The Map of Bones by Francesca Haig
My rating: 3/5 cats
3.5 stars CATS
i liked this second book more than The Fire Sermon, but i’m not in love with the series yet.
i’m going to be as spoiler-free as i can, but any book review worth anyone’s time is going to include some discussion of the book’s contents, so if you’re a person inclined to recoil in horror from knowledge, you may not be safe with me.
i’m usually able to roll with a premise, even an oddball one, but there’s something about this situation that i can’t stop “but wait”-ing because it is bonkers.
in the briefest of nutshells and with many omissions – a nuclear event has occurred, whose biological aftereffects are that every human birth now results in twins – one perfect baby and one “burdened with deformity” (<—from the synopsis). these “deformities” manifest in a number of ways – extra fingers or toes, missing limbs, blindness, etc. bottom line – they are all physical anomalies, (except for seers, but we don’t need to go into them here). when the babies are born, the twins are separated as the wheat from the chaff into “alphas” and “omegas;” the alphas are kept at home with their parents to love and rear and educate, while the omegas are branded on the forehead and sent off to a life of hardship and sterility in omega communities with limited opportunities and fewer and worse resources. oh, but fun fact – when one twin dies, so does the other. when one twin is injured, they both feel it, no matter how far apart they are. if an alpha falls in the forest, somewhere an omega makes a sound.
none of this makes sense to me. not the psychically linked twins part – that’s just ordinary creepy twin shit, but i find it hard to believe that parents would give away half of their children for what is essentially a cosmetic reason. six fingers? who cares? it’s hard to wrap my head around a society’s collective shame towards physical imperfections overwriting the individual’s hardwired biological imperative to protect its young. and particularly in this case, where the death of the icky omega also results in the death of the beloved alpha. shouldn’t these bound fates be incentive enough to keep both babies close, watched over, provided for, even if one of them only has one arm? if not compassion, at the very least self-interest should provide enough motivation to keep everyone alive. it seems short-sighted, letting one of the children toddle out of parental reach, when there’s a risk of waking up to a dead heir and not knowing how it happened and if it could have been prevented.
that’s just one of the things that makes me wonder why this wasn’t marketed as a YA series; that whole “exploring injustice or racism or bullying or ostracization in terms of pretty vs. ugly” theme that pops up so often in YA lit but is a little underbaked to serve to an adult audience. don’t get me wrong – i am an adult who happily reads YA, but there are different expectations when reading adult fiction than reading fiction targeted at a younger audience, and this series features many of the hallmarks of YA lit – the age of the characters, the division of society into capital-letter groups like “Alphas” and “Omegas,” the “Council” whose leaders are known as “the Judge,” “the Reformer,” “the Ringmaster,”“the General,” etc., the all-consuming insta-love between cass and kip in The Fire Sermon, cass’ stubborn anti-violence stance despite the realities of her world, the ramped-up dramatic tone; these are all the snips and snails of YA fantasy-adventure.
The Map of Bones has less of this than The Fire Sermon, but it’s still there, worked deep into the trilogy’s roots. however, there are definite improvements for my tastes. for one thing, kip and cass are separated at the end of The Fire Sermon, so this is mercifully free from that overwrought romance. there’s also a bit more of a reality-slap for cass. despite everything that happened in front of her in the first book, she still seems to believe that it can all be worked out with a conversation and maybe a bonk on the head if things start getting especially heated. traveling with piper and zoe grows her up a little bit, and i really appreciated zoe’s soldier-impatience with cass’ little girl squeamishness about violence and her need to remind everyone that every death is actually two deaths, as though anyone’s going to forget about that when their own death is twice as likely to take them by surprise. this one pulls back a bit less from unpleasantness, and there are some interesting developments i look forwarded to seeing continued/concluded in the next book.
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reading this to get myself one step closer to finally being able to honor the goodreads giveaway gods for their generosity in crowning me the winner of the third book in this trilogy. i am coming for you, book three – don’t give up on me!
