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In one of my rare forays into the fantasy genre I came upon this gem of a book. 4/30/2014 12:07:24 PM
This is my review of The Girl Who Sang With Whales, a great read which brings us a fully-developed imaginary world. A weakness that is common to many fantasy stories is that much time is spent on the fantastical elements, while most of the characters are either two-dimensional or come across as mere caricatures.
This is far from the case with The Girl Who Sang with Whales. Marc Secchia’s excellent novel combines a richly-detailed alternate world, with a slew of well-drawn and well-thought out characters.
The story takes place in a world dominated by the ocean. The people live on islands of varying sizes that are grouped into atolls. Every aspect of life, from religion, to language, to politics, to food, is intertwined with the World-Sea and the creatures that inhabit it.
Among those creatures are huge whales which can be controlled by an exclusively male guild of Bard-Navigators. These men "sing the whales," using their powerful voices to draw the whales to guide and protect their ocean-going convoys. The convoys, and many of the islands, are being preyed upon by a growing population of sea dragons, which are the mortal enemies of the whales.
Into this world comes a teen-age girl, Zhialeiana, or Zhisu for short. She is born of an unknown father, on a tiny island located at the furthest end of the furthest atoll. With her white hair and sea-blue eyes she stands out from everyone around her. Her webbed foot marks her as an object of derision, and sometimes fear, to many who wonder at her origins. And her ability to commune with nature through her songs means she has the chance to become one of the rare female Bard-Navigators in the world.
The book can be enjoyed on so many levels. The prose is almost lyrical, with much time devoted to describing the near-magical realm that Secchia has imagined. The huge cast of colourful characters that Zhisu meets when she is forced to leave her home island reminded me of the best Dickens novels. The story, of an orphan who is used by those she thought she could trust, and sold into indentured servitude to a harbourmaster far from her home, also could have been written by Dickens.
There are moments of quiet contemplation of Zhisu’s inner, spiritual world, as well as the outer world she inhabits, and both are fully-realized creations. But there are also scenes of political intrigue, violent action and high seas adventure. In the middle of this whirlwind stands Zhisu, struggling to find her inner strengths as well as some sort of meaning to the events which befall her. She is swept along by political and spiritual currents that she hardly understands, as her abilities make her a prize that many people want to obtain.
It may sound like a mixed bag, and it is, but Secchia holds all the disparate parts together, and keeps this wonderful story moving forward to an ending that promises further adventures, along with a voyage of discovery where Zhisu, and the happy readers, will hopefully learn who, or what, she really is.
