Faith J. Cormier Penned this review.
Singer of Souls is like a funhouse mirror, or a kaleidoscope. Every time I thought I knew what it was about, something shifted somewhere, and I didn’t know what was going on any more.
So what sort of book is it? There’s a bit of redemption, a touch of sex (not very graphic), rather more violence (rather more graphic, but not sickeningly so), some music theory, a travelogue of Edinburgh, politics, religion, heroes and villains who are both larger and smaller than life (and are frequently the same person), folklore, some good old-fashioned “if only he’d told Grandma right away everything would have been fine.”
Who is the hero? Young Douglas Stewart is a master musician, stoned or sober. He manages to haul himself out of his heroin addiction by main force, yet ends up square in the middle of something that makes heroin withdrawal look like fun. He escapes a Minneapolis winter for an Edinburgh one, which has its own set of rigors.
There’s an expression, “water finds its level,” and that certainly seems to be true of Douglas. The book ends with him impossibly, unforeseeably far from where he started out, but there’s a kind of bizarre inevitability about it.
Is Singer of Souls worth reading? As always, that depends on what you’re looking for. The following exchange between Douglas and his grandmother pretty much sums the whole thing up, however:
“Don’t you know any nice faeries, Grandma?”
“In Scotland?” She snorted. “They didn’t pluck the term, Dour Scot out of thin air, Dougie. There’s not a Scottish fairy tale that doesn’t end without someone getting hanged or burned at the stake or thrown down a well. And the faeries themselves? They’re all the wandering spirits of unbaptised children or murdered relatives, and even the good ones will turn on you in a second if you break one of their unwritten rules.”
I guess you can’t say you haven’t been warned.
This is Adam Stemple’s first adult novel. He has collaborated on several music books and children’s books with his mother, Jane Yolen. Their first young adult novel collaboration, Pay the Piper, is out now.
(Tor, 2005)
