A Telling of Stars
by Caitlin Sweet
(Penguin, CAN$24, 326 pages, trade paperback; published in January
2003.)
A Telling of Stars is a coming-of-age quest,  the
most overdone cliché in fantasy fiction. Caitlin Sweet adorns
it with some decorative touches -- and I kept yearning for those touches
to develop into something more: some obsession to sink my teeth into,
a spectacular moment of revelation that would leave me gasping in awe,
a metaphoric resonance that would make me think. But the exotic details
never gained more significance than mere ornamentation.
Jaele loves to play with her little brother, re-enacting historical
battles against the Sea Raiders. Her games become less fun when she
witnesses the murder of her family by the aforementioned Sea Raiders.
She then embarks on a picaresque journey, on which she will eventually
re-encounter a mysterious boy she had met years before.
Most of A Telling of Stars is swathed in portentous sentences.
Sweet trusts neither her story to convey its own worth nor her readers
to get it. Peppered throughout are vague pseudo-poetic adjectives and
adverbs that try too hard to communicate a sense of the fantastic and
of drama while failing to capture the otherness of Sweet's nevertheless
intriguing fictional world. We want to feel her world and experience
it, but the self-conscious language acts as a veil.
The dialogue throughout is stiff and wooden, as if, again, the characters
were all too aware of the importance of their pronouncements. No-one
simply talks.
Like so much commercial fantasy, A Telling of Stars sits uncomfortably
between the worlds of adult and children's fiction. It struggles to
find a tone that will, on the one hand, be consistent with its stereotypical
YA plot structure while, on the other, be convincing as adult fiction.
This self-important and affected novel fails either way.
Originally published
in The Montreal Gazette, Saturday, 15 February 2003.
Claude Lalumière's Fantastic Fiction
is a series of
capsule reviews first published in the Saturday Books
section of The Montreal Gazette.
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