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Child Of A Rainless Year by Jane Lindskold
01/11/2005 . Source: Jennifer Howell 
pub: TOR. 303 page enlarged paperback. Price: $14.95 (US), $19.95 (CAN). ISBN: 0-765-31513-0. Buy from Amazon US - Buy from Amazon UK
nb: US titles may only be available from Amazon US, and UK titles from Amazon UK. check out website: www.tor.com and www.janelindskold.com
Jane Lindskold's latest novel is a curious book in many ways. A standalone fantasy and somewhat subtle on the fantasy, it also dares to have a protagonist be a single woman in her fifties. Not the usual, then, in genre terms, but for the most part an elegantly, cosy and yet unsettling walk on the slightly less wild side. It's not perfect, but it is completely unique in its way.
Mira Fenn, ostensibly a perfectly normal, middle-aged Ohio art teacher, harbours the secret of a oddly unconventional childhood. Before she was adopted by her adoring foster parents, Mira lived in Las Vegas, New Mexico, in a house full of mirrors and haunted by silent female servants ruled by her egotistical mother, the flamboyantly beautiful Colette Bogatyr.
Colette's mysterious disappearance when Mira was ten heralds the end of a life of handmade silk dresses and her strangely colourless New Mexico existence in Phineas House. Moved to Ohio and a somewhat normal life, Mira discovers her talent for art and her odd childhood starts to recede into a dim and distant memory.
It takes the accidental death of her adoptive parents when she is 50 for Mira to consider returning to New Mexico. Phineas House is almost just as she left it, retro-kitchen appliances (perfect for flogging on Ebay as it turns out) and all. The silent serving women are gone but Domingo, the charming caretaker, has been keeping the house in perfect working order, when he wasn't painting the exterior in rainbow colours. As Mira settles down to wake the house from forty years of silence, strange things start happening but, then, Las Vegas, New Mexico is a strange kind of place...
There's an odd languor pervading most of this book. Great stretches when nothing much happens except Mira pottering around her new/old house and mildly wondering when the next weird thing will happen as she reads her adoptive mother's old diaries about her own efforts to find Colette. It's slow, leisurely and yet strangely beguiling as the mystery of who or what Colette really was gradually deepens and Phineas House starts to come back to life - almost literally. Every chapter is preceded by quotes about colour, mirrors, architecture, kaleidoscopes and local history. You get as much an impression of Lindskold research in writing the book as you do of the actual story, creating a curiously transparent suspension of disbelief.
What we also get, of course, is a distinct impression that Lindskold has done her homework and wants to show it. So guided tours around Las Vegas, side trips to Santa Fe and Montezuma's Castle and enough local colour to make it obvious that it's the place as much as the story that the author is trying to tell.
Fortunately, the vast majority of the story is a slyly entertaining wander through a plot full of distinctive colour. It always takes the scenic, picaresque route and there's usually enough of interest to hold the attention while the mystery of Colette, of Phineas House, and even of Las Vegas itself, let alone an original magic system that doesn't even begin to get fully explored. It's only when the story starts to wind down to its inevitable conclusion that it begins to unravel. Personally, I don't think the final few twists were nearly as satisfying as the preceding set up, which leaves it feeling somewhat rushed and hollow.
There aren't many books as relaxed about their plotting and protagonist as this, though, however far it starts delving into nonsense towards the finale. It's worth reading for the infectious enthusiasm that Lindskold clearly had for the whole project and, hey, you get a whole lot of non-fiction Las Vegas tour-guiding thrown in for the bargain. Recommended, just so long you leave your suspension of disbelief behind somewhere before the last chapter...!
Jennifer Howell
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