bibliogramma | Fran Wilde: Updraft

Fran Wilde's debut novel Updraft has been winning accolades for its inventive and thorough worldbuilding, and the accolades are well warranted. The world in which the young protagonist, Kirit Densira (so surnamed because that is the name of the tower she lives in), is quite unlike anything I can remember reading about before.

The city - which has no name, and may be the only city as far as its citizens seem to know - is a post-apocalyptic collection of towers of living bone, constantly growing upwards as the lower levels fill in and must be abandoned, the inhabited tiers well above the level of the clouds that conceal whatever lies beneath, in the city's past. The people of the towers interact by means of bridges built between the towers, and by flight.

Every adolescent who is physically able, is trained on glider wings of bone and silk. Passing one's fight test is the symbol of passage from childhood to adulthood, and is accompanied by an examination of one's knowledge of the traditional songs that contain both the laws and the history of the city and its people, beginning with the Rise - the time when the survivors of an ancient war grew their towers to soar above the clouds.

The lives of people are not without danger - in addition to the possibility of falling during flight, the skies around them are also home to invisible flying predators called skymouths. To protect the city, one special tower - the Spire - is devoted to training Singers, a special caste who are all at once the historians, law makers and enforcers, and city guards who attempt to mitigate the threat from migrating packs of skymouths.

The novel opens with Kirit and her cousin Nat anticipating their tests. Kirit's mother Ezarit is a trader, one who had gained much status and has won fir her and Kirit living space on an upper tier. Nat and his mother Elna are much lower on the tower's social ladder, because his father, a lawbreaker, was taken away by the Singers. But when Kirit breaks the law, exposing herself to an attack from a skymouth, the Singers block her from passing her tests and force her to become one of their number to save her relatives from suffering punishment along with her, Thus begins a path that will expose a trail of secrets, from the truths about her own gifts, her missing father and Nat's, to corruption and abuse in the heart of the Singers' Spire.

The novel combines a personal coming of age and quest for one's past with an examination of the corrupting influence of power and authority and the need for social and political renewal when accountability is lost.

It's fast-paced and well-written. I did find Kirit to be overly super-competent - she has so much to learn once she joins the Spire and seems to learn it all effortlessly, catching up in months to others who have been learning the Singers' ways for most of their lives. But that is often a weakness in hero-tales (Luke Skywalker, I'm looking at you now). I also felt a little cheated by being given such a detailed world - and no clue at all about how it got that way. What is the city? Is it some gigantic animal that is rooted in the earth many thousands of feet below? What does it feel when its bones are manipulated to grow into these towers? Is it sentient? Is it natural or engineered? Is this how the people of this world have always lived, in the bones of other creatures? I want to read more stories that tell me more about the history and biology of this strange world.