Book Review Saturday – ‘A Crack in Everything’

Ruth Frances Long’s A Crack in Everything, published by O’Brien Press, is wonderfully, authentically, full-bloodedly Irish, and I really liked that aspect of it. Set in Dublin, and its faerie equivalent of Dubh Linn (pronounced ‘Dove Lin’, and literally meaning ‘Black Pool’, this is the Irish word which became the name ‘Dublin’; however, the Irish for Dublin is Baile Átha Cliath, which means ‘Town of the Fording Place’, as far as I remember – Ireland’s a complicated place, all right?), A Crack in Everything is the kind of book you can taste and smell as well as read, if you’re at all familiar with the city.

Image: rflong.com

The story introduces us to Izzy (Isabel) Gregory, who lives with her parents in a Dublin suburb. She has friends, she is into music, she has a part-time job in a coffee shop and she loves ‘town’ – as most people who live in the Dublin area refer to the city centre. One afternoon as she strolls through the streets, she is captivated by a beautiful piece of graffiti, an angel painted on a wall (which did actually exist in reality; I often saw it myself!), but as she is sucked into the power of the image, she finds herself being assaulted. She had noticed herself being followed by someone whom she took to be a homeless man, and it is he who shoves her against the wall and steals her phone – but then, before Izzy’s eyes, he vanishes into thin air. As Izzy struggles to get her phone back, she finds herself drawn into a different world, one which exists side-by-side with the human one, but peopled with entirely different Dubliners. The ‘homeless man’ is no such thing – he is a member of the Sídhe (pronounced ‘Shee’), the fairy-folk of Irish lore and legend, and another member of the Sídhe, Jinx, comes to Izzy’s aid. Thus begins a fast-paced, emotional story which takes in the Sídhe, angels and demons, magic and myth and the fate of the universe itself – all of which hangs on Izzy’s being brave enough to face up to her true identity, her role as more than a mere teenage girl, and her ability to deal with her complicated feelings for Jinx who – as a newly-acquired voice in her head keeps telling her – cannot be trusted.

But when he keeps saving her life, and she keeps saving his, it starts to get harder and harder to believe that. And who, or what, is the voice in her head – and why is it trying to control Izzy’s body?

Dublin – and Dubh Linn – as a setting for this novel adds so much to the story. It really couldn’t have been set anywhere else. Landmarks take on new significance, and the particular streetscape of Dublin city comes alive. Alleyways and rat-runs which are familiar to me become, in this novel, doorways to the Otherworld (I always suspected as much anyway, to be honest), and it was so much fun to imagine yourself in the world of the book as you read. Even if you don’t know Dublin well, or at all, though, you can still read and enjoy this book. It’s very much set in a particular place, but the power behind it is one which anyone can relate to – the loss of loved ones, the uncovering of deeply buried family secrets, the realisation that you are not what you thought you were and that your family is not what you’ve been raised to think it is, and the shouldering of new and onerous burdens – and the twisty, complex and satisfyingly interconnected plot should satisfy any reader.

I’m not big on books with grand passions in them, so I wasn’t too bothered with Izzy and Jinx’s love story (it’s not a spoiler to say so, because it’s telegraphed from the first moment she sees him), and I did tire a bit of Jinx being described as ‘lean’ or ‘lithe’ or ‘hard-bodied’ or ‘muscular’ or whatever every three pages, but he’s an interesting and complex character, and the tattoos and piercings which are so much a part of his ‘look’ are interestingly woven into his identity, and I did like that. There were places when I felt the book could have been tightened up a little (but perhaps that’s because I primarily read children’s books, which move at a breakneck pace!) and where I felt description was overdone, but in general I enjoyed A Crack in Everything. I liked the fact that so many of the central characters are women – and powerful, kick-ass women at that – and the seamless, intelligent use of Irish myths, brought cleverly into the twenty-first century (I particularly enjoyed the use of an electric guitar as a modern-day harp). It builds well to a frenetic conclusion, and even though it is the first volume in a series its story is perfectly wrapped up and brought to a solid conclusion, while still laying the foundation for the next book.

If you’re into emotionally wrenching YA love stories, and/or mythology and folklore, and/or Ireland and its history, and/or kickass heroines, then give this book a whirl.

Growing a Story

Image: strawberryindigo.wordpress.com

Ah! *Deep breath* It’s good to be back.

I hope your weekend was full of glitter and cocktails and dancing, and that it’s now a pleasantly fading memory. Mine was wonderful – full of family, great food and lots of laughter – and, as well as that, it was almost entirely computer-free. I think it’s necessary, every once in a while, to step away from the screen.

That doesn’t mean my mind didn’t live in stories, just because I was away from the computer, though. Of course.

Sometimes it seems like your brain works overtime to create story ideas when it knows you have no way of taking note of them. You’re in the middle of a meal, perhaps, or on a long car journey, when the Best Idea Ever whacks you between the eyes. When that happens, you can find yourself repeating the idea over and over to yourself until you manage to find a pen and paper, or your phone, or whatever it is you use to keep track of your ramblings; hopefully, by the time you get to do this, your idea hasn’t lost all semblance of coherence, and still sounds like the Best Idea Ever. Also, hopefully, the people who have been trying to hold a conversation with you while you’ve been trying to hold a whole world inside your head aren’t too peeved at your apparent absent-mindedness.

While we’re on this topic: I think it’s important to stay faithful to these ideas, the ones that come at you out of nowhere. If something strikes you as exciting or interesting, then don’t let your enthusiasm for it fade while you search for something to make a note with. I fear many a wonderful idea has been lost down the dark crevasse of that particular form of self-doubt.

Abandon hope, all ye who enter here…
Image: gutenberg.org

It’s funny how the human brain can talk itself into most things, and out of nearly everything. Have you ever had the experience where a word you use all the time suddenly starts to look ‘wrong’ or weird, like you’ve misspelled it or are using it incorrectly? It happens to me all the time. Common words, if repeated often enough, can eventually seem like gibberish, so it stands to reason that the more familiar your brain is with something, the more nonsensical it can seem. If this starts happening with your ideas, and you start to convince yourself that they’re no good just because you’ve been focusing strongly on them for a while, then try to bear in mind that all you’re doing is talking yourself out of your own process of inspiration.

And that, I’m sure we can all agree, is a bit silly.

Sometimes, though, a story can grow in unexpected ways. It can grow slowly, out of a single image or a fleeting impression, and years can pass before anything changes. It’s not a bolt from the blue, leaving you scrambling for a pen; it’s a far longer and more gentle process, like a flower blooming inside your mind. Something like this happened to me at the weekend, and I’m quite pleased about it. It feels like a warm scarf, which I can’t stop tucking gently around myself. I feel like I’ve found the next step in a long-unsolved puzzle, and that a story seed I’ve been nurturing for a long time is a tiny bit closer to coming to fruition.

For years now, I have had a character in my head. He stalks the corners of my consciousness, raising a scornful eyebrow at me every once in a while. ‘I will have a story for you soon, I promise,’ I keep telling him; ‘yeah, right,’ he seems to reply. I can see him, tall and skinny and besuited, his face long and his smile beguiling, darkness flowing off him like radiation. He is a blood-chilling character, and he deserves a story to match.

Well, I think I might have found the first step in the tale of my unsettling man.

It all happened because of something I misread in a book at my in-laws’ house. The book was a compendium of local folklore and mythology, and the words I read were Irish. They were ‘Féar Gorta’, which means something like ‘Hunger Grass,’ or ‘Famine Grass’; to my eye, though, they first appeared as ‘Fear Gorta,’ which means ‘Man of Hunger,’ or ‘Man of Famine.’ The only difference between the word ‘féar’ and the word ‘fear’ (pronounced ‘fair’ and ‘far’ respectively) is the diacritical mark known as a ‘fada’ which appears over the ‘e’ in ‘Féar’; this little mark changes the word completely, though. As I read the words which I thought were ‘fear gorta,’ my slender, dark and smiling man popped into my head, and took a bow. I thought: Wow. So, now I know what he is. He’s a Man of Hunger – or, at least, a version of one.

A Man of Hunger is, apparently, a folkloric figure in Ireland, a wraith who appears at your door seemingly on the point of starving to death; you’re supposed to show him mercy, and give him whatever food you have to spare. If you do, you’ll never know another hungry day, but if you don’t… well. If you don’t, hunger itself will never be far from you. ‘Féar Gorta’, or hunger grass, is a patch of innocent-looking grass which has dried up and died, but if a person walks over it they’re afflicted with dreadful, life-threatening hunger and must be given something to eat immediately or face death; the legends say that patches of hunger grass sprang up at the places where people dying of starvation during the Famine fell and were left unburied, or where the fairies have cursed the ground.

Ireland, eh? Cheery place.

Image: musingthetrauma.blogspot.com

Lots of legends like this sprang up in Ireland after the Gorta Mór, the Great Famine, and even though they’re no longer believed, they still have a powerful cultural resonance. I love stories which take elements of folklore and weave them into new and interesting stories, and which bring ancient ideas back to life, and I’m quite delighted with my little misreading, the one which brought me from Hunger Grass to Man of Hunger. It has given me – ironically, perhaps – a little meat to put on the bones of my mysterious character. I already have a story beginning to weave itself around him, and it’s exciting to watch it grow.

Of course, another thing the mind does is give you a good idea for your next project while you’re still working on your current project. It will be a while before I get to actually write any of this, but until then, my subconscious mind can churn away at it. Hopefully by the time I’m preparing my first draft, the story will flow with ease – but if this sly and smiling man inside my head is anything to go by, nothing will go to plan…