All the Crooked Saints

Sometimes when I take my dog out at night, there's just something about the moon or the weather or the light that makes me tell the dog "Hurry up, this is ghost weather."

This book has ghost weather. "Well that's no surprise, Twitchy, all the miracles and blackness..." No, I mean beyond that.

Magical realism is a weird and tricky genre for me. I hated Love in the Time of Cholera for other reasons, but its sense of magical realism never struck me as anything past awkward coincidences. I love love love Raven Boys but I would call it fantasy. I think the otherworldly feeling this has even when it isn't being about saints/miracles/blackness is what I'm meant to get from magical realism, that sense of the book's world being both my world and show more also very much not.

I don't know that I'd call this YA, though, just because I'm used to YA characters having teenager YA problems, and these are hardly that.

Maggie Stiefvater's writing style seems to be like mushrooms, or candy corn, or pineapple on pizza: Strong opinions for or against, not a lot of in-betweens. I'm a fan! (also of mushrooms and pineapple, but not candy corn.) If you're familiar with it and want to know if it's in this too, yes, yes it is. If you're not familiar with it, try it out!

Also! If you liked this, but want even darker, maybe try out Zoo City by Lauren Beukes? Like a town of pilgrims described from the POV of the pilgrims. Hanging-on darkness, the magical realism spooky feeling. I kept thinking of it while I was reading this. show less

The members of the Soria family specialize in performing miracles, and pilgrims come to the Colorado desert from all over for their services. Lately, though, those pilgrims haven't been leaving, because they find the *second* miracle - which they must perform themselves to rid themselves of their personal darknesses (made flesh by the first miracle) - is not an easy thing to create. The Sorias themselves fear their own darknesses, and when the younger generation starts breaking the taboo of helping the pilgrims heal themselves, old fears and truths start coming out of the woodwork.

I admit that I didn't fall in love with this one as right-from-the-first-page-immediately as I did with the Raven Boys books, but I got there eventually and I show more do love this story and its characters. Stiefvater is fabulous at what she does (creating amazingly relatable and real characters nestled in a supernatural story that nevertheless seems totally plausible because why not?) and I'll be here for it every time. show less

I swear I could eat up Steifvater's worlds with a spoon, they are so luscious and so satisfying. This time desert renegades with peculiar and problematic miraculous powers. Pirate radio! Fame and family and finding a new way through despite the tragedies of the past. And the imagery -- the baying dog pack, butterflies and rain, the giant and his memorable, obnoxious car. Everywhere miracles, everywhere saints.

Once again, the only YA romance fantasy novels I can enjoy as someone who identifies as aroace, is Maggie Stiefvater's. Because it's not all about romance. This novel is basically like if Disney let Encanto be 4 hours long and fully fleshed out their character's nuances.

There's family bonding, healing from generational trauma, self realization/introspection, with a little sprinkle of romance.

This metaphor-laden young adult fantasy takes place in the small barely-a-town of Bicho Raro in Colorado in 1962 and is centered on the Soria family. All of the Sorias were gifted with the ability to perform miracles, especially the cousins Beatriz and Daniel, who were especially suited to the task: “They were stranger or holier than other people, depending upon whom you asked.”

The Soria cousins - Beatriz, Daniel, and Joaquin, were all very close, and operated a rogue radio station out in the desert. All of them had hopes and fears that obsessed them. Joaquin, 16, who used the D.J. handle “Diablo Diablo,” desperately wanted to be famous, and feared dying unknown. Beatriz, 18, feared emotions, and occupied herself with science show more to avoid feeling anything. Daniel, 19, was “the Saint of Bicho Raro” and was in charge of guiding the pilgrims who came to see them in search of a miracle. But he was afraid his private desires would interfere with the miracle process and hurt his family.

The “miracles” at Bicho Raro always came in twos. The first miracle was making the darkness inside a person visible:

“Over time, the darkness crusts in unpredictable layers, growing at such a pace that one doesn’t notice it has filled every cavern under the skin until movement becomes difficult or even impossible. Darkness never boils over. Darkness remains inside.”

Daniel could somehow draw it out of a person.

The darkness was made flesh, much in the way psychosomatic illnesses can express themselves, except that with the influence of the Sorias, the darkness took on fantastical forms. For example, the head of a lecherous priest turned into that of a coyote. These manifestations represented a puzzle for the pilgrim to solve and move on.

The second miracle, the healing, was up to the pilgrim.

“There was a law laid down among the Sorias to not interfere. If a Soria lifted a hand or breathed a word in aid, a darkness would fall on the Soria as well, and a Saint’s darkness was an even more terrible and powerful thing.”

When Beatriz & Daniel were young, they had discussed it. Beatriz: “I think the darkness is about shame.” Daniel: “I think you’re right.”

As the book begins, Tony DiRisio, also a D.J. like Joaquin, is heading to Bicho Raro looking for a miracle, and he has with him Pete Wyatt, 18, who is not a pilgrim but is heading there as well in search of a job. Still, Pete is not without his own problems; the doctor told him he has a hole in his heart, which he feels not only physically but emotionally: loneliness was “his second language.”

Pete and Beatriz are attracted to one another, and after one memorable night when they danced together, she thinks she finally understands that the process of miracles, with all its illogic, is really love.

Pete, an outsider, is able to discern the dysfunction of the Sorias' vow not to talk to the pilgrims or indeed, even to each other. He suggests to Beatriz there is too much silence among the Sorias:

“There’s an awful lot of things that go on here that don’t get said. A lot of shut doors and closed eyes, just to be on the safe side. Maybe if you want things to change, you should start in yourself.”

Joaquin concurs:

“We smell Marisita’s cooking [Marisita is one of the pilgrims] and we are too afraid to even tell her that it smells delicious! We starve! We starve of - of everything because we are too afraid to eat! Look at us, all standing here, because we’re afraid of them.”

Beatriz comes to understand:

“. . . the Sorias’ real collective darkness was that they would not let themselves help others because they were too afraid of losing themselves, that they were so afraid of being open and true about their own fears and darkness that they put it in a box and refused to even accept that they, too, might need healing. And the longer they blocked it up, the more the pilgrims also blocked up . . . "

Beatriz also comes to realize that her darkness was being afraid to show she had feelings like other people. Pete helps her see the light.

Discussion: Stiefvater has a way of making the mundane miraculous, and the scientific lyrical, as with this meditation by Beatriz on radio waves:

“They travel on perfectly straight paths from their broadcast source, and because the Earth is round, it does not take them long to part ways with the ground and head out to the stars. Wouldn’t we all, if we had the chance?”

And here is how Beatriz thinks about the mere act of moving through the air:

“And now she thought instead about how really she was pushing through a crowded atomic city of invisible chemicals, microorganisms, and waves, the last of them detectable only because she held this magic box [radio] capable of receiving them and spitting them back out for her mortal ears.”

While this book was a bit too metaphorical for my tastes, a book by Stiefvater is always worth reading for the gorgeous flights of prose that intermittently sail through her books and stop you in your tracks.

Evaluation: Interesting and thought-provoking, this fantasy may be too stylistic for the tastes of many Stiefvater fans. But I think Stiefvater is always worth reading. show less

Most people won't like this book. Luckily, I am not most people.

Do you love magic in the every day? Do you love lush prose that you could fall into? Do love books where you can't explain them to anyone else because "nothing happens" even if so much does? Do you love character pieces that bring life into the words on a page? Do you love omnipresent narration that makes it seem like the story is being told to you by your grandmother who knows all? Do you love the bizarre and the magical and the strangely beautiful? If so, then you are also not most people.

The thing about Maggie Stiefvater is that she gets better and better with each book she writes. All the Crooked Saints is not a perfect novel, nor does it pretend to be. Like the title show more suggests, it's skewed: from the characters to the writing to the story itself, you can't help but feel that there is something unbalanced, something not being said that needs to be. And that's okay. It is this imperfect, this "well that doesn't make any sense" that makes the book so charming.

Don't read this book if you are looking for answers, because you won't find anything. Read this book if you are searching for something you can't articulate, something that exists in that place beyond your dreams.

I love this book. I love it with every inch of me. I can't wait to reread and reread and reread, and discover that darkness inside me that I'm not sure if I want to name. If anything, All the Crooked Saints teaches you that that brokenness inside of you can define you, but it doesn't have to. But beyond that, it teaches you that you don't have to deal with it alone. show less

All the Crooked Saints is a lovely homage to magical realist fiction. Set in rural Colorado in the 1950s, this short novel follows a family of "saints" who grant a very interesting variety of miracle. Like all magicians, their powers have limitations, leading to complications when outsiders intrude on their closed world.

In my less kind moments, I sometimes think that Maggie Stiefvater is too good for young adult fiction. (I know, I know, there are plenty of YA authors who excel at style, but I haven't stumbled on nearly enough of them.) The prose in this book is gorgeous; it never overstays its welcome or, in my view, exoticizes its source material. Every page was truly a pleasure.

The story leans on the author's talents for evoking show more rural American life and blending the supernatural and mundane. This book is cozy as heck; the setting was probably my favorite character. It's also a wryly funny book - there are many hijinks, and at least one of them involves a rooster.

Now I should probably atone for my sins and go read some actual magical realist authors, as my knowledge of the genre pretty much begins and ends with Garcia Marquez. Somehow I have never read Like Water For Chocolate... show less