I preordered my copy of The Land of Yesterday months ago and have finally received and read it. My response was mixed at first, but ultimately I love this book.
I am a 50-year-old man, and because of this, have forgotten what it is like to be a 8-12 year-old kid. I am also a writer, and tend towards scientific nonfiction and "great" literature. Therefore I was not sure about Lo'Y when I started reading it. It seemed like the writing was not nuanced and the thoughts were pieced together a little too easily, telling everything instead of letting the reader put the pieces together. Some of the characters have long preambles, introductions that are front-loaded for us instead of allowing them to be discovered over time. Maybe this is a Middle Years Fiction thing, but I felt like characters, places and situations were being labeled for easy mental placement and I started to wonder if this book would ever allow me to suspend disbelief and ride along without a tour guide telling me what everything meant, who exactly everybody is, and what everything does. "One reviewer called it awkward world-building." I have to agree a little, though the visual imagery is gorgeous, haunting and otherworldly from beginning to end. Everything from the house to the wonderful hair to the endless seas of daisies made for some really nice imaginative moments that have stayed with me long after reading.
Anyway, as I read on, the story gathered gravity and the world achieved coherence. I realized that beneath this frail and wobbly paper ship made for an eight to twelve year-old was a strongly-beating heart with a message beyond mere imagination. I felt the true emotional message coming through, and at the same time I felt the the universe of this book cohering into a real place with things to show all of us, even a 50 year-old man. Especially a 50-year old man.
The unrelenting pain and remorse of the different characters was very affecting as they grappled with the loss that they experienced, as well as their heart-wrenching guilt over what they did to help make terrible things happen, or what they could have or should have done or not done to keep terrible things from happening. Anybody who has actually grieved, and who has watched family twist itself into knots to try to assimilate, justify or even deny what has happened will feel this acutely. Finally, the way in which the true nature of each of the characters (including the poor house) is revealed and forms the basis for each of them to find redemption and to find each other again is magical and made my heart feel good even long after the reading.
I am also glad that this book about loss, and about dealing with death, guilt, recrimination and redemption does not avoid the difficult issues by simply plucking the poor departed soul back from death and making everything right again. The creation of a magical world does not mean that everybody is right as rain, returned to their full health at the end. There is pain and loss in magical worlds, too. There is no victory over death, only over grief, and even then, only over grief's power to turn us away from each other and from our true selves. The victory is for Cecelia to find her true self and understand the power of her own feelings and her own love and her own actions, and for her family to show their intense and honest love for each other in a way that acknowledges the pain but also brings them back to each other. Cecelia's love in the face of emotions from her loved ones that she did not recognize or understand proved to be their collective salvation and I can't think of a better lesson about loss for young people or old.
What I also found really charming about The Land of Yesterday is that despite so much of the world and the plot and the characters' motivations being laid out for us so explicitly, many other quirky aspects that are entirely "otherworldly," like house spirits and the grasping and emotive hair of Cecelia and her mother having lives of their own, are given as fact without any explanation at all. I love this. In some ways, that is the power of this world and of this book. It just is, and once I was done with the book, I believed that too. I maintain a relationship with these characters to this day.
I will look forward eagerly to another dispatch from the Land of Yesterday. I am a faithful reader an I can't wait to watch
more of Cecelia's adventures.
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Top reviews from the United States
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Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 22, 2018
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 7, 2019
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 2, 2018
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 2, 2018
Top reviews from other countries
Nick Tomlinson
A deep and dreamlike journey to a land of lost souls
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on September 18, 2018
Nick Tomlinson
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on September 18, 2018
Also featured: a kidnapped (dadnapped?) father, a mad sentient house, sentient hair!, gnomes in hot air balloons, a sea of daisies, people turning to paper, a planet of nightmares, a cameo by the Little Prince himself (St Exupery too)... It's not your standard middle-grade world-building. A bizarre but satisfying dream logic guides the non-stop dirigible-ride of a plot, and the sheer strangeness of it all allows the author to maintain a sense of enchantment while tackling weighty topics - death, abject guilt, grief - head on. (As you see from the author's note at the end, she's been there herself.)
Re. the book's treatment of the theme of coping with loss: no quick fixes are offered. Learning to carry your departed loved ones as part of you, living in the now instead of remaining lost in yesterday - these aren't easy palliatives; they're states of being we have to fight for, not least because how we deal with those we've lost has a profound effect on how we deal with those we haven't.
It's tempting to call it an intertextual Easter-egg hunt, given the volume of literary references. But the literary refs are more than just fandangles. You don't find them lying on the ground; often they ARE the ground. Sometimes the characters themselves are straight out of literature. You'll want to go and read/re-read The Little Prince, Lewis Carroll's Phantasmagoria, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader etc. etc. and ponder the relationships between those books and K.A. Reynolds' cosmos. Will definitely be re-reading this one, I'm guessing more than once.
Gorgeous artwork by Helen Musselwhite and Jensine Eckwall.
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S. Green
Poignant, whimsical, and beautiful
Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on August 5, 2018
