The Wall and the Wing
by Laura Ruby
Laura Ruby's The Wall and the Wing is an exciting, funny and distinctively American fantasy. The book's setting is a strange combination of the familiar and not-quite-so familiar. It looks a lot like New York and many of the touchstones of contemporary culture get namechecks: Oprah, e-Bay, Harry Potter - even Stanley Yelnats. On the other hand, Ruby has given the city a vigorous shove sideways, away from consensus reality and toward the worlds of freakery and nightmare. She has created a memorable landscape, where urban myths are everyday reality. Subway vampires, gangsters whose scarred faces are marked by real zippers, rat-men, and free-range alligators all find a place on her crowded stage.
Ruby is exhilaratingly inventive, and she tells her story with flare and a good deal of humour. On the other hand, this very modern book is many ways quite traditional, not least in the situation of its main character. Gurl is a child at bottom of the heap, who has been raised as an orphan in Hope House for the Homeless and Hopeless, under the deranged eye of its chatelaine, the cosmetic-surgery-obsessed Mrs Terwiliger.
Not only that, Gurl is a Leadfoot, one of the few New Yorkers incapable of flight (an ability most of the population started to exhibit a century or so before). Gurl feels her social inferiority keenly but, in the way of these things, soon discovers a gift that more than compensates for her inadequacy. She finds that she is a Wall ' that is, someone with the ability to make herself invisible. Forming an alliance with another orphan, Bug, she sets out to free herself from Mrs Terwiliger's clutches, find out the truth of her own identity, and ' not least ' rescue her cat, Noodle. The resolution of the mystery, at least as far as Gurl herself is concerned, is rather predictable, but the journey to that destination is well worth the pains of the arrival, and most of the time Ruby's storytelling and verbal legerdemain are nimble enough to distract readers from the overfamiliarity of the underlying plot.
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