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Skin Hunger

December 5th, 2007
Cover of Skin Hunger

As of today, I’m in the unusual (for me) position of actually having read all the contenders for the National Book Award’s Literature for Young People category. I enjoyed all the nominees but thought Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian was particularly deserving, so la-di-da. It wasn’t until this week, however, that I got around to reading Skin Hunger, by Kathleen Duey (Atheneum, 2007).

When I was a kid, I loved Ursula LeGuin’s The Tombs of Atuan. I eventually read other Earthsea books, but The Tombs of Atuan was the volume I kept plucking from the library shelf. In it, a little girl named Tenar is identified as the reborn high priestess to the Nameless Ones. She’s wrenched from her family and renamed Arha (“the eaten one”), and begins her isolated training. She spends much of her time in the labyrinth of the Tombs, which is where she eventually encounters the wizard Ged of A Wizard of Earthsea. I think what I loved most about the story was its bleakness: the stone, the darkness, the solitude. The horror of it gripped me in some masochistically pleasant way.

Well, in Skin Hunger, Duey takes bleakness to an even higher (lower?) level. It’s the first book of a series called A Resurrection of Magic, and, boy howdy, am I looking forward to the books that follow; please tell me there’s a happy ending somewhere?

In short, alternating chapters, Skin Hunger follows two main characters, in what turns out to be different times: a farm girl named Sadima and a lord’s son named Hahp. In Sadima’s time, the nearest thing to magic is the charlatan “magicians” peddling their snake oil in the marketplace. Every age is ruled by kings or by wizards, and now it’s an age of kings; magic is forbidden.

No one believes in Sadima’s ability to communicate with animals until a mysterious young man appears on her farm and invites her to join him in the far away city of Limòri. There, he and another young man named Somiss are trying to unlock the secrets of magic to bring health, wisdom, and peace to the land. That’s what Franklin tells Sadima, anyway. When she arrives in Limòri and meets chilling and single-minded Somiss, however, she begins to question whether the means outweigh the outcome.

Then there’s Hahp, scorned second son of a wealthy lord, sent to the wizarding academy in Limòri. Before you start envisioning jolly banquets and Quidditch matches, know this: the Academy is no Hogwarts. From Hahp’s arrival, he and his classmates are thrown into a dark, labyrinthine world where days and nights are meaningless (reminiscent of the Tombs of Atuan, actually), and literal starvation is the motivating factor to learn the seemingly impossible tasks the wizards set them. One of the ten boys will graduate to become a wizard – or none at all. And the boys are forbidden to help each other. Despair is always just around the corner.

While at first I found the very brief (three to seven pages) chapters maddening, the shift in point of view jolting, Duey ultimately pulls it off. The two storylines eventually converge, the events and themes of Hahp’s and Sadima’s stories informing the other’s as the tension rises. After a somewhat slow first fifty pages, Skin Hunger turned into a page-turner I could barely put down.

At the book’s close, Hahp’s story pauses on a note of hope and anticipation, Sadima’s on chilling inevitability. Meanwhile, many questions remain unanswered. I’d like to know what it is about Hahp that gives him his wizarding aptitude, and what Sadima’s special ability will amount to. And, of course, I can’t wait for a ray of sunshine. It’s going to be a difficult wait for Book Two.

At this point, I don’t think I have much to add to the conversation about the other NBA nominees, but I'd like to link to some good blog reviews found elsewhere. Read them and consider my opinion “ditto.”

Also, check out Cynsations' interview with Kathleen Duey about Skin Hunger!

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