Unraveller

In a country where anyone can cast a curse on one's enemies, Kellen has accidentally become an unraveller of curses. But now he discovers that he himself has become the target of such a curse. Can he unravel his own curse on time?

I adore dark fantasy, and this book reminded me of fairy tales and novels I loved to read when I was growing up, and which made me fall in love with books. I devoured it in record time. I found the characters very accessible and relatable, even though it has to be said that one often has to read between the lines, and they have real emotional and psychological depth. The pace varies, with slower sections that fit the story and aid character development, with the pace picking up when it needs to. The plot is show more imaginative and unpredictable to a degree while still following certain familiar fairy-tale tropes, and there are plenty of twists. From the first page I felt myself being drawn into this world and became completely immersed, to the degree that I resented having to find food and drink and having to spend time with my family because I was itching to get back to the story; I could very happily have read the whole book in one sitting, if my body hadn't protested its need for sustenance, sleep and calls of nature. Simply wonderful. show less

Reading the finalists for the Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book often makes me despair. Does the genre of young adult sf&f have to be so, well, generic? Saying Frances Hardinge "transcends" genre is condescending, but she does refuse to be hemmed in by it, I think. Unraveller is squarely YA, in that it's about young people coming into adulthood and learning to navigate that, but it's not the currently overly common YA narrative of villages getting attacked and people going on quests, which are clearly written by writers who have watched a lot of Avatar: The Last Airbender but not read many actual books. (Though if that's what the market wants, can we blame them?)

Anyway, Unraveller is set in a fantasy world where a sufficiently show more angry person can incubate inside themselves a "curse egg," which then allows them to hit the target of their anger with a curse—usually a thematically appropriate but disproportionate punishment. If, for example (minor spoiler here), you are a boat inspector who goes around fining people for illegal fishing, maybe you get transformed into bait for the hook of a fisherman. One of the two main characters has the talent of "unravelling"; he can follow the threads of a curse and unravel it, which usually required him to emotionally understand the curser and set things right. The other main character is a girl who he uncursed; she was transformed into a bird... and still sometimes finds herself yearning for that way of being.

So, as I am coming to realize is typical of Hardinge, we have an interesting secondary world but also a set of concepts that are thematically rich. No one would ever be tempted to use the term "magic system" to describe this book. There are a lot of really great sequences in this novel, as the two protagonists travel from place to place, unravelling curses, but also slowly realizing that there's a conspiracy they need to unravel too, a plot to leverage the power of cursers in a systematic way. Hardinge is an evocative writer, and her dark landscapes throb with life.

Compared to the previous Hardinge novels I've read, I would rate this below The Lie Tree and A Skinful of Shadows but above Deeplight. Though I liked a lot about this novel, I felt like its ambition somewhat outreached its grasp. There were a rich set of associations here, but by the novel's end, I didn't think they'd totally cohered. The metaphorical associations resonating in Unraveller's conception of cursing didn't pay off in the plot about the conspiracy. In our era of populist leaders leveraging anger to dark purposes, it seemed to me that there was some potential in how the conspirators were taking people's curses and misdirecting their anger to fulfill their own ambitions, but this wasn't really present in the text. I also found the conspiracy plot a bit jerky in the way it unfolded.

But, you know, give me a flawed Frances Hardinge novel over a successful A:TLA ripoff any day. So many of those books are completely forgettable; this book contains images I will remember for a long time. show less

Frances Hardinge's books never cease to impress—she writes immersive, imaginative, darkly fantastical books, for middle grade and young adult readers, though that fact disguises their depth of story and of feeling. While the setting and plots are varied and wondrous, the true focus of her stories is always on the relationships between people, and how the things we do to each other can make all kinds of situations into something beautiful, or something terrible. Unraveller is her best novel since The Lie Tree.

Series Info/Source: This is a stand alone book. I got an eGalley of this book through NetGalley to review.

Thoughts: I liked the idea behind this book but found the story to be a bit slow and didn't engage with the characters very well. This story follows Kellen and Nettle. Kellen can break curses, a unique and useful talent in a land where people can accidentally or maliciously curse each other. Nettle is one of the people Kellen has un-cursed but she is struggling to adjust from when she lived life as a heron (when was cursed into a bird) to now living as a person.

Now, Kellen has been cursed and not only are curses are unraveling around him but everything else too. Him and Nettle get wrapped up in a plot against some rebellious show more cursers and are desperately trying to do what they can to help track down these elusive cursers and also break Kellen's curse.

I really enjoyed the idea of curse eggs and people developing these curse eggs because of intense emotion. I enjoyed the world built here and the idea of the Wilds. This is an excellent concept novel, like so many of Hardinge's novels are.

However, I struggled a bit with the characters and the story. The characters are very much held at a distance here and I didn't really engage with them or care about what happened to them. The plot seems slow at points and gets a bit repetitive with the characters confronting one cursed person after another and trying to solve the mystery of the curse. The book ended fine.

My Summary (4/5): Overall this wasn't my favorite Hardinge book but I liked some of the concepts here and the world-building. I enjoyed her books "Deeplight" and "A Face Like Glass" a lot more than this book. I struggled some with the plot and characters here but I still think it was worth reading because of the way cursing and the Wilds were dealt with. I would tentatively recommend it to those who enjoy a good concept-based fantasy. show less

Another richly imagined world in which people can, under the right circumstances, become “cursers,” capable of destroying others’ lives. Others get different gifts from the Wilds, such as a bond with a marsh horse that requires only the sacrifice of an eye—and a commitment to wildness. A young boy who can unravel curses, with a girl he rescued from being cursed into a bird, lives a peripatetic life trying to save people and then move on. But when they are sucked into an apparent conspiracy to assemble cursers and use them to assert power, they have to go deeper into the meaning of curses and the question of whether cursers can be trusted to walk free. It’s very well done.

A surprisingly strong YA fantasy, rather reminiscent of Alan Garner's writing. I wouldn't mind reading more.

Recommended.

I do not like humans. Your hearts smell of earth and sweat. You miss notes when you sing. You bleed too easily. You walk in with stories tangled around you like briars and do not notice. You trip over everything and break it. You are too real, and it is wasted on you.

Frances Hardinge writes worlds I want to know so so much more about. I might be a little allured by the creatures of the Wilds...
The big reasons I only rated this 3* despite thinking the overarching message is v good are I never quite fully connected to the characters like I wanted to. Kellen and Nettle are wonderful MCs but we were like... simultaneously in their heads and incredibly detached at the same time? It may just be me but. It's a shame. I wanted to love the show more characters but only wound up with a solid liking. The other part of this is Tansy and Ammet... Hardinge drew them and their motivations and hates out v well but it was mildly just an "oh that is kind of unfortunate" moment with their reveals - not quite great betrayals, but they made sense in the end. The big emotional moments came in the last like 15% of the book that was v good. But ye I greatly appreciate the characters and especially the bond between Nettle and Yannick. Also just Nettle in general.
I think my general opinion on this book is that everything makes sense but it's all so weirdly understated... muted. I did see the first two cursers coming from a million miles away tho I think that was very deliberate and obvious.
also I LOVEEE the creatures and the Night Market LIKE. This is so fey but in a different way. I'm obsessed.
HOWEVER I'm going to be so for real the throat-boxes with Gall and Harland's hearts was INSANE I'm going to be thinking about that concept for a while. It's just one of those things that gets burned into my memory bc of how utterly wild it is I love worldbuilding chat show less