Your Humble Blogger picked up Lauren Ruby’s The Wall and the Wing because, you know, YASF and it didn’t look absolutely terrible. In fact, it looked OK. And I wound up liking it a lot. It wasn’t perfect for me, to some extent because it feels aimed just a tad younger than my own comfort level (it seems I am the audience for books aimed at twelve-year-olds, more or less, which is undoubtedly a reflection on my character), and some of the tying-up seems a bit glib and unsatisfying. On the other hand, I was utterly unprepared for what lay underneath Odd John’s human suit.
One thing that I particularly liked about the book is that it is set in a modern world, very specifically and recognizably Manhattan, but far, far different from our own Manhattan, both in small and in large. It’s not, quite, and alternate universe Manhattan, or one of those Manhattans where magic works; it’s a Manhattan that is utterly different, and yet still Manhattan. I’ll take it.
I think there is a trend, probably newish or newly flourishing, to have YA fantasies set in cities. There are still plenty of unicorns and knights, and still plenty of pirates and plenty of villages and so on, but also plenty of modern fantasy as well. Is that the Harry Potter influence? If so, it’s well beyond HP itself, which retreated from its suburban setting to the School, which is a medieval relic in itself, and largely cut off from the modern world. These books (and I’ll put this one, and much of Cornelia Funke’s stuff, and the Percy Jackson series, and the Keys to the Kingdom, and Horns and Wrinkles (although that is modern rural) all in that category) tend to be much more comfortably modern. Although the Diana Wynne Jones’ Chrestomanci books have that sense of retreat, of there being a modern world outside the book, rather than the book in the world. Not that it ruins the book; it works for those books, but it isn’t quite what I’m talking about.
Now that I think about it, maybe it isn’t the Harry Potter series so much as the Daniel Pinkwater influence. Although I don’t see him listed as an influence in those little interviews on the publisher’s sites. Hm.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.