My Swordhand is Singing | Vampire Novel Review
My Sword Hand is Singing Cover
As far as Vampire novels go, I will admit that this is one of the strangest and yet, most charming. The first Vampire novel I read was Twilight, yes, I’ll wait for the groans. Of course, now I understand that it is not the most appropriate love story to be handing out to teenage girls, but when you’re thirteen Twilight seems like the greatest love story to have ever been written! But I digress; my Swordhand is certainly far spookier than Twilight, and the romance is a little more plausible...
My Swordhand is Singing is a young adult novel that tells the story of Peter and his father, Tomas, as they settle down for the winter in Chust, a village surrounded by a forest somewhere in
Eastern Europe. They are woodcutters, trying to earn a simple living before they move on. However, the mysterious Shadow Queen runs riot in the village, causing all sorts of mayhem that Peter and his Father get rather closely tied up…
The first good point to make about this novel is the ambiguity in location. Chust is a fictional village, but the novel is based in Eastern Europe; this much is evident from the folkloric elements and the names of the characters. However, the exact location of Chust, where it might lie in the real world, is never even hinted at. All Sedgwick provides is details of the hut that Tomas and Peter reside in, a few other huts dotted around the village, and the deep impenetrable forest. This gives the setting an ethereal atmosphere, and this, in turn, lends itself greatly to the plotline and dynamics of the story.
Leading on from that, the simplicity of this novel is also a talking point. As far as young adult novels go, this one was fairly simple. A nice, basic story arc carries readers comfortably through from beginning to end and the vocabulary is effective and never overdone. You may be thinking that this sounds like a veiled critique, but I have learned over the years that I have been writing, that making simple effective is harder than anything else in writing. It is easy to throw in convoluted, elongated words (see what I did there!) to sound intelligent, but to tell a story simply is one of the toughest things for a writer; it leaves nowhere to hide.
The basic story arc allowed the pacing to take centre stage too, and it was a joy to behold. Never once did I feel the novel speed up or slow down too much. The author gave me just enough information to keep me on edge, but never gave too much away so that I felt I knew what was coming. For a horror novel, this was surprisingly tense and I enjoyed my read because of this.
Despite all this praise, I must remain level-headed. I will admit to a personal annoyance at the lack of folkloric explanation. From the blurb, I was hoping the novel was going to be rooted deeply in Eastern European folklore, something that centres around the Vampire, but I found this lacking. There were suggestions and tantalising moments where I thought I might get some factual knowledge, but alas, I was mistaken. I do feel it would have been better for readers to have had the fully immersive experience of real-life facts. Plus, it would have made the tense scenes a lot more frightening if the reader knew that this was based on truth!
Overall, I enjoyed this novel and would rate it a solid 7/10. For a young adult novel, I found myself pleasantly surprised by the gripping nature of the plot, and the execution of the story is a masterclass in simplicity.
