Customer Reviews

Racing the Dark

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I just finished this book and can't wait for the next one. I usually don't read this type of fiction, but my teen daughter read it and loved it so much I had to read it. It's refreshing to see a coming of age book about a girl that's filled with adventure and danger. The main character is smart, resourceful, and driven by her love and commitment to her family.

"Racing the Dark" is a haunting, fascinating novel that has you hooked with the opening scene and leaves you begging for the next installment in the trilogy. Parts of the book are reminiscent of Ursula Leguin's "Wizard of Earthsea" but as ever, Alaya twists words and traditional fantasy in completely new directions (if you have not read her short story "Third Day Lights" which can be found in "The Year's Best Science Fiction #11" or her novella "Shard of Glass" in "The Year's Best Fantasy #6" you should). "Racing the Dark" is an excellent start to what I'm sure will be a long and fruitful literary career.

Teenage Lana lives on the island earning a living diving in fresh water to take jewels from mandagah fish. When Lana goes through the rite of adulthood ceremony, she finds a special blood-red jewel that she hides from her family and the village elders. She knows the gem means she is someone with power, but she does not want to become an elder as those who obtain special jewels become; elders have no independence as their life is filled with responsibilities for others.

Six months after she hid the jewel, the village cash crop, the mandagah fish are dying out caused by changes to their watery environs. Lana's family wants to relocate to another island, but have no means to pay neither the transportation nor settling. To do so Lana obtains an apprenticeship with a strange "exiled" witch the sorceress Akua, who uses blood sacrifice to fuel her spells. As Lana learns how to cast spells, she must sacrifice something of personal value to cast her incantations. When she is tricked into sacrificing her beloved mother, Lanai knows she cannot; she must find someway to save her mother's life, which means using even more ancient forbidden dark magic.

This is a terrific coming of age fantasy thriller starring a thirteen years old girl whose rite of passage into adulthood takes a dark turn when she finds the special blood gem. Readers will feel they have entered Johnson's Island (not the military base in the Pacific) realm as the geography and climate come across rather influentially and powerfully. However, the island culture beyond the gem economy and government never fully seems developed although in fairness the gems are the heart of society. Still filled with twists especially the key Twilight Zone spin, young adults will enjoy RACING THE DARK alongside of Lana, who would do anything for her beloved mother as witnessed by her sacrificing her soul to apprentice to the blood witch.

Harriet Klausner

The real strength here is Johnson's images. The setting details are richly realized and beautiful. At times, I could almost forget the plot and characters and flow from image to image, each one stunning, strange and colorful.

In a way, the intense, sometimes disjunctive vividness of the images was enhanced by some of the expositional and structural oddities. I find myself thinking of the novel in retrospect as if it were a dream -- one filled with rich detail, saturated emotions, and weird leaps in time and place. Just as in a dream, I knew what I was seeing and what I felt about it. But just as in a dream, the connections between images didn't always make sense. Sometimes things that I should have seen dropped away into nothing, and sometimes things didn't make sense as they happened, but only after I rationalized them.

Despite the novel's faults, the greatest strength of Racing the Dark is that it's a fun read, full of energy and vivacity. I finished this book the same night I picked it up and then my husband did the same a few days later. Lana is not complexly characterized, but she's easy to identify with. The prose makes it simple to imagine oneself in her position, toying with magic, falling in love with spirits, flying across the sky, playing a tune for death on a flute made of bone. Lana's adventures are always interesting, and so Racing the Dark is always enjoyable.

This is my second experience with Johnson's work, the first being "Moonshine" which I felt was fun, but pretty typical of what is being written in the urban fantasy genre right now. It didn't really make Johnson stand out as a writer. "Racing the Dark," a book she actually wrote before "Moonshine," does make Johnson stand out as a young, but mature, writer. Just about everything in "Racing the Dark"seemed more developed: the island culture world seems large and diverse, the magic/elemental systems are interesting, the characters seemed to be more than genre types, the issues that the characters have to deal with--both in light hearted matters and harder material-- seem more thought out, and the character's reactions to them more natural. People have to make hard choices, and sometimes they make selfish decisions, and sometimes they make selfless decisions, but all the decisions have consequences.
There are some things that I feel could still use a little work: while the sentences are more clear than in "Moonshine" every now and then Johnson will pick words that don't quite seem to fit the description she's after. Once, when talking about a character diving, it is phrased something like `he tumbled into a graceful dive.' Having done a fair bit of swimming, `tumbled' is not a word that I would use to described what is supposed to be an impressive dive. The black angel issue worries me a little too, if only because it limits the protagonist so much both in what she can physically do, and because it always seems to cause one reaction to the people around her, making her traveling to a new place get slightly repetitive and dull. There also seems to be the set up for a love triangle, which I am tired of.
However, despite those issues, Johnson's strengths seem to lay in this series, and she has crafted a book that has made me interested, instead of indifferent, about reading the next one, and finding out what happens next.

Lana is a jewel diver in the outer islands, near the mysterious Death Shrine. When her island suffers a catastrophe, she and her mother are forced to go to the colder inner islands, where Lana is apprenticed to a mysterious witch who may or may not mean her or others well. Racing The Dark is a fantastic first novel, following Lana across many islands and finally on a dangerous trip to the former shrine of the escaped wind spirit, where she suffers a cataclysmic transformation. There are a few other point of view characters, whose lives intersect with Lana's in various ways as she tries to save her mother's life. The author has Ursula K Le Guin's gift for creating both Western-like cultures and other cultures; the setting is unique and the magic system is different and interesting, being entirely based on binding spirits through self-sacrifice (or that of others). I am very picky about what I read but the writing is good and the setting and plot drew me in and I finished the book in a few days. The best comparison I can make is Le Guin, except that sometimes her novels are, not quite slow, but contemplative, and this novel is not.

The other reviews are accurate as they go, but they all seem to make it sound as if this is appropriate young adult/young teen reading. Although the main character is a 13 year old girl, there are some graphic scenes, including the mother prostituting herself in order to raise money for medicine for her daughter (coughing up blood from working over lye vats); this is clearly described, including the sexual encounters. An odd choice on the author's part, and something some parents or readers might find very off-putting.