Bound Up With Books: Child of a Rainless Year

I really enjoyed Jane Lindskold’s Child of a Rainless Year – it has most of the elements of fiction that I like: mystery, alternative history and magic worked in in an offhanded manner. Not that the treatment is offhanded – but extraordinary events are introduced in such a manner that treats them as no more extraordinary than a table or a phone call from a friend. I love books and writers that play with the boundary of what is real and believable in that fashion. There’s no heavy philosophical or sociological, but more of one woman’s account of what happens to her when she becomes a major character in a mythic tale.

When Mira is nine years old her her selfish, flamboyant and vivacious mother mysteriously disappears. When after several months she has not returned, and all attempts to locate her have proved fruitless, Mira is sent to a foster home far from everything she has known. She quickly comes to love her foster parents, who eventually adopt her, and all traces of her former life fade into obscurity. When she turns 18, she learns that she has a trust fund and a board of trustees that has been keeping tabs on her and her welfare from afar. And when her adopted parents die in a car accident, she learns that she still owns the house she was raised in. She also learns, from her adoptive mother’s journals, just something of how odd her mother’s disappearance, and the terms of her rearing by her adopted family were. She returns to New Mexico dispose of the property, Phineas House, and to see if she can discover just what happened to her mother all those years ago. In the process, everything she thought she knew of life and who she is is turned upside-down.

There are several themes that run throughout – how one’s origins determine who one will become, family, reflections and color, and ways of seeing. One of the major themes concerns liminal spaces – what they are, and methods of ‘using’ them. The book itself makes use of liminal spaces by moving from one type of story into another kind of story, and layering all these together. The end result is as mysterious and colorful as Phineas House itself.