Jessica Rydill's debut novel, Children
of the Shaman is set in a world very much like our own, with magic and
different nomenclature. In that respect, it is reminiscent of some
of the more recent novels by Canadian author Guy Gavriel Kay. Set in
what appears to be a nineteenth-century Eastern European analog, the story
focuses on the young Wanderer Shaman Annat and her attempts to build a
relationship with her father, Yuda Vasilyevich.
The story begins with Annat and her
older brother, Malchik, deposited with Yuda, who left their mother shortly
after Annat was born. Their mother now dead, an aunt, Yuste, has
been caring for them, but her illness means she must give them into the
care of their father, who they will now get the chance to know. Yuda
is working as a guard on the railroad, but is about to take a position in
a frontier town as a healer, using his powers as a Shaman. Annat's
own nascent ability as a healer provides her father with an apprentice as
well as an opening for them to make their relationship work, something
Yuda lacks with his son, Malchik.
Rydill attempts to tell several
different types of story in Children of the Shaman, with the result
that the novel does not seem as cohesive as one would like. It
appears to open as a story about a reconciliation between father and
children, which does continue through the book, but is frequently eclipsed
by the murder mystery which begins to unfold in Gard Ademar, a mythic
quest when Yuda and Annat, accompanied by Yuda's friends Govorin and
Casildis try to discover the whereabouts of some of the missing people in
the faerie land of La Souterraine..
The novel is slow to pick up steam, with
the plot only really getting moving a third of the way through the book.
However, the early chapters allow Rydill to present her world, at once
familiar and exotic, at a leisurely pace to let the reader become
acclimatized to the differences between our world and Annat's. These
descriptions, of places, foods, clothing, are one of the areas in which
Rydill excels. She provides texture to her civilization which is all
too often lacking in more derivative works of fantasy.
In some ways, the very familiarity of
Rydill’s setting is distracting. The
similarity to our own world results in attempts to figure out what our
world’s analog is for everything in Rydill’s novel, when in many cases
the analog does not exist, or is only a partial analog at best.
Furthermore, the similarities have a tendency to make the reader
wonder about them. Why are
there some linguistic links between worlds, but the languages themselves
(and the histories which created them) do not always seem to exist.
Rydill seems to know a lot more about
her world than she is letting on, and she may choose to reveal additional
information in future novels set in this world, but for the duration of Children
of the Shaman, the civilization Rydill depicts seems to be missing
keystones and raises as many questions as it answers.
Children of the Shaman is a good debut novel which provides hints of things
to come from the author, both within the framework of the world she has
built and in the potential her use of language implies for future work.
With luck, those future novels will live up to the promise she
shows in Children of the Shaman.
