Magic women lead in Minnesota author Barnhill’s story collection
Gentle readers, if you like your fantasy fiction female powered, with a Minnesota accent, may I introduce you to Kelly Barnhill?
Your children may have already known her; Barnhill’s previous books include “The Girl Who Drank the Moon,” which won the Newbery Medal for children’s literature in 2017.
Now Barnhill has magicked into being a collection for adults, “Dreadful Young Ladies and Other Stories.” She will speak here Thursday at Lynden Sculpture Garden as part of the Women’s Speaker Series.
I am not kidding about the Minnesota accent. Two stories have Sorensens, and hot dishes are mentioned. These occasional regional grace notes add a homey touch to Barnhill’s vivid fairy tales, which often turn on the extraordinary power of women.
In two stories, a clergyman has loving eyes for a woman who commands nature and the attention of animals around her, to the chagrin of regressive forces. Every man desires the attractive widow in the delightful “Mrs. Sorensen and the Sasquatch,” but she has rekindled romance with someone hairier. Quicker than most of his flock, the priest arrives at the Mirandan conclusion that love is love is love, and the comedy moves to a climax that is positively Franciscan.
I think Jorge Luis Borges would have liked “Elegy to Gabrielle — Patron Saint of Healers, Whores, and Righteous Thieves,” with its formally satisfying frame story. In this 17th-century tale, a healing woman and a pirate captain help each other, but also wage a turf war for control of her daughter, Gabrielle. Gabrielle becomes the next pirate captain, a Robin Hood who torments the Governor by stealing tax gold and freeing the occupants of slave ships.
Women with special powers and strong wills are often dubbed witches. Barnhill portrays several of them in the title story, including Margaret, who has a touch of Wednesday Addams about her; and Estelle, who gets more out of her lizard brain that most people do.
In “Notes on the Untimely Death of Ronia Drake,” a witch tells a girl who yearns for power: “It is neither good nor bad. It is itself, but can extend our goodness or badness, our foolishness or our intelligence. It’s difficult to use. It has consequences. It is not a toy for children.” Of course, if the child listened to that sound advice, it would be a much shorter story. “Ronia Drake” and several other tales in this collection fall into the zone of weird fiction, as anatomized by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer, a blend of fantasy and horror and the uncanny, a suggestion that another reality is penetrating our quotidian one.
This book’s culminating novella, “The Unlicensed Magician,” won the World Fantasy Award in 2016. Like some other stories here, it pits a girl with miraculous powers against a controlling authority — the Minister. This Herod figure commandeers the magic babies born every 25 years under the aegis of a comet, draining their powers dry to keep himself youthful and strong. Only Sparrow, the junk dealer’s daughter, has escaped his cordon.
Sparrow’s magic (her love, really) is so powerful it not only wills her beloved chicken Midge back to life, it duplicates her, until the egg woman’s yard has more than 100 identical Midges. The eggs and manure from those chickens heal people and do wondrous things.
Her magic even leaks into the rubbish dump where her adopted father, the junk man, browses for things to sell. He finds wonders: “A pair of of eyeglasses that allowed the wearer to see in the dark. A pen that never ran out of ink. A picture frame that would show the face of the person the holder missed most. The Sparrow helped the junk man to identify these curious objects, and then connect them to the person who needed them most.”
The Minister cannot countenance magic outside his control, especially magic this powerful, so a showdown is inevitable — which Sparrow heads toward with a heart both light and as full as any creature’s has ever been.
Like any excellent writer, Barnhill reminds me of other writers and other books: the climax of Sparrow’s story brought both Jesus and Madeleine L’Engle’s Meg Murry to mind. But she’s her own species, too, a graceful and playful one to keep an eye on.