Spirited and Exciting

filled star filled star filled star filled star star unfilled
themushroomforest Avatar

By

When Clementine's big day arrives, she is both excited and terrified. She has been waiting for years to become a Sundown Girl, one of the elite girls at the Green River Welcome House. Although she will have to spend her nights entertaining rich brags and doing whatever they choose, she will also be freed from her cooking and cleaning responsibilities, be given a luxurious bedroom and a wardrobe of fine dresses. The best part however, is that she will be closer to her sister Aster, who has been a Sundown Girl for a year.
When the night comes, Clementine tries her best to fulfil her duty, but when her Lucky Night takes a turn for the worst, her instincts kick in, causing her to make a big mistake.
Forced to make a run for it, Clementine and Aster find themselves with a group of girls ready to do what it takes to fight their way to freedom.

This book is set in a very special and well thought out world. Something akin to the American wild west mixed with a Victorian penny dreadful, the land of Arketta is both uncivilised and tightly regulated. Half the population don't have shadows due to an ancient debt, and ghostly apparitions haunt the woods. Miners spend their lives digging for mystical theomite, and poor families sell their daughters to Welcome Houses to pay off their debts.

This is a story of the fight for freedom; freedom from the law, freedom from the past, freedom from inner demons. These women are downtrodden from their lives of oppression and slavery, but each has a flame of rebellion and hope to carry them forward on their journey to a second chance at life.
Revenge also plays heavily into the theme of this book, as the girls find themselves in a position of power, in which they can take back some of what was taken from them. I am on board with the narrative as far as that goes, but when they choose to hurt because they have been hurt, and do to others what has been done to them, “because it's their turn”, their actions start to get iffy for me, and I found myself questioning what the author was trying to say. I understand fighting back may be a stage that each person must pass through on their way to wholeness, but as a standpoint it makes me uncomfortable. What was done to them was clearly wrong, and the way to fix that is not to do wrong to others. Of course this story is about people who are freshly out of their abusive situation, and so I wouldn't expect them to be thinking clearly about how to fix the world, or even who they want to be. As far as the narrative goes, I ended up agreeing that this pathway was believable and worth exploring.

By the end I was very into this story, and read through it very quickly. The events didn't always twist in the way I expected them to, and I do love a book that surprises me. However, there was still something a little bit lacking in terms of how fleshed out this book was, only I can't quite put my finger on what. It took some time to get into, and I think it may have lacked some sensory descriptions. I never quite felt like I was there like I do with my favourite books.

Overall, this book was fantastically adventurous, and phenomenally feminist. The setting was exciting and absorbing, and the characters were complex and believable. I would recommend this book to fans of Samantha Shannon's Bone Season series and Wynonna Earp.