Another one for your booklist

 

I was stuck into this book before I knew what had happened to me.  BLOOD MAGIC, by Tessa Gratton.  You pick it up and say hmm, looks interesting, I like that title, that's some creepy, striking cover—and for me anyway, because I've been through it from the other side, there's always a little extra breath-holding for a first novel, is this person going to bring it off?  Am I going to be looking for her next book, and the one after that?  Am I going to need a new dedicated shelf?—now you turn the first few pages.  There's a quote from Richard Selzer, MORTAL LESSONS:  'Thus is the fruit of the earth taken, its flesh torn.  Thus is it given over to standing, toward rot.  It is the principle of corruption, the death of what is, the birth of what is to be.  You are wine.'  I love 'You are wine'.  But maybe Gratton just knows how to choose a good quote.

            Turn the page.  Chapter One is one line:  'I am Josephine Darly, and I intend to live forever.'

            Chapter Two:   'It is impossible to know who you really are until you spend time alone in a cemetery.

            'The headstone was cold against my back. . . . Dusk washed the cemetery of shadows, lending it a quality of between-ness, neither day nor night, but a gray, teary moment.  I sat with my legs crossed and the book in my lap.  Beneath me, scraggly grass hid my parents' graves. . . . The mahogany leather cover was soft and scuffed from years of use . . . Notes on Transformation and Transcendence. . . .  The book had arrived in the mail this afternoon, wrapped in brown paper with no return address.  DRUSILLA KENNICOT was written in plain block letters, like a summoning. . . . It smelled like blood. . . . I closed my eyes and saw a splash of blood streaked across bookshelves.

            'When I opened my eyes again, I was still alone in the cemetery. . . .' 

The book, mysteriously old and old-fashioned, was written by Silla's father, and has been sent to her by someone who describes himself as her father's friend, but Silla has never heard of him.  But what he has written to his friend's daughter is crazy:  'He was a gloriously talented magician and healer.'  Silla thinks:  'why would [the friend] suggest such incredible, ridiculous things . . . he'd only been a high school Latin teacher.'  But she also recognises her dad's handwriting:  ' . . . every page contained lines and lines of perfect writing and meticulous diagrams sprawling like spiderwebs. . . . Dad had made tiny notes at the edges of the pages, written descriptive paragraphs in Latin, and made lists of ingredients.

            'Salt dominated the lists, and recognizable items like ginger, wax, fingernails, mirrors. . . . But there were words I didn't know. . . .

            'And blood.  Every list included a drop of blood.

            'They were magic spells. . . .

            'There had to be a spell I could try. . . .'

I don't have to tell you that there is, right?

            'I pushed the knife against my skin. . . . My whole body shivered.  I was about to find out if magic was real. . . . Quickly I let one, two, three drops of blood fall and splatter. . . . They gathered in the center . . . in a small pool.  I leaned over, staring at the blood as if it could stare right back.  I thought of Dad, of how much I missed him.  I needed this to be real. . . .'

BLOOD MAGIC is told from three different perspectives:  Silla and Nicholas now, and Josephine in the past.  Josephine also discovered she can do blood magic:  'It is like nothing I can say.  No words Capture what it feels like when my dark blood smears against a red ribbon, or leaks into the lines of a rune carved into wood.  The Thrill of the Blood as the magic burned through me, the way it tickles and teases when I am doing other things, begging me to slice my skin open and let it out!'  But Silla is a young woman of the present day, a junior in high school, and an orphan, after her father shot her mother and then himself—as everyone, including Silla's brother Reese, believes, except Silla herself—three months ago as the book opens.  Silla found the bodies—and cut her long hair afterward, because she couldn't bear the memory of the ends of her hair soaked in her parents' blood.  She may believe that she is doing magic, when she cuts herself with a knife;  the school counsellor sees the scabs and scars and is afraid that she's self-harming.

            Nicholas has just moved in next door.  He's from Chicago, and wishes he was still there, and not in the back of beyond in some hick farming village in Missouri.  His grandfather died and left him the property, and Nicholas' father—and loathed stepmother—have decided to move the family there.  Nick has just stomped out of the house, having lost an argument with his stepmother, and wandered off in the dark of the forest, when he finds the cemetery—and the girl.  The girl cutting herself with a knife.  'There was no effing way I'd seen that.  It wasn't possible.  Not here.  Not again.'  Nick has a few secrets of his own:  his mother, his certified-crazy mother, who grew up here, was also into blood. . . .

Tessa Gratton is the third of the Merry Sisters of Fate: http://community.livejournal.com/merry_fates/profile   They post short (eerie, sinister) fiction and hold on-line discussion groups:  'Welcome to Merry Fates. But be careful, we run with scissors.'  The other two sisters are Maggie Stiefvater, whose LAMENT and WOLVES OF MERCY FALLS series(es) are multi-gazillion NYTimes bestsellers, and Brenna Yovanoff, whose first novel, THE REPLACEMENT, made an enormous splash last year.  These are very hard acts to follow, and if I were Tessa I'd probably be hiding in a closet and eating lots and lots of chocolate and making small whimpering noises.  But I loved BLOOD MAGIC;   it's absorbing, it's well-written—it's full of little throw-away lines like 'His lashes curled like birthday ribbons'—it has a climax of blood and fire that scared me silly.  It's totally up to the standard set by Yovanoff and Stiefvater.  Also, you know how I'm always objecting to this or that fashionable literary gimmick?  I don't like alternate POVs.  They piss me off.  They're cheating.  Yeah, well, blah:  They work a treat here.  Rather than making me feel the author just doesn't want to make the effort to get one viewpoint right, I felt I was getting a whole extra layer of the complexity that is life which is what the best stories give you.  The swapping between Nicholas and Silla works especially well at the end when they may have just won out—may—but:  "'We can do it.  We have to."  It was almost over.'  The page following is just these terse little bursts from each of them:  Nicholas:  'The only thing that kept me going was Silla's hand in mine. . . .' Silla:  'Every step meant being closer to destroying the thing that had killed my mother, my father . . .'  Nicholas:  'The forest screamed as it burned. . . .'  Silla:  'A cluster of crows fell from the sky, trailing flames. . . .'  Nicholas:  'We fell to our knees when we returned to the beginning.  As I painted the rune onto a tree, Silla dug at the earth . . . "Be bound! . . . Be forever bound!"  . . . heat exploded. . . . Silla and I were knocked backward. . . .'

            And don't let me forget to tell you that there's really good kissing too.  Soppy moony dragged-out eye-fluttering trash kissing is one of those things that makes me throw books across the room.  This is good kissing.  And when Silla and Nick argue, it's like two real people arguing, not like two characters in a novel where the plot needs a boot forward.

Okay, do you have to read this book?  Yes?  The bad news is the freller doesn't come out till April.  They sent me the ARC over a month ago and I did ask why so soon, but the response is that they're building buzz.  Whatever.  Zzzzzzz.  But mark it on your calendars.  BLOOD MAGIC.  April 2011.