★★★☆☆ Seanan McGuire comes to praise cheerleaders, then bury them!

Dying with her Cheer Pants On

Seanan McGuire

I expected to have trouble with a hagiography of cheerleaders. As a high school student, my friends and I were united with cheerleaders and football players by strong bonds of mutual disdain. McGuire writes

Even those of us who don’t like going to class ... or don’t enjoy the company of our fellow students ... understand the sheer necessity of school spirit, which is the glue that binds a student body together.

Well, the "sheer necessity of school spirit" is not a thing I ever understood. If the phrase "school spirit" was ever uttered in my presence, I don't remember it, and it is certainly not a feeling I experienced.

But I was won over by the poetry of McGuire's paeans to cheerleading,

These girls, who had seemed like strange, bright birds to me when I stood at the edge of the forest, were birds in more ways than one. They flew. They soared, they twisted in midair, they dropped out of the sky with the absolute confidence that they would be caught. Colleen seemed to have no weight at all when her teammates flung her upward. She jackknifed in flight, pressing her face to her knees, and then she fell like a star, so fast and so impossible that I almost made a wish on her. I was sure that if I did, it would be fulfilled.

Won over temporarily and provisionally, let us say, for the sake of the story.

Now, the Fighting Pumpkins are not an ordinary consensus-Earth type of cheer squad. Their leader, Jude, is a vampire. Laurie has compulsive mojo, Heather spends time as a zombie, etc. (The publisher's blurb continues the list.) The Fighting Pumpkins exist to fight off extradimensional and alien threats to the Earth (very much a Buffy the Vampire-Slayer feel). It is rare for a Fighting Pumpkins squad to survive to graduation -- usually they die gruesomely on the way.

To me this felt like a McGuire sketchbook. It's where she played with half-formed ideas. If you've read much of McGuire's other works, you will definitely feel a Rose Marshall vibe to Heather's story. The longest story, "Turn the Year Around", which, at 77 pages, is actually a novella, explores some of the ideas that eventually became Seasonal Fears.

All the stories work, some to greater degree than others. My favorites were "Fiber" and "Turn the Year Around", which was unexpectedly poetic. (The second quote above comes from "Turn the Year Around".) I say "unexpectedly" because McGuire doesn't usually go for poesy. "Fiber" was more typical McGuire -- she can be very funny when she tries and when it clicks, and for me this one did. But I enjoyed all of them, along with the tongue-in-cheek world-building.

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