Sparkers (Eleanor Glewwe)

Sparkers
Eleanor Glewwe
Viking Books for Young Readers
Fiction, MG Fantasy
****+ (Good/Great)

DESCRIPTION: In the city-state of Ashara, to be without magic is to be a second-class citizen, as Marah Levi knows too well. Her kind - derisively called "sparkers" for the spark of magic they'll never have - are expected to stick to menial tasks and hard labor, while the magicians run the government and do more important things. Though others chafe at increasingly strict laws that always come down harder on nonmagical backs, it's not really so bad; she has her family and her violin and her books, and looks forward to a decent, if nondescript, future like her sparker peers.
Then the plague of the dark eyes descends upon the city, and things rapidly go from bad to worse.
A chance encounter with the daughter of a well-ranked magical family leads Marah into the labyrinth of Asharan council politics and forbidden books. As the plague strikes magical and nonmagical households indiscriminately, turning victims' eyes dark before slowly killing them, the Council's measures grow more ever more draconian - and when Marah and her new friend, the girl's brother Azariah, discover the truth, it's more terrible than anything they could imagine. But what can children hope to do against an entire city-state founded on the deepest of lies and injustices?

REVIEW: It can be difficult for any book to handle racial and cultural injustice, inequalities and privilege, and the rationalizations that entrench and enable such things without dropping into caricature, but Sparkers handles the concepts better than some adult books I've read. Marah, Azariah, and the rest of the cast are always people first, but their cultures and classes are also inherent parts of who they are, and even if and when they learn to see past that, those parts of them never go away. Not only is there growing tension between the ruling mage culture and the underclass of nonmagical citizens, but recent influxes of refugees add a third prong. The city is a powder keg long before the dark eyes plague arrives, already being steered toward intolerance by a Council with a dark ulterior motive, manipulating education and history to suit their chosen vision. The roots of the darkness run centuries deep, so even the chief instigators of the modern disaster are simply filling in roles cast for them by their ancestors. Marah sometimes stumbles as she navigates the city, first solely as a second-class nonmagical citizen, then as a somewhat awkward friend of a magical family, and later as agitator and seditionist when she and Azariah can no longer be silent about what they know, but she never acts in outright stupidity, and her trials bring genuine pain and conflict that go far beyond her own life. Likewise, Azariah and his family, though among the more liberal-minded of their kind, cannot help but be blind to the true plight of Marah and her people and their own part in perpetuating the greater injustices on which Ashara was founded. By the end, there is hope, but no simple magic bullet to fix everything that has gone wrong. The story moves fairly well, if not necessarily at breakneck speed, crafting characters, a city, and world that feel solid enough to support future stories. I may be mildly generous with the extra half-star, but it wound up pulling me in more than I'd anticipated, crafting a surprisingly emotional and nuanced tale of cultural clashes without easy or obvious answers.

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