-time bride in a church wedding, although I found ivory in the 1880s. Late 1840s/early 1850s, I just don’t know for sure. Supposedly, Queen Victoria’s wedding dress in 1840 is what popularized white for weddings, so gray is probably accurate but unfashionable, especially for a family as the well off as the Rothmers seem to be.
Chapter 15
Eff actually does something, 161 pages in! Well, no, not actually. She starts to do something, but then stops herself, so all we get is a frightened drunk uncle and a cloud of sparklies. If she’d actually done something, we might have got some story going on, and we can’t have that!
Seriously, at the absolute least just to tide us over, couldn’t she have at least given Uncle Earn some tentacles, or donkey’s ears, or turned his skin green or something? And then she could be all “Ha ha, see, I intended to do something silly and childish all along. Oh God, Papa knows I tried to kill him.” But no, we don’t even get that much, just a cloud of sparklies.
Eff, just come to the Dark Side already. You’ll like it. We have cookies. We’ll even let you do stuff. Otherwise, nothing will happen again until Chapter 18.
Chapter 17
After another chapter so dull it’s not even worth talking about, we go beat out carpets. Yay. The story’s dragging, and then Wrede shows us housework.
But the good news is that in this chapter, Eff decides she might want to do something. Someday. She gets the idea, so painfully obvious at the end of chapter 11, of becoming a naturalist and going out to see scary critters for herself. There’s no consideration about whether a woman in this society would even be allowed to do this; I’d say the odds if favor of it are basically nonexistent. However, I’m just as glad that didn’t occur to Eff, because God knows the last thing our heroine needs is another excuse to do absolutely nothing.
Chapter 18
I’m sorry, I lied. I can’t in good conscience call the baby mammoth knocking over its fence “something happening”. Nothing happens here. Nothing actually happens
We do see the first, and only, hint that the Rothmers don’t have an endless stream of money somewhere.
1. Magic Styles and Stereotypes
Oh gosh, now Wrede’s stepped in it. The magic style stereotypes are so incredibly offensive.
Hijero-Cathayan (i.e. Asian): “Hijero-Cathayan magic is group magic. They hardly have any small, everyday magics that one magician can do alone, like fire-lighting spells.” Asian = group. You can tell how much thought and research went into that idea, can’t you? You know, it’s not like there’s actually people over there living out lives where they might, like Westerners, need to light fires for cooking, or carry heavy water buckets, or keep bugs away, or do the other dozens of things that the main characters do every day without hardly thinking about it. Nah, they’re just all doin’ big mystic crap, none of that living stuff. “They’re good at big things, like moving rivers and clearing out dragon rookeries -- at least, they say it was the ancient Hijero-Cathayan magicians.” Look at that! Wrede doesn’t even let them keep their cookie!
I just got to point out, that the “Aphrikan” trying seeing the world as it really as rather than as it appears to be and redirecting energy instead of manhandling, those have at least some resemblance to Buddhist and Taoist traditions. It would need more research, but it’d show a little more thought than “group work”.
Believe it or not, the stereotyping in Aphrikan magic is even worse. Aphrikan is not about calling up magic, but just guiding the magic that’s already there, and it never works the same way twice if it even works at all, and by European standards it’s unpredictable and unreliable but it’s really really good at one particular thing, and that’s dealing with “natural” magic. Hmm. Passive, little initiative, unpredictable, unreliable, but with a primitive closeness to nature. I’ve heard stuff like this before. In fact, when I was reading the description of Aphrikan magic, my mind connected to a paragraph in Uncle Tom’s Cabin where Stowe starts waxing poetic about how “If ever Africa shall show an elevated and cultivated race”, how great it’ll be because black people are so gentle and docile and in tune with a higher power. I admire Harriet Beecher Stowe greatly, but I will be the first to admit that she was very much a product of her times. Haven’t we come any further than that in 160 years?
If you’re going to write outside of your time period and/or outside of your own culture, *you’ve got to do your research*. If you know you want European, African, and Asian magic systems in your world, and you’re a pasty Mid-Western white girl, you need to start reading. See what’s already there in the culture, and use that instead of just throwing antiquated and offensive stereotypes around.
Also, “unreliable”, don’t throw that at anyone. “Unpredictable” needs to be followed by “but it isn’t at all if you know what you’re doing” and NOT by “and I guess they’re right”. And that “good with nature” thing, that is a literary hand grenade. That’s been patronizing backhanded praise lobbed at just about every minority for the past 500 years, carrying with it the unspoken “because they’re uncivilized.” Find a way around it. Even “good with the unexpected” is a big step up. (In fact, “good at handling the unexpected” could tie in well with the themes of cleverness often found in the heroes of African folklore.)
Suffice to say, the different magic systems earned a scream of disgust and a book thrown across the room. (Well, not really because it is a library book. But if it had been my own...)
Chapter 19
1. The Age of Majority
So... You can sign up for a homestead on the life-threatening, nasty-creature-ridden frontier at age 18, but you can’t marry without parental consent until you’re 21. WTF?
2. Sawbones
The slang “sawbones” for doctor came about in our world because for most of history, the only way Western medicine could deal with a severely injured or especially infected limb was to amputate it. However, the way Eff’s rheumatic fever is treated suggests that the story world has antibiotics, even if they don’t realize that’s the mechanism by which their potions work. So there should be fewer amputations. Would “sawbones” still be used?
Chapter 20
1. Triskelion
A triskelion is a symbol with three connected spirals or three bent legs joined at the crotch, which is found across many cultures with diverse meanings. However, I’m a huge geek, so the first thing that popped into my mind when Miss Ochiba left for Triskelion University was the original Star Trek episode, The Gamesters of Triskelion. Hence my reference earlier. :)
Chapter 21
1. Eff’s new look
On page 20, a nearly 18-year-old Eff remarks that she has started putting her hair up and wearing full length skirts. What she doesn’t mention is that everyone around her was thinking it was about freaking time. This was usually done at age 14 if you were going to start working, maybe a little later in a well-off family, but 16 was the latest. When she waited until she was 17 and a half, people were whispering about her behind her back.
2. William’s old look
We’ve got to be in the 1850s by now (no news on that statehood thing, though). William is described as wearing a “beaver hat”. Beaver hats were out. They fell out of favor right about 1850 in our world, replaced by silk in the upper classes and wool in the lower. But, there’s more to it that.
The America beaver population supported the popularity of beaver hats well after the European beaver had been driven almost to extinction. That was with the full beaver population of North America available, and indeed searching for the pelts spurred a lot of exploration. Of course, in this story world everything west of the Mississippi and north of the Great Lakes is off limits. So there goes access to at least half the beaver population. With that reduction, the American beaver east of the Mississippi surely would have been wiped out long before, forcing beaver hats out of popularity even earlier in this story world.
3. And No One Knows What Lan’s Going For
Lan has grown muttonchops. Muttonchops were not fashionable at this time, especially not for young men. Sure, a few people wore them; a few people wear them now. But a young man picking a hairstyle to go with his nice new fancy probably imported paisley waistcoat? Nah. Young men were oiling their hair in this decade, and doing this wave thing, or almost a duckbill with this sort of topknot thing. Here, here's a picture of what I mean, not the worst example by far. There were some seriously scary men’s hairstyles going on in the 1850s, but not so much with the mutton chops.
4. What’s Differerent About the Rationalist Settlement?
Hmm. Every settlement west of the river is overrun with grubs and beetles, except the Rationalists. What could possibly be different about the only settlement in entire West that doesn’t use magic?
We will spend the next 70 pages politely pretending that the difference is not really freaking obvious. Or maybe screaming every 10 pages “The bugs are attracted to magic, you flaming morons! It’s so bloody obvious!”
Chapter 22
If you’re looking for a good spot to scream “The bugs are attracted to magic!”, I suggest page 240, where we discuss in detail how much the Rationalists dislike magicians.
1. Benjamin Franklin as a double-seventh son
Oh for goodness's sake. Ben Franklin was Josiah Franklin's 10th son, not 7th. Josiah was his family's 9th child. I wasn't able to find genders, but the odds are against him being a 7th son. This is not terribly obscure as trivia goes; the Google search to find this out will take you all of three minutes.
I find this change disturbing, because it smacks heavily of classism. Jefferson was from a rich and prominent family that could afford a good education. He can stay basically as he was.
But Franklin. His family was squarely working class. He was the son of a candle and soap maker and grandson of a blacksmith. His formal book education stopped at age 10. Being freaking brilliant isn't enough; Wrede's got to make him special for him to be capable of this great amazing Great Barrier Spell. :P Screw that.
2. Why didn't they just ask him?
A big deal is made out of no one understanding how Jefferson and Franklin created the Great Barrier because Franklin didn't write everything down, and Jefferson did but with references other people couldn't figure out.
Jefferson didn't die until 1826. The Barrier had to go up before Franklin's death in 1790. That's at least 36 years in which people could have asked "Tom, what the Sam Hill were you talking about here?"
Chapter 24
Including this one, only 5 more chapters until something finally happens.
1. Washington Crossing the Delaware
A. The Flag
Eff makes a deal about Papa and Prof Jeffries remembering that the flag carried by Washington and his crew “should only have thirteen stars”.
Actually, it shouldn’t have stars at all. There would have been a union jack there (sans the red portion of the diagonals). The Stars and Bars wasn’t used until 9 month later.
B. Robert Carradine
It’s too much to ask for Wrede to research actual participants of the crossing of the Delaware, or even important military figures under Washington. Instead we apparently get an actor best known for staring in Revenge of the Nerds.
C. The Light
Said actor is known for casting the light spell that guided Washington. Because when you’re setting up a sneak attack, you definitely want a big huge bright light on your boat.
Chapter 26
1. Sisters Hugging
When Eff sees her sister Rennie again, part of her wants to hug and part wants to yell at her, “but I wasn’t thirteen anymore, and I couldn’t do either one” in front of the others.
Actually, women relatives and close friends in this time period were expected to be very touchy-feely with each other, to a degree that modern audiences can find downright lesbianic. When she doesn’t hug her sister, the others are probably thinking that Eff is really pissed off.
2. Rennie’s Clothes
There’s nothing wrong with Rennie’s clothes, but I would have loved to see her in reform garb. The Bloomer trousers and short skirt. It’s a little early, but absolutely doable; in fact, the reason the Reform clothing movement didn’t die almost as soon as it started was because of pioneer women. In Reform garb it was so much easier to move around and do hard frontier chores and cook without setting yourself on fire. There’d also be this fun mirroring thing with Eff. Eff just stopped wearing pantalettes and short skirts (children’s wear) and comes out here to find her older sister wearing something that looks very similar to what she just discarded. And the cherry on top: in later decades, Reform dress was also known as “Rational Dress”. It’d be perfect!
3. Rennie and Eff’s Conversation
... falls flat on its face. Rennie and Eff talk about Rennie running off and it looks like they’re going to have a big argument or worse but then that fizzles, because an argument might be doing something, and then later Eff decides to just accept that Rennie said sorry even though there wasn’t much explanation, and the conflict just sort of goes away.
It didn’t occur to me until I was doing the dishes the next day, but I bet when this takes place, Eff hadn’t done the math on Albert’s birth yet. (If she has done the math, she’s just being an asshole.) Which brings up that this would have been a much better place to reveal the math rather than just tossed out in prose earlier.
So imagine if when Rennie says she was young and scared and did the best she could at the time and Eff asks what she was afraid of, instead of answering “Oh, stuff”, Rennie instead says, “Eff, you know how I eloped in May? Albert was born in November.” “What does that have to do with.. Oh. Oh!”
Rennie found herself pregnant and unmarried in the late 1840s/early 1850s. Hell yes she was scared. This is a golden opportunity for some character development. A great perception shift (Rennie from bossy selfish know-it-all to scared desperate girl), a good reinforcement that Eff is now a woman who can be trusted knowing how her sister messed up rather than needing the truth hidden from her. But no, instead we get an “Oh, just stuff” answer, a fizzled-out conversation, and a potentially major reveal just tossed out in prose way back in Chapter 14.
Chapter 27
As usual, Eff is actively kept from doing anything interesting. She wishes she was out bug-hunting with the boys, and as usual I do too, because it means something might be happening. This is how desperate I am at this point. Looking for bug pupae would be a step up. *head desk* At least we finally stop pretending that it isn’t Really Flaming Obvious that the bugs are attracted to magic.
1. Spell casting
So... all respect for the Rationalists goes completely out the window and we just start casting spells willy-nilly without even trying to be subtle about it anymore. Would have served them right if a local had come up and smacked them upside the head and told them to get the hell out of town.
2. Walking Boots
When she tells Wash and William she’s a 13th child, Eff specifically mentions avoid their eyes by looking at the toes of her walking boots. In the 1850s? Possible, but not likely. Boots didn’t come in until the crinoline did, and then there was a transitory period of gaiters over slippers and soft soled, heelless boots -- all driven by modesty rather than function. What you’re thinking of when you read “walking boots” is probably not what Eff is wearing.
Chapter 29
Finally, something happens! Don’t get your hopes too far up, though. For a second there it looks like Eff has finally become a character worth watching, but we later find out it’s just that her brother has, at great effort, drug her into doing something. :P
1. Full skirts
Eff specifically makes it a point to mention while getting on horseback that she’s glad she wore a full skirt. As opposed to? It’s 1850-something. They’re ALL full skirts. Your options when you wake up in the morning are putting on the skirt made with 10 yards of fabric, or putting on the skirt made with 12 yards of fabric. Thank God she went with the 12-yarder, huh?
I’m just glad she hasn’t started wearing that new-fangled Parisian crinoline thing.
Chapter 30
1. Bugs.
So, our heroine finally goes and does stuff and heroically battles one of the great unknown creatures of the frontier and it’s... bugs. Not dragons, or pyromaniacal bird things, or even mammoths. Just bugs. They’re not even carnivorous bugs. (Well, Wrede might try to slap life-sucking on as an afterthought, but it’s just slipped into a single sentence in the denouement and never really demonstrated.) The problem is that they eat magic, which means they can eat your protection spells, and that allows other things to come eat you later. If the other critters get around to it.
Bugs. Purty much.
3. No! Big Issue, Come Back! I’ll Love You!
The bugs do bring a Big Issue, though. They’re attracted by the spells settlements use to protect themselves, and this has caused enough buggy population growth that the Great Barrier could be in danger. This is a Big Issue. The things required for our short term survival are a detriment to our long-term survival! What else are our magics contributing too? The increase in the pyromanical bird population? The steam dragon that made it across the Great Barrier? Do we enter an arms race with nature itself, knowing the price of losing is complete destruction of the entire country? Do we abandon the settlements and attempt to deal with overpopulation to the east of the Mississippi? Do we have to start recruiting a whole bunch more Rationalists and let them have the entire west half of the continent?
Or do we just put together a solution that takes “a couple of days” of tweaking and then we’re completely hunky-dory? :P Wrede chooses the “couple of days of tweaking” route and completely drops the Big Issue.
I want the Big Issue. We should have fought the bugs at page 180 and spent the second half the book tackling the Big Issue.
And the book just kind of smacks its nose on the door on the way out. We got denouement going, but it doesn’t really have a conclusion; it just sort of reaches the end of a page, and stops.
So, final conclusions on Thirteenth Child.
If you can look past the massive racism in the set-up...
You’ll find a lot of racism in the book itself. I don’t think any of it’s malicious, but is this level of laziness and thoughtlessness really that much better?
But if you can look past the additional racism, you’ll find...
A story that’s at least twice as long as it needs to be, and thus LOOOOONG stretches in which abso-fraggin’-lutely nothing happens.
But if you could trim the story down to, say, 150 to 180 pages, you’d get...
Well, I’m afraid you’d still got the story of a whiny heroine who has no sense of adventure at all and has to be drug kicking and screaming into doing anything interesting whatsoever.
It’s a bad book on multiple levels. There’s maybe a few good scenes in it, but if they total even 20 pages I’d be shocked. Mostly, it’s a lot of nothing peppered with whining. There’s 12 hours of my life I ain't never getting back.
