2016 read #87: The Radiant Road by Katherine Catmull.

The Radiant Road by Katherine Catmull
356 pages
Published 2016
Read from November 15 to November 16
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

The first couple years I maintained this review blog, I had something of a fixation for novels of Faery. I was still new to fantasy in those days, having discovered how dreary and repetitive modern sci-fi can be after a lifelong allegiance to that genre, and something about a well-done Faery tale hit the right nerves -- for a while. Nowadays I can't even remember the last Faery novel I finished, let alone the last one that really stood out and stuck to me. (An archive search suggests Drink Down the Moon or, possibly, The Book of Atrix Wolfe for the former, possibly as far back as War for the Oaks for the latter.) I can't even list all the Faery novels I began and abandoned only partway in the last couple years; I've reached the point where another solitary, bookish girl stumbling between the worlds has lost any sense of freshness or enchantment.

Catmull's Summer and Bird was a wondrous and strange fairy tale (not, please note, Faery novel), and I was excited to read more of her output -- that was my sole motivation to keep reading after the sustained meh of Road's opening pages, with its condescending, omniscient narrator and constant second-person asides: "Or the Halloween feeling -- you must know that one -- the feeling of dead leaves and chill and early dark..." Even though Road's POV character is older than her counterpart in Summer, Catmull appears to have had a much younger audience in mind. With juvenile fiction, there's always a risk that an author will talk down to their audience, which is aggravating to read as an adult (and probably aggravates its intended audience as well, though I for one never read YA when I was young), and in those first few pages, I worried what kind of slog I'd be in for.

I'm glad I persevered, however. While The Radiant Road doesn't produce any staggering or delightful new addition to Faery lore (I'm doubtful, at this point, that anything new remains to be done with Faery), Catmull spins out a worthwhile and enjoyable sojourn in its halls. Her imagery here doesn't approach the vividness and creativity it displayed in Summer, but glimpses of that talent do emerge: to a much lesser degree, Catmull here does for trees what Summer did for birds, elevating them into the lexicon of fantastic imagery.