Skin Hunger by Kathleen Duey
Teen Fantasy Novel Explores Dark Side of Magic
Kathleen Duey's National Book Award nominated fantasy novel shows flashes of brilliant prose but ultimately falters as a stand alone work.
Plot Summary
The wizards at the wizarding academy in Kathleen Duey's Skin Hunger do not believe students can learn magic under comfortable conditions. At their school, the magically ambitious are placed in rooms with stone slab beds, pitted against other students, and forced to conjure their own food or starve. By contrast, J.K. Rowling's Hogwarts is a pretty decent place to go to school, with comfy common rooms, a quidditch field, decent food and organized dances.
Characters
Skin Hunger follows the stories of two protagonists. One, Hahp, is a young man with paternal-hatred issues from a wealthy family. He is convinced that his father is sending him away to the academy as a way to get rid of him. The other is Sadima whose mother, the victim of a charlatan magician, dies during Sadima's birth. As an adolescent she discovers a talent for reading animal minds, and leaves her struggling farm family to follow a scholar of magic into the city. The novel alternates between the two narratives, slowly exposing clues as to how they are related.
Assessment
Nominated for the National Book Award, Skin Hunger demonstrates its author's true lyric abilities. In the opening scene, Sadima's brother Micah desperately solicits the help of the magician who will ultimately let his mother die and steal his family's savings. A picture imprints itself on his mind of the magician's "yellowed fingernails, rimmed in black--little half moons of filth." This is the kind of poetic image that startles the reader with both its specificity and its significance. Unfortunately, the poetic language ebbs after first few chapters, and the rest of the novel, while competently written, is more pedestrian.
The two narratives occur at different times in the books' stark and forlorn world. In Sadima's time, magic has been largely lost and it is her quest to help rediscover it. In Hahp's time, magic is very much in use, though available mostly to the wealthy. Hahp arrives at the wizarding school in a carriage pulled by flying horses. The horses have been, at great cost to his wealthy father, enchanted by a wizard.
Themes in Skin Hunger
The book's main theme is the extraordinary cost of practicing magic. Magic seems always tied up with suffering. The greater the magic, the greater the suffering. The enchanted flying horses, for instance, have eyes that are "opaque--dead." And practicioners of magic must vow poverty and are apparently destined to periods of near starvation. What Skin Hunger doesn't explain, though, is why this should be so. Is suffering something necessarily tied up with magic? Or is this merely the tendency of the cruel wizards who hold magical power in Sadima and Hahp's times? The novel reluctantly reveals clues to these questions, and is stingy with information that would help flesh out its world as well. In fact, the slow dissemination of information here partly substitutes for an action driven or character driven plot.
Book One in The Resurrection of Magic Trilogy
To be fair, the book is the first in what promises to be a series (The Resurrection of Magic), and part of its job is to raise questions that the reader will want answered in future books. In the end, though, the story does not carry quite enough urgency to fuel a cliffhanger ending, and not quite enough resolution for a satisfying conclusion.
Skin Hunger
By Kathleen Duey
Copyright 2007 by Kathleen Duey
Published by Atheneum Books for Young Readers, New York
ISBN: 9780689840937
