City
of Islands. By Kali Wallace.
Katherine Tegen/HarperCollins. $16.99.
A nicely paced novel with some genuinely interesting elements – placed,
unfortunately, within some genuinely stereotypical ones – Kali Wallace’s City of Islands is most involving when
it is less a fantasy adventure and more an exploration of the way in which such
adventures are perceived. “Even the best legends were a weave of truth and
lies, memories and wishes, and few people ever had a chance to revisit the
foundations of their most cherished beliefs to learn how they withstood the
test of time.” This perceptive comment, simply a narrative aside near the end
of the book, speaks to what is best and most thoughtful in City of Islands: an approach that almost helps it rise above what
is essentially a thoroughly standardized plot acted out by one-dimensional
characters.
The basic story here is typical preteen fantasy: a young orphan girl
proves to have powers far beyond her imagining or the expectations of anyone
else in the book, especially adults; and as she starts coming into those
powers, she makes great things happen and single-handedly changes the world for
the better. Surrounding the protagonist, 12-year-old Mara, are the usual
friends/foils, notably an older girl named Izzy and a boy called Fish Hook. The
adults are the usual blend of cruel and/or uncaring and/or feckless and/or
ambition-driven; they include the ruling Lady of the Tides, a “bone-mage” named
Bindy who takes Mara in after the girl’s parents die, and a dark sorcerer known
as Lord of the Muck. The characters act and interact in entirely predictable
ways that include arguments and fights, lies and betrayals, and the typical
error in books of this sort of underestimating Mara and her abilities.
City of Islands would be
eminently forgettable were it not for the setting and some of the details of
the narrative. Wallace’s world here is indeed a set of islands, each supposedly
with its own character (although only a few are actually visited in the course
of the book). In this world – and this is
interesting – there is magic, yes, but it is so mundane a part of the world
that people use it all the time, albeit in small ways. And it is evoked and
shaped, and used to shape other things, by means of music – specifically songs.
That is a very intriguing premise that could have drawn on the whole notion of
the power of music to mold the mind, had Wallace wished; and even though she
does not use it that way, preferring simply to have music be a tool for calling
forth magic, itself a tool for accomplishing everyday tasks, the notion that
music is something special pervades the book and lends it more character than
most preteen fantasies possess.
The concept here is that the City of Islands is a degraded form of a
once-greater land created through potent magic by a race of water beings known
only as the founders (not even a capital F). The magic that still exists is but
an echo of what the founders possessed, and while most people are content to
use what magic they can to aid their everyday lives, some power-seekers strive
for ever-more-potent magic and go to great lengths to try to find or develop
it. This is a standard power-hungry-adults trope, and the Lord of the Muck’s
insistence on explaining his nefarious designs in detail to Mara, who has just
shown up unexpectedly in his Frankensteinish laboratory, is almost laughably
formulaic: young readers who have encountered nearly any cardboard-character
bad guy anywhere will have heard speeches like his many times.
They will have met heroic young people like Mara many times, too. In
fact, Mara is a rather weak central character, constantly self-questioning and
having no real idea of how anything in life works, even though Wallace says she is a determined-survivor type. For
instance, Mara comes up with a clever idea to get her captive friends away from
the Lord of the Muck, but when she has a chance to present the plan to the Lady
of the Tides, it does not even occur to her to do so in a way that will pique
the Lady’s interest, which is not in
lowly servant Mara or her equally lowly friends: “She needed them to understand
that rescuing Izzy and Fish Hook was more important than the Muck, more
important than his magic, more important than anything he thought he could do.”
A smarter protagonist would have focused on the exact opposite of this: how the
Lady, by helping Mara, could outmaneuver the Muck and undermine his plans. But
not Mara – who, rather unrealistically, gets the help she wants anyway.
City of Islands moves along at
a good pace and has a few genuinely intriguing scenes, such as one that echoes
Pushkin’s The Stone Guest as Mara
discovers a statue that seems to shed tears – a prelude to something more
significant that is still to come. But the book has no truly compelling
characters, and it suffers from a number of editing errors, such as one in
which, while Mara and a girl named Feather search for the missing Fish Hook,
there occurs this line: “‘We didn’t find her,’ Fish Hook said.” No – Feather said, Fish Hook being nowhere in
the scene. A little more care in editing would have been in order here. Even
then, though, City of Islands would
be a pleasantly involving, sometimes dramatic adventure that fits firmly in the
preteen-fantasy genre while bringing very little new to it. It is not one of a
kind but one among many of its kind.
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