Motheater by Linda H. Codega

 

As someone who loves D&D and who has been a passionate reader of io9 since before Charlie Jane Anders left, I was very impressed by the writing of Linda H. Codega. I really enjoyed their articles about the OGL fiasco and I thought their reporting was top notch and their writing style was clear and enjoyable. 

So I was very excited when their first novel was previewed in io9 and even more excited when I got an eARC from NetGalley and the publisher. 

This novel was interesting. Like I’ve said about the novels of Chuck Tingle and Stephen King, I think I would very much enjoy a novel by Linda Codega that didn’t have genre elements. 

The book starts with Bennie, a woman who moved to a mining town in Appalachia with her boyfriend, got a job at the mining company, and made a best friend there with whom she was looking into suspicious mining deaths. But then her friend was killed in some sort of mining incident and in the aftermath she then broke up with her boyfriend and was living on the fringe of poverty while trying to figure out a way to take the mining company down. At this point the story begins when she finds Motheater, a witch who had been trapped in the mountain for 150+ years. This fascinating setup is undermined by alternating chapters with Motheater’s perspective from before she was stuck into the mountain. I was bored by these flashback chapters and I felt they added very little to the overall narrative. Furthermore, the book doesn’t really mine the time traveling culture shock or the realization that magic is real very well. There are token attempts but they feel halfhearted at best. 

In addition, I was disappointed that Bennie never got justice for her best friend or all of the other dead miners and that part of the driving of the plot was abandoned without much explanation. Furthermore, the explicit  tying in of the magic to Christianity was quite offputting to me (and presumably will be to many other non-Christian readers).

 But when this book worked, it worked. The language was often lyrical. The blue jay familiar was a joy. I look forward to Linda Codega’s next book.