Wilce, Ysabeau (2007). Flora Segunda: Being the Magickal Mishaps of a Girl of Spirit, Her Glass-Gazing Sidekick, Two Ominous Butlers (One Blue), a House with Eleven Thousand Rooms, and a Red Dog ,the Tygers of Wrath series. Orlando : Harcourt. 431 pages.
After you get past the title, I’m not sure a summary is really needed for this book. But here it is: Flora Segunda is on the cusp of her 14th birthday, an age that means she’ll officially be an adult, and have to go off to the barracks to be trained as a warrior, like the rest of her noble family. But as much as Flora doesn’t really enjoy trying to do all the housework in her family’s castle, Crackpot Hall, or taking care of her insane father, she wants to become a warrior even less. Things start to look up, however, when she discovers her family’s banished butler, Valefor, who agrees to give her a helping hand… for a price, anyway.
With a basic – and somewhat predictable – fantasy plot, there are three things that make this book stand out. One, the characters. Two, the language/slang usage.
Flora herself isn’t a particularly ground breaking character. In fact, if you’ve ever read a novel that had a spunky heroine with red hair (bonus points if said hair is curly), you’ve met Flora. Mind you, she’s one of the better, and less romanticized versions of this stock fantasy archetype, but… there’s nothing really new here. However, the supporting characters are truly mold breaking. Flora’s mother is the general of her country’s army, and is portrayed with a lot of nuanced sensitivity as she busts through gender stereotypes as a dictatorial and remote father figure. Meanwhile, Flora’s father is crazy. Taken captive as a prisoner of war, and forced to watch his oldest daughter (the original Flora) be killed, he spends all of his time alternately pining and throwing fits. At least for the first half of the book, anyway. As it turns out, he’s one of the most dynamic characters in the book. Flora’s “glass-gazing sidekick,” Udo, is also wonderfully alternative, being at once both manly and metro. Wilce has created a world in which gender as we know it doesn’t really exist, and Udo, obsessed with haberdashery, is one of the best ways she drives that point home. Finally, there’s Valefor, who is fabulously whiny, petulant, charming, and self-centered.
While I liked the characters pretty much whole-heartedly, I’m a little more reserved about the “slang” that they used. For the most part, it came off as silly, and while a lot of the book is intentionally silly (Crackpot Hall?) – I think the language was the part that came off as a little condescending, in that “I’ll make new, family friendly curse-words for my characters to use,” way that – just always sort of bugs me a little. Like, frak, do you really think kids aren’t going to know what you’re frelling saying? I understand the motive – but I don’t have to like the execution, especially if it’s really wince-worthy. On the other hand, the slang was definitely original, including colorful phrases like, “pigface psychopomp.” And some of the subtler touches, like the use of “ayah” or “ayah so” for yes/ok, did a really good job of creating a sense of exoticism, without being hard to interpret or overly cute.
The world was also fairly interestingly constructed, as though someone took Aztec, Roman, and Celtic cultures and put them in a blender with demonology myths. I’m assuming there is more to come in the series, so I’m looking forward to seeing a little bit more of it.
If you liked this book: Why not look up some information on the Lesser Key of Solomon, an old and famous grimoire that provide the mythological basis for the characters of Valefor and Paimon? Of course, me, I recognized the names from playing Shadow Hearts: Covenant…
