A review by spiderwitch
Riddance: Or the Sybil Joines Vocational School for Ghost Speakers & Hearing-Mouth Children by Shelley Jackson
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
1.5
Riddance revolves around a strange school in which children with stutters are trained to become spirit mediums. (Stutterers are particularly suited for the task, as their difficulty speaking in their own voices provides space for the dead to speak through them.) In particular, it recounts the life stories of Sybil Joines, a white woman who founded the school in the late 1800s and serves as its headmistress, and Jane Grandison, a mixed-race student who becomes the Headmistress's amanuensis and aspires to one day succeed her in running the school. Along the way, it provides lengthy disquisitions on the nature and purpose of language.
In theory, it seems that the Headmistress and Grandison are supposed to share the role of protagonist. In practice, it is much more Sybil's story than Grandison's -- even if their life stories are given equal page time (I didn't count), the inclusion of Sybil's correspondence and transcripts of her journeys through the Land of the Dead give her more focus. She also seems a more central figure, narratively, than Grandison. In particular, it is established through a frame narrative by a modern scholar researching the school that every successive headmistress is Sybil; that is, their job is to channel Sybil so that she may continue running the school after her death. Thus, Grandison's ambition (which she does, ultimately, achieve) is to abnegate her own identity to become a vessel for Sybil.
In Grandison's narrative, she explicitly raises several questions about race in the context of spirit-channeling that the novel then immediately drops and never returns to. Why, she asks, are all the spirits channeled by Sybil and her students white people who are fluent English-speakers? The reader will never know, as the issue is not explored -- simply mentioned and then forgotten. What, she wonders briefly, does it mean for her as a mixed-race person to become the headmistress and allow a white woman to speak through her? Is the opportunity for a position of authority worth that cost? This issue, too, is never mentioned again, and the reader is not privy to the thought processes that lead her to go through with it in the end.
In addition, for a novel that purports to be about language, it seems to have very little understanding of linguistics. Of course, it is possible to talk about language in a literary sense without delving into linguistics, but the problem is that the novel does attempt to get into topics such as grammars and writing systems, and when it does, the lack of research is evident. For example, the Headmistress at one point creates a writing system for English based on drawings of the mouth and tongue positions required to make a given sound. This is described as resulting in twenty-six characters, one for each letter of the alphabet. The problem is that sounds (or, in linguistics terms, phonemes) in English don't correspond neatly to the alphabet at all -- standard American English has thirty-eight to forty different phonemes. And I'm sorry, but if you don't know the difference between a phoneme and a grapheme, I am not interested in anything you have to say about writing systems. This is basic stuff.
Ultimately, despite an intriguing concept, Riddance fell flat on several counts, and I felt its halfhearted attempts to address racial issues were almost worse than not mentioning them at all.
In theory, it seems that the Headmistress and Grandison are supposed to share the role of protagonist. In practice, it is much more Sybil's story than Grandison's -- even if their life stories are given equal page time (I didn't count), the inclusion of Sybil's correspondence and transcripts of her journeys through the Land of the Dead give her more focus. She also seems a more central figure, narratively, than Grandison. In particular, it is established through a frame narrative by a modern scholar researching the school that every successive headmistress is Sybil; that is, their job is to channel Sybil so that she may continue running the school after her death. Thus, Grandison's ambition (which she does, ultimately, achieve) is to abnegate her own identity to become a vessel for Sybil.
In Grandison's narrative, she explicitly raises several questions about race in the context of spirit-channeling that the novel then immediately drops and never returns to. Why, she asks, are all the spirits channeled by Sybil and her students white people who are fluent English-speakers? The reader will never know, as the issue is not explored -- simply mentioned and then forgotten. What, she wonders briefly, does it mean for her as a mixed-race person to become the headmistress and allow a white woman to speak through her? Is the opportunity for a position of authority worth that cost? This issue, too, is never mentioned again, and the reader is not privy to the thought processes that lead her to go through with it in the end.
In addition, for a novel that purports to be about language, it seems to have very little understanding of linguistics. Of course, it is possible to talk about language in a literary sense without delving into linguistics, but the problem is that the novel does attempt to get into topics such as grammars and writing systems, and when it does, the lack of research is evident. For example, the Headmistress at one point creates a writing system for English based on drawings of the mouth and tongue positions required to make a given sound. This is described as resulting in twenty-six characters, one for each letter of the alphabet. The problem is that sounds (or, in linguistics terms, phonemes) in English don't correspond neatly to the alphabet at all -- standard American English has thirty-eight to forty different phonemes. And I'm sorry, but if you don't know the difference between a phoneme and a grapheme, I am not interested in anything you have to say about writing systems. This is basic stuff.
Ultimately, despite an intriguing concept, Riddance fell flat on several counts, and I felt its halfhearted attempts to address racial issues were almost worse than not mentioning them at all.