Stay
September 11th, 2002Nicola Griffith
ISBN: 0385503008
This book is a sequel to The Blue Place, and while I did like that book, I think this one is stronger.
The novel begins not long after the previous one left off, with Aud shattered in her grief. Since one of the things that annoyed me before was Aud’s superhuman competence, this was a welcome development. It was also hard to sit with, because Griffith does an expert job of rendering the pain of losing a loved one.
There was a moment in the book where I thought, ‘crap, this is going to turn into a mystery’ but that didn’t actually materialize. [I am not a mystery genre fan, and I could see how this story could have veered into fulfilling genre conventions at the expense of following the "real" story. ] It is taughtly plotted, but the real story is as much inside Aud’s head as anywhere else.
Griffith can write: she knows how to describe a walk through the woods, what to have her characters say, and what not to have them say. Her prose can be beautiful and chilling, sometimes both at once.
At the end of the book, I found myself wondering if she was going to write a third “Aud” book. Not because the end was a pitch for book three–I hate it when things are written with that obviously, huckersterishly, in mind–but because I liked Aud better now, and wanted to see her go down the path a bit further. Stay is the story of Aud’s struggle to keep her promise to Julia to “stay in the world.” I think completing a trilogy would give us the chance to see her living in it.
