The Gracekeepers

Kristy Logan

Completed 2/25/2020, Reviewed 2/25/2020

4 stars

Sometimes a book grabs me and I don’t exactly know why.  Usually, it’s the prose, or the action, or the characters, or some combination that gets me, and I can pinpoint it.  With “The Gracekeepers,” I can’t quite put my finger on why I loved this book.  It reads like a lovely non-genre novel that could make the best sellers’ list, which I might have read in my younger days, but would normally bore me these days.  It’s sort of a magical realism/dystopia fusion that is apparently inspired by Scottish myths and fairy tales.  It takes place in the future when sea levels have risen, leaving only islands rather than continents.  People are either islanders or sea-farers, and they don’t get along.  And through a strange set of circumstances, two young women meet and find they are soulmates.  This book won the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ+ Science Fiction/Fantasy/Horror, was nominated for a Kitschie (for progressive, intelligent, and entertaining genre fiction), and was on the James Tiptree Jr. Honor List (for genre fiction that expands or explores our understanding of gender).

There are two main characters and two plots that intersect.  Callanish is a Gracekeeper.  She lives on an island and performs a water burial ritural for sea-farers (damplings).  She uses caged birds called Graces as markers for the place where the body was submerged.  She has a secret that keeps her servicing the damplings rather than live on the island where she was raised as a “landlocker.”  North is a young woman in a sea-faring circus, performing with a bear.  Her act is one of the highlights of the circus, which brings odd and sometimes mildly transgressive entertainment to the landlockers.  She is expected to marry the Ringmaster’s son and become a landlocker herself.  She also has a secret, and would rather live the rest of her life with the bear at sea than be married and live on land.  When one of the circus performers dies during a storm, they bring his body to Callanish for the Resting ritual.  There North and Callanish meet.  In their short time together, they bond.  But North leaves with the circus, leaving the two longing for each other.

The best word to describe this book is lovely.  It’s a complicated plot with little action.  The prose is wonderful, with bounteous descriptions and mood setting.  The world building is not intense, rather it leaves you with just a sense of this mostly aquatic world.  It’s not a happy world, and Callanish and North are not happy people.  Life is hard, especially for the damplings.  The pace isn’t quick, but I tore through it in barely three days, two of them working days on which I don’t normally read a lot.  That’s how much I enjoyed it. 

The characters are very well crafted.  I liked how they all developed, except for the Ringmaster Jarrow, aka Red Gold.  He was overbearing and oblivious.  He annoyed me.  Even in the end, he was still blinded by his own belief system, never waking up to the facts of the situation around him.  It made reading him very frustrating.  On the positive side of that, though, it kept the tension around North and her future quite intense.  

I give the book four stars out of five.  It’s well crafted and well, lovely.  Again, I don’t know why I was so into it.  I just couldn’t put it down.  It’s not normally the type of book I’d love.  The only thing that kept me from giving it five stars is that I didn’t get emotionally attached to either of the main characters.  I always felt like a watcher, rather than totally empathizing with them.  This may have had to do with the bouncing narrative.  It changed perspective a lot.  While it was usually from Callanish or North’s perspective, it also featured the perspectives of many secondary characters.  I think if the two main characters narratives were in first person, I might have gotten more emotionally involved.  Nonetheless, it’s a very good book.