Cate Tiernan, Balefire, Book One: A Chalice of Wind (Razor Bill Books, 2005)
I often have a tough time with Young Adult fiction, and I'm not really sure why. After all, I can still read Children's fiction with no problem, and I certainly hope that I'm able to process Adult fiction just fine. But whenever I read something specifically written and marketed at the Young Adult set, I find myself strangely at sea. Perhaps it's the problem of identification. I obviously identify with adults, and in the case of Children's fiction, while I may not exactly identify with a child, I can at least sympathize with their worldview when everything is a wonderment and I can remember my own childhood. Perhaps I don't remember it all that accurately, but I can remember to an extent what the world looked like and how it felt to be a child in a world of adults.
But Young Adult literature? It's hard for me to identify with the problems the main characters of such books face, even though a lot of those problems are familiar to me. Maybe it's ultimately about the fact that while adults may often wish they could relive their childhoods perhaps even just in part, it seems that the impulse to relive one's adolescence is most often found in former jocks and people who are simply insane. So to impress me, a writer of Young Adult fiction has to walk a very careful line. The world of the protagonist has to feel like the world of a real teenager, but at the same time, it can't feel so real that I end up feeling the frustration that most adults feel when confronted with the trials and tribulations of the teens.
This is a line that Cate Tiernan, for the most part, walks pretty successfully in A Chalice of Wind.
Set in New Orleans (obviously pre-Katrina), A Chalice of Wind basically introduces us to the cast of characters who will populate this four-book series. At the forefront are two seventeen-year-old girls, Thais Allard and Clio Martin. Clio is a "native" denizen of New Orleans, raised by her grandmother in a tradition of magic, witchcraft, and soothsaying based on dreams. Thais, however, has only just moved to New Orleans after the death of her father, and she finds herself living with a motley collection of adults who seem to be slackers at first but clearly are not; instead they are a group that seems to be gathering for some dark purpose. Thais and Clio meet each other one day in school -- and find that they can only be twins separated at birth.
From there, A Chalice of Wind is off to the races.
Tiernan's book blends a lot of standard tropes from Young Adult fantastic and horror fiction: we have the protagonist living in an unfamiliar home after the death of a parent, the mystical grandparent, the creepy circle of acquaintances working toward some unspoken end, adults "in the know" who speak "knowingly" of the role Our Heroes are to play, and so on. And Tiernan also writes the teenagers as people with standard teen problems; fitting in, love, and all the rest of it. But it all comes alive to a much greater degree than in any other similarly themed novels I've read in recent years, and while there's nothing particularly revelatory or stunningly unique about Clio or Thais (in fact, given that they're twins, they're not even singularly unique), but they each still come off as real people.
A Chalice of Wind is, as noted, the first book of four, so only the beginning of the larger tale will be found here. If, on that basis, I cannot assess Cate Tiernan's skill as a storyteller, I can at least praise her skills at characterization and description.
