Zahrah the Windseeker
Mar. 6th, 2011 12:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
booksofafeatherShort review: A girl named Zahrah is born with mysterious vined hair that tells of a dada (shaman)'s nature in her, but the society around her is fearful of the unknown. The village is surrounded by a forest that everyone fears, but Zahrah is forced to enter it one day, at the same time as struggling with her power as a dada... the power to fly.
Writing: I think I expected this to be less light-hearted and silly feeling... I read in another review that it's trying to be an "African Alice in Wonderland" and it has that feeling. The unusual ideas are really interesting but they're not explored much so often they just seem put there to sound strange... There's a lot of feeling that Zahrah is putting herself through a ritual test but it's made less powerful by the fact that the story feels light-hearted, and the story structure it is based on is a very old one meaning you get a good sense of what will happen.
From a winged person's perspective...: There really aren't any wings, just floating. At the very end, there's a description of her flying, but it may as well have not been in the story at all... the flying is very secondary to the story.
Trigger warnings: Some use of "freak" and name-calling towards the girl for being a shaman, and a general sense of prejudice towards the unknown. But this book is light and unfrightening... even if some bad things happen, the way the story is told makes it feel as if they will easily pass, which is one of its weaknesses.
More thoughts...: If I was reading this as a myth, as a rite-of-passage story, I probably would have liked it a lot. It's very exaggerated which is the quality you need in a story like that. There are some nice philosophies in it, like how Zahrah thinks of all the silly questions that get asked as she comes out of the jungle, "How can they know so much and yet know so little?"
But as a long story I feel that it doesn't come together somehow. There's a difference I think between a fable, where everything is a metaphor, and the point is a message... and a story that might have a message, but the point is to journey along with the characters. I felt like this was the first, but trying to be the second.
There are some interesting thoughts here and there, such as the revelation right at the end that the Windseekers are "plagued by wanderlust". But nothing is really done with it. I think a more interesting story would have been if she had experienced that from the beginning, and her personal challenge to face was the desire to wander, and what she would do, as a wandering shaman in the world apart from her family. That could have been a more mature book I think... thoughtful and wistful... instead it feels like a not that probable heroic tale, of the kind that there are many of, that don't shift between trying to be ritual and trying to be silly in an awkward way. I think that my biggest problem with it was, due to the light-hearted nature, I never felt any sense of awe. In a book about magic and flight, that shouldn't be missing. The treatment of some animals as equal or even smarter than humans was nice, very much avoiding falling into a humancentric trap... but it's not enough to make the story stand out I don't think. :(
It's a shame since I wanted to like this book, I thought it could be a different view on flying and "coming of age" since many of the books I'm reading came from American culture. But I didn't feel it said much I haven't read in other books... I still want to read another of the author's books, Who Fears Death, since I think that would be interesting for me in a different way, but this one is hard to recommend, especially for fliers. I would say two and a half out of five... it isn't offensive, but there is nothing new either.
Writing: I think I expected this to be less light-hearted and silly feeling... I read in another review that it's trying to be an "African Alice in Wonderland" and it has that feeling. The unusual ideas are really interesting but they're not explored much so often they just seem put there to sound strange... There's a lot of feeling that Zahrah is putting herself through a ritual test but it's made less powerful by the fact that the story feels light-hearted, and the story structure it is based on is a very old one meaning you get a good sense of what will happen.
From a winged person's perspective...: There really aren't any wings, just floating. At the very end, there's a description of her flying, but it may as well have not been in the story at all... the flying is very secondary to the story.
Trigger warnings: Some use of "freak" and name-calling towards the girl for being a shaman, and a general sense of prejudice towards the unknown. But this book is light and unfrightening... even if some bad things happen, the way the story is told makes it feel as if they will easily pass, which is one of its weaknesses.
More thoughts...: If I was reading this as a myth, as a rite-of-passage story, I probably would have liked it a lot. It's very exaggerated which is the quality you need in a story like that. There are some nice philosophies in it, like how Zahrah thinks of all the silly questions that get asked as she comes out of the jungle, "How can they know so much and yet know so little?"
But as a long story I feel that it doesn't come together somehow. There's a difference I think between a fable, where everything is a metaphor, and the point is a message... and a story that might have a message, but the point is to journey along with the characters. I felt like this was the first, but trying to be the second.
There are some interesting thoughts here and there, such as the revelation right at the end that the Windseekers are "plagued by wanderlust". But nothing is really done with it. I think a more interesting story would have been if she had experienced that from the beginning, and her personal challenge to face was the desire to wander, and what she would do, as a wandering shaman in the world apart from her family. That could have been a more mature book I think... thoughtful and wistful... instead it feels like a not that probable heroic tale, of the kind that there are many of, that don't shift between trying to be ritual and trying to be silly in an awkward way. I think that my biggest problem with it was, due to the light-hearted nature, I never felt any sense of awe. In a book about magic and flight, that shouldn't be missing. The treatment of some animals as equal or even smarter than humans was nice, very much avoiding falling into a humancentric trap... but it's not enough to make the story stand out I don't think. :(
It's a shame since I wanted to like this book, I thought it could be a different view on flying and "coming of age" since many of the books I'm reading came from American culture. But I didn't feel it said much I haven't read in other books... I still want to read another of the author's books, Who Fears Death, since I think that would be interesting for me in a different way, but this one is hard to recommend, especially for fliers. I would say two and a half out of five... it isn't offensive, but there is nothing new either.
