Nataliya's Reviews > Riverland

The premise was interesting, and I bet that’s what got this book the Andre Norton Nebula Award (“baby Nebula”, basically). The problem was the execution. And as a result I struggled quite a bit to finish this book, and would have abandoned it if not for my Hugo-Nebula reading project this year.

“At home, every time I lost my temper, things got worse. When Poppa lost his temper, things broke. If you can’t control your temper, Eleanor, you’ll be just like him. Momma had said this so many times.”

This is a middle-grade fantasy (or perhaps magical realism) novel centered on domestic violence and the ways children create to cope with it. Twelve-year-old Eleanor is trying to protect her seven-year-old sister Mike by inventing the stories of magic - including house magic that fixes broken things that follow heated arguments with their emotionally and physically abusive father as long as they painstakingly follow the rules that their abusive parents lay down - the rules aimed at pacifying the abuser and creating a happy image of this very broken family to the outsiders and authority figures. Except that it turns out that magic is indeed real, and there is a river under Eleanor’s bed that takes the girls to Riverland, where dreams are born, and nightmares are trying to escape into the reality as the borders between dreams and reality crack - partially because in a fit of rage the girls’ father breaks a magical object that used to help maintain the integrity of those borders. It’s up to Eleanor and Mike to find the ways to repair the damage and to uphold the ancient magical agreement.

“I’d never thought about magic as an agreement before. It made an uncomfortable kind of sense. Even a small magic that anyone could do needed someone on each side: someone to cast the spell and someone to believe in it.”

Fran Wilde does a decent job showing the insidious ways Eleanor and Mike’s thinking and perception of the world are altered by living in an abusive family. Her father is mostly emotionally abusive to girls, although there are physical elements as well revealed as the story progresses, and is clearly physically abusive to their mother who has put so much into simulating any kind of normalcy where there is none that she has become quite complicit in the situation, although she still tries to protect the girls somewhat, but yet doles out the blame to them for upsetting the abuser. And you start seeing this habitual violence even in the girls’ interactions with each other, which is heartbreaking.

“What could I ask her? Did you ever battle nightmares? Ever try to keep dreams from leaking through to reality?”

Where things fall apart is the fantasy part of the story. The Riverland on the other side of reality, that you can reach through the river under the bed and escape on the beam of the lighthouse, where dreams are born and nightmares grow and crabs and Heron are battling the evils. It’s interesting and dreamlike and yet constructed with the sloppy fuzziness that does not allow for full immersion in the story. The descriptions are vague, perhaps in an attempt to convey the dreamlike quality, making the scenes, especially the action ones, unclear and constantly interrupted by Eleanor’s internal monologue, leading to a very choppy effect. It’s barely sketched out, simplistic, with no room for subtlety or nuance but enough room for muddily unclear storytelling. I consider myself well-versed in fantasy worlds, but even this did not help make the world of the River more clear. Which is too bad, as its haunted surreal atmosphere was shaping up to be promising.

Perhaps it’s this jarring disconnection with the fantasy world part that left me cold and unengaged. Every time I started to feel like I cared and was getting angry at the very difficult situation the girls were in, the story would jump to the fantasy world and the not-caring annoyance would come over me again. There is supposed to be the sense of urgency here, but I honestly felt more engaged in the real-world bits that addressed the preparation for a boring science fair, which says a lot. The real-world parts and the fantasy-world parts felt like they belonged in different books, with little uniting them, with disparate pacing and stakes and very tenuous connections. The story just lacked cohesiveness and therefore ended up just messy.

2.5 stars.
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Ugh, it’s my third 2-star read in a row. I need to get out of this book rut...
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My Hugo and Nebula Awards Reading Project 2020: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...