The Gift/Curse Duality

The Foreshadowing
Marcus Sedgwick

This is the first book I finished since I rejoined the reading world. It's just too bad that I didn't like it as much as I wanted to. Sigh.

This is not my first Sedgwick book. I've read and thoroughly enjoyed The Dark Flight Down prior to this book blog. I love the way he writes perfect prose that make the hairs at the back of your neck stand up to attention. I like the way he paints a setting that is both eerie and yet challenging to the lead character, Boy, if I'm remembering it correctly.

With that I was pretty much excited with this story: the cover flap reveals that Alexandra Fox has a unique gift. She sees the future and unfortunately for her that includes her brother's death. So I picked it up and after sometime found myself almost halfway into it just as I was feeling sleepy.

What is it all about? The Foreshadowing is both historical fiction and a chilling story echoing Greek mythology tightly wrapped in a hundred short chapters. Alexandra's gift is more of a curse. It's not the future she actually sees but death. The death of a friend. The death of a stranger boarding a bus. The death of her brother's friend. And she dreams of ravens; that black bird that foretells death.

She's also living a sheltered life where her gift is not discussed. At a time where women never much had a say in the world, she feels closeted, her dreams unexpressed. But when her beloved brother goes to France for the war, she sees him being shot in the future. Devising a plan to save him she escapes the confines of her home and set sail to France as a nurse. And there she met a man who is just like her.

Well, that somehow sums it up without giving anything away. Plus a spoiler of sorts even. Hahaha.

It is well-written. The short chapters helped in the pacing. Sedgwick gives you just enough to go on from chapter to chapter, with characters that speak for themselves sans the usual backstory expected from major characters. You form a picture in your brain and accept it as is. You don't ask for reasons why a character is that way because you understand him or her. Maybe because you know them well enough: we all have fathers and mothers, siblings, strangers and friends.

It's also a story about a war.

And they crow about our brave men. It's not that I don't think they're brave, it's simply that when I look at a broken body, all I feel is sadness. Not pride, or pity, or horror, or hatred. To me those are false feelings, emotions that we ut on top of our sadness, because of the war, because of our country or because we don't want to feel afraid.

War is always a difficult thing to read. Sedgwick used the war as a backdrop for Sasha's decision to save her brother from a fate she saw in her dreams. It's also a platform for education. Using books and diaries from that period, the reader is apprised of what the war was like in those times. I learned that back then if you give a young man a white feather it means you think him a coward for not joining the infantry and suiting up for war.

But mostly it is about growing up. Sasha is seventeen. A sheltered girl with a curse. It's her own personal quest to drown the ring in Mt. Doom. Oh wait, that's Frodo. Sorry. Actually it's more of a Frodo-lite. Or Frodo-extralite. To me at least. For one thing, the whole world doesn't hang in the balance in this story. Hahaha.

If it's that interesting how come you didn't like it? Well, it's just me. I liked the writing. I liked the idea. I liked the references to Cassandra's tale. But, but, but there wasn't any emotional pull to me when I reached the middle. I just wanted to learn how it ends. Then, a few chapters before the conclusion I felt how it would end. I hate it when that happens to me.

Then again, this is the first book I finished after more than a handful of false starts from other stories. So there's still a bit of that pull somehow that made me want to finish it. And I'd still look forward to his other books in the future. This probably caught me at a bad time, who knows? Or maybe I just need to get my reading groove back.

Other interesting point of view:

Bart's Bookshelf