A city of bone-spires, winged messengers on patrol, and monstrous mouths appearing in the sky. This merely touches the surface of Fran Wilde’s imaginative, debut novel Updraft which is a marvelous display of world-building Told from the first person perspective of young Kirit, Wilde’s voice is powerful, evocative, smart, and likeable. Kirit’s mother Ezarit is a noted Trader – the crucial flier-messengers who fly between the spires – and Kirit’s dream is to follow in her mother’s footsteps. She and her best friend Nat must; however, pass the Wingtest before they are permitted to take steps to join the Traders. Her hopes are unraveled when Kirit draws the attention of a ‘sky mouth,’ a floating monstrosity that can potentially threaten the Spire itself.
Although Kirit’s hopes of becoming a Trader seem dashed, she can still be a force for good in the Spires. Because she shouted and sang away the skymouth, she was noticed by the Singers, the collective of individuals whose role is to keep the skymouths from doing any harm to the Spires. It isn’t an easy journey, but through it all, Wilde does a very good job of capturing Kirit’s frustrations, hopes, desires and all of her emotions.
For such a relatively short novel (350 pages), Wilde packs a great deal of detail into her world and the consequences of living in such a strange place. It seems clear that Wilde put a enormous effort and time constructing this world, but she does not dole out those details with reckless, word-dumping abandon. The world-building comes as the plot comes, in the adequate amounts to round out the characters and push the story forward. There’s enough detail about the flying equipment to give a good understanding of the challenges Traders/fliers face without dragging down the narrative. The Spires themselves are harrowing constructions, and even more harrowing are the lower levels. They are made of bones, but bones of what? It isn’t clear (and that’s a strength of Wilde’s storytelling), so in that sense there’s the right amount of detail leaving me wanting more. The spires and a (once?)-living environment constructed of bone, reminded me of Mike Underwood’s highly enjoyable Shield and Crocus. There’s a vein of mysterious darkness in Wilde’s fantasy world that echoes some of the darkness underlying the New Weird just as it did in Mike’s novel.
However, I was a bit confused early on in the novel about some of the characters, mainly because Kirit is inconsistent with how she refers to her mother, sometimes it is “mom” or “mother,” but most of the time she called her Ezarit. I also thought the scenes with the larger groups of her age-peers were not as strong as the scenes when she was one-on-one with Nat; her mother, or discovering unknown secrets of her world. There were many points throughout the novel, reading Kirit’s voice that reminded me of Robin Hobb’s lovely first person narratives. On the whole, Updraft evokes a nostalgic, comforting feel to the voice that made it very easy for me to be lulled into the novel.
Voice for a writer is not an easy thing to capture and the fact that Fran Wilde pulled off such a captivating voice in her debut novel is very impressive. Tor has always been a reliable science fiction and fantasy publisher and in recent years, the publisher has been introducing readers to many new, diverse, and unique voices. Fran Wilde is no exception to that track record.
An impressive debut by an author who possess both a great voice and knack for world-building, and an ability to show-off those attributes with great skill.
Recommended
© 2015 Rob H. Bedford
Hardcover, September 1, 2015
ISBN 978-0-765-377-83-8, 368 Pages
Excerpts: http://www.tor.com/2015/05/20/updraft/
https://franwilde.wordpress.com
Review copy courtesy of the publisher, Tor
