★★★★☆ WTH is this? Beats me, but it's GREAT!

The Lightcasters

Janelle McCurdy

The Lightcasters is, I believe, Janelle McCurdy's debut novel. And what a debut it is! Strikingly original. The Lightcasters is intended to be the first book of a series, Umbra Tales, and I certainly intend to read the rest.

I'm going to start by asking which genre The Lightcasters belongs to. This is usually a stupid question to ask about a book. Genre classifications are arbitrary and, especially in the speculative fiction regime, largely meaningless. But I have a reason.

At first glance, The Lightcasters looks like fantasy. Mia lives with her family in the town of Nubis, in a small country, Lunis, that had six cities (three now destroyed) surrounding the Shadowplains, where dangerous creatures walk. Nubis is a city of perpetual night. Some of the people of Nubis are umbra tamers. An umbra tamer is one who has accepted a lifelong pairing with a shadow animal called an umbra. Umbra are or appear to be magical.

That all sounds like a fantasy world. But there are no elves, no sorcerers, no magic spells. Mia's mother, besides being an umbra tamer, is a scientist who works in her lab trying to understand the umbra. Mia's mother and father carry holophones, which appear to be cell phones that project holograms instead of showing things on video screens. They have computers and Mia has a tablet that can take and show pictures. They have running water and elevators and navigation systems.

All right, I thought -- is there a kind of fantasy in which magical creatures and modern technology are both found? Yes, of course, urban fantasy. But as soon as I had that thought, I knew it was wrong. The Lightcasters is not urban fantasy. I had to think about why. It is because urban fantasy is, from a particular point of view, very conventional. Urban fantasy worlds have magic, they have witches and sorcerers, and magical beings: vampires, werewolves, fae, and ghosts. But, although each urban fantasy author puts her own spin on these beings, they are all drawn from folklore. McCurdy's umbra are totally new, to me at least.

So that's my point. I don't know what The Lightcasters is, because I have never read anything like this before.

The novelty of The Lightcasters creates a difficulty for McCurdy. She can't rely on our familiarity with worlds like this -- she has a lot of explaining to do. There were definitely points in the early chapters when I felt I was on the receiving end of an infodump. These were deftly handled, never overbearing, but there is no denying that the story was slow to really get rolling.

Once it got going, though, it was very good. Mia, her little brother Lucas, and her friends TJ and Jada must save their world. It is one of those stories where a child is thrust suddenly and unfairly into the job of an adult.

Administrative note: As far as I can figure out, The Lightcasters and Mia and the Lightcasters are the North American (Simon and Schuster Aladdin) and UK (Faber Children's) version of the same book. If wrong, I would be glad to be corrected about this.

Thanks to NetGalley and Simon and Schuster Canada for an advance reader's copy.

Amazon review

Goodreads review

Comments

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