Up with Updraft

I have been involved in a personal reading challenge for the last 7 years, during which time, my son has aged from being a 10-year-old to a 17-year-old.  He is an avid reader (and a fast reader!) and always enjoys talking about the books he reads.  Except for pausing my reading challenge to read the three Hunger Games books, I have not been able to participate much in what he has been reading, though he has many times asked me to.  This Christmas, just before I finished my long reading list, a friend got my son Fran Wilde’s Updraft.  My son finished in quickly as usual, and being a fan of dystopian novels, he insisted that I read it too so we could talk about it.

Updraft follows many of the tropes of the YA dystopian novel.  The protagonist is a headstrong young woman, Kirit, who doesn’t much question the world she lives in at the opening of the novel.  She knows precisely who she wants to be in this life and is focused on her own immediate future.  The city has rules and laws in place in the name of protecting the city, and the enforcers of those laws are mysterious and threatening.  Kirit accidentally runs afoul of those laws and her entire future (or at least the one she so clearly envisioned) is threatened.  Like her other YA protagonists, Kirit has a few special gifts, and her unsettled place in the world makes her uniquely qualified to change its course.

Wilde handles her tropes expertly and the world she creates is unique, fascinating, and mysterious.  It’s a world in which humans live above the clouds in towers of living bone that are rumored to possible be part of one structure somewhere out of sight below the clouds.  The main external threat to the city are “skymouths,” flying, people-eating, squid-like creatures whose skin renders them invisible, so that the first time you see them is when their gaping maws come to claim you.  The adults of the city move about on human-made wings, and the towers are occasionally joined together by bridges made from the sinews of killed skymouths.  It’s a fascinating world and wonderfully realized throughout the novel.

The politics of the world are of course the heart of the novel, and they are every bit as intriguing as the physical one.  Updraft, like most YA dystopian novels, is about methods of control and the sacrifice people make in the name of safety.  Particularly, Updraft is about secrets and the withholding of information as a means of shaping and maintaining social structures.  But like all weapons, once peace and order is attained, those with access to the information are tempted to misuse it to secure their positions.  Wilde creates well-formed antagonists for Kirit to struggle against.

The novel is touching and fun to read and there are pockets of lovely prose that soar above the utilitarian, which is the default of YA fiction.  I enjoyed reading it, and have greatly enjoyed being able to talk to my son about it.  I will definitely be reading books 2 and 3 to see how the story develops and to learn more about the secrets of the city of bone.