Undine

[lady_schrapnell]

Penni Russon's Undine was nominated for the Cybils, but it came to my attention when emmaco reviewed it and at pretty much the same time Michele recommended and offered to lend it to me. (I managed to forget the offer and ordered it, but am not sorry about that now, as I'm happy to have my own copy!)



Right from the beginning, with 16-year-old Undine getting ready for school on a Tuesday ("Tuesdays were just badly designed, she thought crossly...") in her odd house ("No-Man's Land) between two streets in Hobart, Australia, where she lives with her unconventional mother Lou and almost 3-year-old brother Jasper, I knew I was going to like the domestic part of this fantasy a lot. And I did. Her family is likable and interesting and the back-story of Undine and Lou having to readjust and cope with the death of Jasper's father convincingly done. And when we meet the boy-next-door, Trout, with his slightly disapproving mother and more laid-back and understanding father, it got even better. (And his brothers, a bit later, and friends.) Good characters, all. I thought the perspective shifts between Undine and Trout work well too, covering that tricky situation of best friends with just one of the two in love with the other.

There's nice tension with the fantasy element, as Undine knows that her feeling she's being called ('Undine, Undine, it's time to come home....') isn't just craziness, but has no idea how to deal with it or what it's about. And when she finally starts to realise just what the call signifies, and that she really does have some kind of supernatural power, Trout witnesses it and has to believe it too. This is another nice feature of the book, as it's possibly more common to have nobody know (and therefore believe) in the magical power the protagonist is discovering, or to have only someone else who shares the power know of it. I really liked the way Trout went off researching on the internet, and found some pretty interesting things about 'Chaos Magic', which combined science and magic in a satisfying way.

If it sounds as if this might be a fairly smooth ride for Undine, discovering cool new powers with her best friend along to help her out - it's anything but. Lou becomes inexplicably angry with her; she and Trout have a major falling out; she discovers her father hadn't really died before she was born; she's conflicted about who she likes (romantically) and how to deal with that along with everything else. And the switches between her perspective and Trout's act to increase the reader's tension - this story could go from bumpy adjustment to flat-out tragedy in a really short space of time.

Like Emma, I felt very much that Undine reminded me of other books, though, also like her, I didn't feel it was derivative. The particular combination of domestic teen story and fantasy was very evocative of Margaret Mahy, and I was actually thinking you could put a lot of the plot together with judicious adding and subtracting between Changeover and Catalogue of the Universe. And I could see Charles Butler's Calypso Dreaming too - though perhaps even more the increasing sense of impending doom reminded me of Timon's Tide.

Those who haven't read Undine yet should probably stop here, as I'm going to talk about a not-very-shocking spoiler, and you may not want to know. Until you've read the book.

Minor

Spoilers

For

Undine

But

Not

For

Changeover

I'm sure I'm not the only reader to have guessed that it wasn't Prospero but Lou who had handed down the magical powers to Undine, and I thought that was a really interesting part of the story. Lou had made two big mistakes - in telling Undine that her father was dead and in getting angry when her power started appearing, instead of helping her cope with everything. And then she'd made that choice for herself which seemed potentially harmful: to hide her powers rather than use them. I especially liked that she wasn't perfect, but neither was she just a useless mother (or person), and the same ended up being true of Prospero. And this combination was in fact something I actually liked more about this book than about Mahy's (though I know nobody else is likely to agree with me!). I always felt a bit of a disappointment that Laura's mother just had to be shut out of this huge part of Laura's life and couldn't even be allowed see it from a cheering-from-the-sidelines perspective. So the adult women in Changeover were either powerful (i.e. magical) or good mothers, but not both. And I certainly thought the mother in Catalogue of the Universe was far, far more interesting than the heroine, whose name I can't remember atm. But this - it has been argued - is because I'm reading the books from the wrong perspective! Anyway, I'll be very interested to see how Undine manages to deal with her clearly dangerous powers. And to see how Lou develops at the same time.... It seems that there's a lot of potential for more great story in the next books.


I've ordered Breathe already, and hope there won't be too long to wait for the third book as well.