This book didn’t end as well as it started out, which is just as well, because if it did, it would have ripped a hole in the universe due to pure awesomeness. I picked it up because I so much enjoyed Stewart’s other book PERFECT CIRCLE, and this promised to be just as good.
It starts out with two daughters dealing with their mother’s death. Their dead mother is such a huge figure in everyone’s lives that even after she’s dead she still scares most of the people she touched. She has a chiffarobe full of the fetish dolls that embody the “Riders,” the gods which would sometimes take over her body completely in exchange for favors. I loved the description of the fetish dolls, which felt so creepy, and so real.
Toni and Candy are Elena Beauchamp’s (the voodooist) daughters. They have their own conflicted relationship due to the roles they’ve played in the family. Toni is the smart but troublesome daughter, and Candy is the pretty but flaky one. They reminded me quite a bit of the sisters in Jennifer Weiners’ IN HER SHOES, though not as exaggerated.
The strength and weakness of this book is in how much and how well it deals with the relationships between the characters, in particular, the female characters. Men feel kind of secondary in this book, overshadowed by Elena, her daughters, Mary Jo, and the enigmatic “Little Lost Girl.” It’s a strength because the characters are fantastic.
It’s a weakness, because it made me lose sight of what sort of a book I was really reading. I get a sense of how a book will end based on what kind of a genre it is. Mockingbird starts out as a delicious urban fantasy about a family who has an arrangement/relationship with some gods of dubious morals. This is one of my favorite subjects to explore in my own fiction, and Stewart does it even better. If it had continued entirely on this vein, the plot would have centered around the conflict of Toni’s conflicted relationship to her mother’s magic. I’m not saying it wasn’t dealt with, but it was dealt with in what felt to me an offhand way, a ruby slippers kind of way, like “we could have done this at any time, but we chose to do it now because the story has played out as long as the writer wanted” kind of way.
Because the relationships between Toni and Candy are so central, both their familial relationships and their romantic ones, this novel felt like a women’s fiction novel. It even ended like one, sort of, where the women empower each other to solve their financial problems, learn to rely on their own strength, and find a place for men and children that is secondary to their own. It’s not a bad women’s fiction novel–I felt particularly amused by her pregnancy issues–but since I hadn’t really expected to be reading a women’s fiction novel going in, it felt a little like a bait-and-switch. The main external conflicts (the gods, the hurricane) are dealt with early and without much fuss, leaving the internal conflicts (who is the “Little Lost Girl”, Toni’s search for the courage to start her own business) dominant.
Mockingbird starts out as a creepy urban fantasy and ends as a women’s fiction novel, but in the middle it felt a little more literary to me. By literary, I mean that there were elements which fit thematically, but did not seem to forward the plot. For example, in one scene, Candy talks about her sex life, and her opinions as to what men find sexy, and how they compare to the view of sex forwarded by one of their family gods. There’s also a scene where Mary Jo gives Toni a check, and I really did not understand why that money was changing hands, why it was a gift, why a gift was necessitated. I’m sure these elements will give a graduate level literature class much fuel for discussion, but I’m a simpler reader, and I found them distracting.
This book is probably best for people with eclectic reading tastes, especially if they’re warned in advance that it, like Elena’s gods, will not bend to puny mortal expectations. I’d recommend it for book clubs, for literature classes, and for people who think creepy dolls are awesome.
