Review: When the Bough Breaks

It's time now to review When the Bough Breaks, the second book in the two book omnibus that also included Wheels of Fire, the last book I reviewed. This book is set in the same universe, where elves living undercover in the United States race cars to raise money for youth shelters (yes, that;s seriously why they're doing it). Although the premise is...unpromising, this is actually a farly good book, and definitely is better than the mediocre Wheels of Fire.

This book deals with Mac Lynn, an elven race car driver in North Carolina whose real name is Maclyn (clever aliad there), whose girlfriend is a human school teacher named Lianne, who at the beginning of the book brings her 5th grade class to the race track to talk to Mac about race car driving. Suddenly, one of the cars crashes, but miraculously no one is seriously hurt. Mac notices a girl in Lianne's class named Amanda who seems to have controlled the explosion, and who seems to have immense magical ability. This is of immense interest to the elves, so Mac decides to investigate. Unfortunately, a woman named Belinda, who works for a man looking for telekinetics, happens to also be at the track at the same time and sees the incident. Fortunately, she believes Mac was the one who controlled the explosion, and Mac pretty soon is able to figure out what she's trying to do and decides to play along to lead her away from the child.

However, there are complications. Amanda has apparently developed her magical abilities because she has been seriously abused by her father for most of her life. This has also caused her to develop multiple personality disorder, with her personality split into three facets: the obsessively clean and incredibly judgemental puritan Alice, the sweet and intelligent Abbey, and the angry and rage-filled Anne, who is the personality that has to do with the abuse by her father. She is also the one who has developed the magical abilities, and that combined with her psychotic distrust of everyone endangers everything else in the book. In addition to the three personalities, Amanda is being possesed by the spirit of an ancient Celtic druidess named Cethlinn who one day appeared inside Amanda's psyche for unknown reasons. Cethlinn tries her best to reunite the three facets of Amanda's personality so that Amanda can deal with her father and be a whole person.

The main plot of the book is for Mac to figure out some way of removing Amanda from her house so she can be raised by the elves, who know how to teach her to use her magical abilities and also can raise her in a loving environment. This is a fairly simple goal, but Mac keeps on getting distracted from it by having to deal with Belinda, Lianne's suspicions about him, and omens of an invasion of the elven realm by horrible unkillable monsters. Lackey accomplishes this balance quite well, so that I never thought that Mac could have just grabbed Amanda first and dealt with everything else afterwards. The other parts of the plot never felt like distractions to me.

The characters are all well balanced, with Mac as a powerful but not perfect hero (which was one of my problems with Al from the last book) who screws up some times and is even put in real danger quite a lot. His mother Dierdre (who works in the human world as his mechanic D.D.) is also quite good, a snarky woman who has earned her wisdom about the way the human and elven worlds work. Lianne was also pitch-perfect, and significantly more interesting than Cindy from the last book, as a logical woman who is forced to accept that which she thought was impossible, and she is able to hold her own with Mac over the course of the book. I also liked how the book ended for her, which is so very different from how the last book ended for Cindy, and is so much better in my opinion. Finally, Belinda was a character that I spent the entire book alternating between pitying and thinking that she deserved what she got, laughing at all of the various tricks Mac plays on her and fearing her increasingly insane rage at him. And her final two scenes in the book, where she suddenly becomes sympathetic, were wonderful.

The three personalities of Amanda are the center of the book. For the first two thirds, Alice barely appears, to the extent that I began to wonder why she was mentioned. It seemed like the story was more of a struggle between the light side of Amanda (Abbey) and the dark side (Anne). But the final third of the book showed that this was not true, and demonstrated both how Alice was a fundamental part of Amanda and how Anne (who by this time had bec0me a truly frightening character) might not be simply the darker side of the poor tortured girl. Cethlinn was also quite good and very necessary to the book, as she was the reader's portal into Amanda's troubled mind, able to see all three aspects of Amanda for what they were. Without her, it would have been difficult to truly understand Amanda.

There were a few loose ends that were never explained (like what Belinda was doing at the racetrack in the first place, and where Cethlinn came from), but all in all I thought this was a surprisingly good book. It's the kind of book I'd read again in a heartbeat.

My next book is going to be The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, so I may end up doing reviews of individual stories therin. Anyways, see y'all later

David