Review: Hanna Who Fell from the Sky

Hanna Who Fell from the Sky by Christopher Meades
My rating: 3.5 of 5 stars

I received an Advance Reader Copy of this book from Net Galley in exchange for an honest review.

3.5 Stars

This is an odd and yet very readable book. In fact, I'd have read it in a straight shot, if life hadn't interrupted. The story is that of a young woman, coming of legal age, in a rural polygynous community called Clearhaven. I found some aspects of the community, which is large enough to have a big daily market, to be rather sketchily drawn. The tremendous economic disparity within the community, and how that works as a justifiable disparity, within the structure of their faith bothered me. In this community, all the older sons are expelled, only the youngest kept and groomed to replace an aging father upon his death, while all daughters are married off to the older men in Clearhaven. In this structure, there are few men competing for all the women of this town. (No mention of inbreeding was made but needless to say, I had a lot of questions about genetics in this enclave.) Women must remain obedient and be guided by their fathers, husbands, adult sons. Frankly, I was amazed that these men were willing to wait until the young women were eighteen in order to force them into polygamy.

Hanna, our protagonist, is soon turning eighteen in her dirt-poor but surprisingly literate family. (Female literacy is especially something I would question in the community since an educated woman is more likely to rebel against the constraints presented.) She receives a new suitably modest dress (one of only three she possesses) for her 18th birthday, but the dress that's ominously awaiting her is the wedding dress (naturally recycled from that of her most recent sister-mother, Jessamina) when she marries Edwin, a man three times her age, becoming his fifth wife. Needless to say, this unusual 18-year-old girl (more on that later) is not down with this plan.

Some aspects of this story so perfectly capture the silenced, obedient aspect of victims of abuse and domestic violence. Encapsulated here we see the circumstances of domestic violence that can leave those with little experience working with DV/child abuse survivors' questioning "why didn't they just leave?" thus failing to understand how constricted one's possibilities appear to be when this life of abuse is all you have ever known. As we come to learn, Hanna hasn't had much violence visited on her personally because of her special status, which is part of a long reveal, in her family. Instead, she sees her beloved sister Emily, her beloved mother Kara, punished and physically abused by her father, often taking blows in her stead, in a sort of whipping -boy relationship. Thus, Hanna is tormented by both her coming fate, as the fifth wife of an old man with a predilection we won't get into here, and by her fear that leaving would be shirking her perceived responsibility to shield her mother, sisters and brothers, from her father's drunken wrath.

Early on in the book, Hanna re-encounters Daniel, the youngest son of a community benefactor, who one can infer is slightly younger than Hanna is, but who is far more worldly, since his parents have taken him and his two older brothers, ages eighteen and nineteen, to "The City" in order to acclimatize the older two boys to their forthcoming expulsion from Clearhaven. Daniel has seen and lived in the outside world for a while and marvels a bit at its wonders, including the monogamous marriage idea. Daniel is ambivalent about his future role in Clearhaven which, when revealed, leaves you ever so briefly questioning what choice he will make about the direction of his life. It's a foregone conclusion that Daniel will be smitten (just like every other man with eyes, don't get me started...) with Hanna, and Hanna is... if not smitten, exactly, quickly warmed to the idea of Daniel as a way out of her situation. Some reviewers have called this "instalove" but that wasn't my take at all. They were two kids with a shared experience, normal attraction, and a heaping share of infatuation. Why wouldn't an 18 year old girl be drawn to a same age boy versus a kinky 60-something-year-old man? Why wouldn't any teenage boy be drawn to Hanna, a pretty teenage girl?

So now we come to my problem with this story. As briefly mentioned above, Hanna is special. A thinly built out aspect of magical realism is woven like a golden thread into the plot. While I won't get into the specific fairy tale aspect of her nature, since I don't want to spoil it for the reader, I am troubled by some aspects of the story. In more than a few instances Hanna is placed in sexually menacing situations. Her entire path out of her being menaced, and out of her community, is conveniently managed by magical realism. Now while I love a good fairy tale, I'm not sure that I think a story with such a gritty plotline should give us our heroine escaping her problems by means of sudden magical intervention. Meades has set this story in a fairly detailed real and present day world, has given us a heroine who is facing real and very ugly threats to her wellbeing. Magic suddenly saves her? This troubles me. Yes, it's a fantasy and make no mistake, I have no quarrel with the caliber of Meades writing which is excellent (and especially impressive given his afterword comments on the terrible TBI he suffered several years back). In this story we have a heroine who is rescued by 1) magic and 2) a boy. Given all Hanna's purported "specialness" I find this so... disappointing. I originally thought it might have been an editorial suggestion but after reading Meades comments about the origin and history of this story, which has been 12 years in the making, I feel he has written exactly what he intended to write. I can respect that choice but still question whether giving Hanna greater agency, either over her actions entirely without magic, or with her use of magic from the very beginning of the story might have given us a better story with a heroine who lives up to her remarkable origins.

A few more comments may go up on the blog about this book post-publication. In summary, Meades is a good writer. I just wish he'd given us a Hanna who lived up to the promise of her fall.

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