Trickster Drift - Eden Robinson
In brief: Jared Martin has his life together enough to move in with his aunt and start upgrading for college. Unfortunately, that’s when his mom’s sociopathic ex turns up, and a bunch of other relatives, and also the apartment’s haunted? Second in a trilogy.
Full disclosure: This was a reading copy which I received through work, with the expectation that I would like it enough to review it and then recommend it once it came in. This book isn’t out until October 2, 2018. (Almost timed it right!)
Thoughts: While I didn’t like this as much as the first one, I think it’s my usual sequel/middle-of-a-trilogy problem more than anything. You know, how the second book isn’t nearly as shiny because you know how the writer and world operate now? How the second in a trilogy often picks up in the middle and ends in the middle and doesn’t quite give you resolution? Yeah.
The writing’s about the same, from what I remember, though the story’s less raw because Jared’s gotten away from the substance abuse and dysfunctional home life that made it so. He’s still a jerk, still unlearning things, still messed up by his childhood and confused in a believably seventeen-year-old way and not dealing very well with the whole magic thing at all—so there’s plenty of mouthing off and doing dumb things and moments when he slips back into old patterns. I enjoyed how much he’d grown since the first book, and watching him grow more in this one, but that gut-wrenching “oh gods no what happens now” feeling I remember from Son of a Trickster wasn’t there.
There’s more humour, too, mostly in the form of absolutely wacky characters. A dance instructor who used to babysit him, a five-year-old with a fixation on Frozen and her cheeky ghostly follower, the twin gamers who show up anywhere there’s free food, his highly intense writer-activist aunt, and more…. Watching them all bounce off Jared, and each other, was wonderful, and I hope some of them come back because they were fun.
The story’s very subtle, though, which I never deal with well while I’m in the thick of it. Like, for most of it, all I saw was Jared going about daily life and helping people and going to school and freaking out over ghosts, with brief moments of “look, there’s a problem here,” and some of the magical stuff near the end was very sudden for me. But like with Son of a Trickster, once I got to the end and looked back, things gelled. To sum up: Robinson is essentially updating Heiltsuk mythology for the 21st century, specifically the Raven cycle, but not playing by Western literary rules to do so. I think I’m missing a lot of the details of what exactly she’s doing because I’m white and largely familiar with other Raven traditions (mostly Haida), but I still think what she’s doing is cool.
And then the climax happened and Robinson doubled down on the magical everything. Shit got real. Fast. And bad. I’m going to have to read the third book just to be sure Jared’s okay in the end.
So … I don’t know if I can rec this book specifically, because it starts too much in the middle of everything and it left me just a bit too ambivalent, but I did like it and I certainly recommend the trilogy.
Warnings: Stalking. Addiction, drug use, and alcoholism. Depression. Mentions of self-harm and residential schools. Seriously terrible driving. Awkward moments with professors.
