Elizabeth Hand is Coming to Town

and that means I'll actually get to meet—live and in person—this writer with whom I've had such a wonderful, honest, intelligent virtual conversation since I first read Illyria last August.  My thanks to Colleen Mondor, who raved about Liz's immaculate sentences to begin with and opened Liz's world to mine.

Liz travels far and wide, both physically and in her own imagination, and she's coming to Philadelphia as a keynoter.  I'm thinking I'll take this colorful lady to Chanticleer, pictured above, if she'll let me.

How colorful is Liz Hand, you wonder? Well, consider this.  She's giving her talk for the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society. Her topic? Norwegian Black Metal music. With brilliant friends like this, I defy anyone to call me boring or, say, stuffy.

(smiles)

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Illyria/Elizabeth Hand: Reflections

Elizabeth Hand was always a cut-above writer. One need only take a tour of her web site, where she posts journal entries from her 16th year, for proof.  What can you say about yourself when you are sixteen etc. years old and the world is either terribly hard or wonderfully simple on account of the world 'love'? she wrote then.  It was less like building a house than colonizing an island, this freakish, lovely, marvelous atoll that rose from the gray wasteland of St. Brendan's High School like some extravagant Atlantis we'd willed into being, she writes now, in Illyria.  All of our previous alliances and identities were tossed aside—jock, freak, egghead, cheerleader, anonymous.

Illyria introduces cousins, Maddy and Rogan, born on the same day and young teens when the story begins in 1970s Yonkers.  Left mostly to their own devices, indispensable to one another, predisposed to theatrics and magic, they know no bounds, this Maddy and Rogan.  They live life at its most urgent.  When they are cast in a high school production of "Twelfth Night," they are brilliant together and wild together, feral and dangerous and suddenly, in the eyes of their extended clan, in need of taming.  Their love affair is doomed and desperate.  Its vestiges will haunt Maddy for the rest of her life.

And, indeed, Maddy tells this story from the perspective of well on—from all those years later, when the intimate details are yet fresh and vivid, but the how-this-story-ends is well-known, too.  Many things will strike a reader about Illyria—its unapologetic intelligence, its unashamed incest, its nearly supernatural force—but perhaps it is the novel's point of view that struck me with greatest impact, the sense that Hand is writing out of the vulnerable, present need to make sense of a time and a place at once mystical and rooted in brand and street names.  Fog floats across the gorgeous cover and fog floats throughout the book, but never at the expense of a clenching specificity. It happened, but it couldn't have.  It was, but it isn't.  It's now because then is always now.  All of that is here.

One can always tell the difference between a story that beckoned an author—suggested itself, teased—and one that demanded.  Illyria made demands on Hand.  She answered them, resolutely.

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Illyria: writing up to teens

Had it not been for Colleen Mondor's high praise, I might never have known about Elizabeth Hand's Illyria, an alternate reality that seems supremely tragic.  Because oh my goodness, is this a book, is this writing at its no-holds-barred, no-compromises best. When I say, as I have been known to say, that the best of young adult writing honors the intelligence of teen readers, expects vocabulary and delivers it, leaves explication in the reader's hands, and entrusts the reader with the odd and the new, I am referring to writers like Markus Zusak and John Green and Rita Williams-Garcia and now, with Illyria, Elizabeth Hand, who yields sentence after sentence of un-redundant perfection in this strange and unapologetic tale of kissing cousins.

I'll be writing more about the story in a blog to come. I will be musing, too, on the power of past tense in a story like Illyria.  But for now, on this Friday morning, might I give you this—Hand's description of the boy cousin, Rogan, who "looked like he'd fallen from a painting."

He had high cheekbones in a feline face—not like a house cat's; more a cougar or a lynx, something strong and furtive and quick.  His nose was like mine, although it had been broken more than once.  His mouth was wide and surprisingly delicate, the only thing about him that might have seemed girlish.  Until he smiled, and showed narrow white teeth that were also like an animal's.  He had huge, deep-set eyes—wary eyes, which made it slightly alarming when he suddenly turned them on you—and they weren't Tierney blue but a true aquamarine, the palest blue-green, changeable as seawater in sunlight or cloud.

Find out more about this book, and about Hand herself, here.

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