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A review by peregrine13
The Spirit Bares Its Teeth by Andrew Joseph White
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
3.25
THIS REVIEW CONTAINS VAGUE SPOILERS BUT THEY'RE TOO SPREAD OUT AND TOO VAGUE TO PUT BEHIND SPOILER TAGS.
I'm not sure Andrew Joseph White knows what running stitch is.
This book has a compelling premise behind it – a gothic novel set in a sinister Victorian Sanitarium in a world where ghosts are real and spirit mediums form the elite Speaker Society (at least, cis male ones do), following an autistic trans boy who has been imprisoned there to be 'fixed' so he can become the perfect wife. However, I found the execution to be somewhat lacking.
Protagonist Silas Bell has a remarkably modern understanding of his own gender and sexualty for a kid from the 1880s, and it seems like he cannot be allowed to be 'wrong' (morally speaking) for longer than a few sentences, before, in a remarkably self-actualised inner monologue, he corrects himself.
For example: early on in the book, Silas reacts callously to news of his sister-in-laws miscarriage – a reasonable, if flawed, response given Silas's own fear and discomfort surrounding his own ability to become pregnant and the fact that he is in imminent danger of being forced to bear children. For Silas, who constantly dreams of performing a hysterectomy on himself, losing a pregnancy is a positive thing. But a sentence or two later Silas, with remarkable perspective and evenness for a sixteen-year-old trying to escape being married off as a brood mare for magic children, remarks to himself, and the audience, that it's unfair to be jealous of her, and that he doesn't hate her, but what she represents ("like she is a metaphor, not a living person")>
Andrew Joseph White's tendency to write his characters with this level of self-awareness with regards to their own feelings, identities and biases is somewhat less noticeable in his other novels, Hell Followed With Us and Compound Fracture, both of which are set reasonably close to the modern day. I found this type of writing clunky but excusable in those, but it's particularly egregious when the inner monologue belongs to a character in Victorian England whose idea of his trans identity (and Daphne's) and sexuality come miraculously close to modern-day ones without explicit using the words transgender or bisexual.
Worth noting also, then, that Silas, while facing the full force of upper-class Victorian misogyny, transphobia, and ableism, is very much still an upper class, white, subject in the core of the British Empire. Colonial violence is brought up, occasionally, when it conveniences the story to do so, and Silas, of course, unable to be wrong for a second, immediately recognises it as immoral. Similarly, class oppression within Britain is hinted at through the concept of indentured Speakers, those with the ability to pierce the Veil but not the social standing to do so as full-fledged members of the Society, and specifically the character of the groundskeeper. And similarly, Silas carries no class prejudice despite his upper-class upbringing.
Now I'm not saying that I wish the protagonist was racist or classist – more that his complete lack of prejudice speaks to a broader trend of not allowing the character to be wrong or biased or have outdated views about himself or others, even at the expense of the 'historical' element of 'historical fiction'. Perhaps, though, towards the beginning of the book Silas could have been shown to have internalised ideas from his parents about non-white and/or working class people (perhaps of the men being savage brutes prone to assaulting any white woman they see, in contrast with the 'civil' misogyny of the upper class + white cisman), and then later on encountered one such person (or people) and found that they were in fact kind, compassionate, decent people, challenging (and for the sake of simplicity correcting) his bias. As a moment of character growth. I don't know.
A lot of the side characters were written somewhat one-dimensionally (as was Silas at points – how many surgery-related metaphors can one book pull off?), though I consider this kind of excusable for a YA book. Charlotte's consistent characterisation as 'pick-me bitch' and nothing else was grating – I think she deserved some redeeming moments of compassion for her fellow 'patients', particularly towards the end.
Pretty much every cis man character fell into the exact same archetype of violent misogyny, and while I'm not looking for any of them to be outspoken feminists or anything, it would be less boring if they were misogynistic in different ways and to varying degrees. Perhaps it would be nice for Silas to have a positive or even neutral figure of masculinity and manhood to model his manhood off of aside from the abstract concept of James Barry. (Maybe that's George?)
All of this criticism aside, there is plenty to enjoy about this book. It has a compelling setting and premise (even if tone and atmosphere is sometimes sacrificed by clumsy writing, and the plot could have done more with the premise in my opinion). In many places the prose is genuinely beautiful to read – the metaphorical rabbit in Silas's chest is a part cularly interesting device – and despite my complaints I did love and care about the characters, and saw some of myself in Silas.
Overall a mixed bag, though this book is making me really want to steal the entire idea and rewrite it to suit my own tastes. Alas.
I'm not sure Andrew Joseph White knows what running stitch is.
This book has a compelling premise behind it – a gothic novel set in a sinister Victorian Sanitarium in a world where ghosts are real and spirit mediums form the elite Speaker Society (at least, cis male ones do), following an autistic trans boy who has been imprisoned there to be 'fixed' so he can become the perfect wife. However, I found the execution to be somewhat lacking.
Protagonist Silas Bell has a remarkably modern understanding of his own gender and sexualty for a kid from the 1880s, and it seems like he cannot be allowed to be 'wrong' (morally speaking) for longer than a few sentences, before, in a remarkably self-actualised inner monologue, he corrects himself.
For example: early on in the book, Silas reacts callously to news of his sister-in-laws miscarriage – a reasonable, if flawed, response given Silas's own fear and discomfort surrounding his own ability to become pregnant and the fact that he is in imminent danger of being forced to bear children. For Silas, who constantly dreams of performing a hysterectomy on himself, losing a pregnancy is a positive thing. But a sentence or two later Silas, with remarkable perspective and evenness for a sixteen-year-old trying to escape being married off as a brood mare for magic children, remarks to himself, and the audience, that it's unfair to be jealous of her, and that he doesn't hate her, but what she represents ("like she is a metaphor, not a living person")>
Andrew Joseph White's tendency to write his characters with this level of self-awareness with regards to their own feelings, identities and biases is somewhat less noticeable in his other novels, Hell Followed With Us and Compound Fracture, both of which are set reasonably close to the modern day. I found this type of writing clunky but excusable in those, but it's particularly egregious when the inner monologue belongs to a character in Victorian England whose idea of his trans identity (and Daphne's) and sexuality come miraculously close to modern-day ones without explicit using the words transgender or bisexual.
Worth noting also, then, that Silas, while facing the full force of upper-class Victorian misogyny, transphobia, and ableism, is very much still an upper class, white, subject in the core of the British Empire. Colonial violence is brought up, occasionally, when it conveniences the story to do so, and Silas, of course, unable to be wrong for a second, immediately recognises it as immoral. Similarly, class oppression within Britain is hinted at through the concept of indentured Speakers, those with the ability to pierce the Veil but not the social standing to do so as full-fledged members of the Society, and specifically the character of the groundskeeper. And similarly, Silas carries no class prejudice despite his upper-class upbringing.
Now I'm not saying that I wish the protagonist was racist or classist – more that his complete lack of prejudice speaks to a broader trend of not allowing the character to be wrong or biased or have outdated views about himself or others, even at the expense of the 'historical' element of 'historical fiction'. Perhaps, though, towards the beginning of the book Silas could have been shown to have internalised ideas from his parents about non-white and/or working class people (perhaps of the men being savage brutes prone to assaulting any white woman they see, in contrast with the 'civil' misogyny of the upper class + white cisman), and then later on encountered one such person (or people) and found that they were in fact kind, compassionate, decent people, challenging (and for the sake of simplicity correcting) his bias. As a moment of character growth. I don't know.
A lot of the side characters were written somewhat one-dimensionally (as was Silas at points – how many surgery-related metaphors can one book pull off?), though I consider this kind of excusable for a YA book. Charlotte's consistent characterisation as 'pick-me bitch' and nothing else was grating – I think she deserved some redeeming moments of compassion for her fellow 'patients', particularly towards the end.
Pretty much every cis man character fell into the exact same archetype of violent misogyny, and while I'm not looking for any of them to be outspoken feminists or anything, it would be less boring if they were misogynistic in different ways and to varying degrees. Perhaps it would be nice for Silas to have a positive or even neutral figure of masculinity and manhood to model his manhood off of aside from the abstract concept of James Barry. (Maybe that's George?)
All of this criticism aside, there is plenty to enjoy about this book. It has a compelling setting and premise (even if tone and atmosphere is sometimes sacrificed by clumsy writing, and the plot could have done more with the premise in my opinion). In many places the prose is genuinely beautiful to read – the metaphorical rabbit in Silas's chest is a part cularly interesting device – and despite my complaints I did love and care about the characters, and saw some of myself in Silas.
Overall a mixed bag, though this book is making me really want to steal the entire idea and rewrite it to suit my own tastes. Alas.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Ableism, Child death, Deadnaming, Death, Gore, Misogyny, Rape, Sexism, Sexual assault, Sexual violence, Transphobia, Violence, Forced institutionalization, Blood, Medical content, Medical trauma, Murder, Injury/Injury detail
Moderate: Adult/minor relationship, Confinement, Pedophilia, Grief, Pregnancy, Dysphoria
Minor: Bullying, Domestic abuse, Homophobia, Miscarriage, Outing, Colonisation, Classism