TITLE: Updraft
AUTHOR: Fran Wilde
GENRE: Fantasy
PUBLISHED: 01/09/2015
RATING: ★★★
PURCHASE LINKS: Amazon
MOBILISM LINK: Mobilism
Review: I’ve had a few days to think about this book after turning the final page, and I’m still pretty conflicted over how I feel about it. On the one hand, I am, as you guys have probably realised by now, a huge fan of great world-building – and I have to admit that the world-building for this one is pretty awesome. Kirit, our main character, lives in Densira, a tower of living bone in a city made up of such towers. Citizens must fly on glider-like wings to travel between towers, and everything is overseen by the Spire of Singers, people who oversee the law and keep the terrifying skymouths away from the city’s citizens. Lawbreakers must wear tags of bone detailing their crimes, history and magic are both told and kept through song, and every so often the city wakes and roars, demanding living sacrifices.
But I can’t claim to have really enjoyed the story.
In essence: Kirit wants to be a trader like her mother. Traders are highly respected, honoured, even, as the lifeblood of the isolationist towers. But when Kirit accidentally discovers she has the power to Scream – using her voice to drive off skymouths – the Singers come to claim her, tearing apart her life until she has no choice but to join them in the Spire for training.
It’s not that unusual a formula – we’ve all seen it before: oblivious young person discovering a power and being conscripted into training by a suspicious-seeming organisation or central government. But it’s a good formula, one that’s been done very well by a lot of different authors. Unfortunately, I can’t honestly claim Wilde is one of them. Six months of training is condensed into half of a single chapter, so that although Kirit learns a great deal, the reader is left wondering what the hells just happened, and the inevitable conspiracy Kirit must overcome feels rushed, dropped into our laps all at once rather than letting us learn of it bit by bit. More, it’s a very poorly thought-out conspiracy, with only a single villain. I can’t help but think that government conspiracies can’t function with just one person pulling all the strings; there needs to be a network, a whole group of people believing and supporting the ideology in question, which makes uprooting them very difficult.
The book is written in first person, which either really works or fails utterly. Here, it fails abysmally. Kirit reads like a psychopath, with almost no emotional reactions to anything or anyone around her; she tells us this person is her friend, this person she loves, but we never feel it. We never even see her feeling it. She reads not like a narrator but like someone giving a very poor report, without details. I still have no idea how it feels to Scream, or how she felt when her best friend died, because these things flash past without any emotional reaction. It’s frustrating – I know that I particularly like description, and description of emotions especially, but I can’t think that even readers who prefer less description are going to be happy here. There’s just nothing to work with, nothing to engage in. I still don’t understand Kirit’s transition from despising what the Singers have done to her to her identifying with them and wanting to be one of them. It’s a fact simply told to us, that she changed her mind, not a natural transition that we can follow on the page.
And then, Wilde doesn’t really do anything to make the formula she’s taken anything but predictable. At once point, Kirit has to enter a duel, and the moment it’s announced that she will have to fight you know who her opponent is going to be. The identity of the villain is just as obvious, and the ‘big bad’ plot is so ridiculously implausible (and poorly explained) as to be laughable. Not to mention how quickly Kirit manages to raise the Spire against the villain. If everyone has hated him for so long and disagreed with his methods all this time, why does it take Kirit to push everyone to action?
My mother selected her wings as early morning light reached through our balcony shutters. She moved between the shadows, calm and deliberate, while downtower neighbors slept behind their barricades. She pushed her arms into the woven harness. Turned her back to me so that I could cinch the straps tight against her shoulders.
The writing style is abrupt, short sentences without much description or elaboration. The characterization is poor, and although the world is interesting, it’s full of holes: for example, not once is it explained just what kind of creature the citizens are living in or on, despite the fact that it’s clearly alive. Not once is it properly explained just how humans came to be living in these towers, despite the fact that people sing The Rising – the history song of the beginning of the city – over and over; it’s always summarised, never giving the reader the answers we’d like. And the plot is rushed past all sense.
It’s a fun book, I won’t argue that. If you want a light, pretty read, this should suit you fine. But it is definitely not worth all the hype it’s received the last few months.