The Ballad of Perilous Graves (Alex Jennings)

The Ballad of Perilous Graves
Alex Jennings
Redhook
Fiction, Fantasy
*** (Okay)

DESCRIPTION: The summer night when Doctor Professor, piano-playing sorcerer of the magic-infused city of Nola, appeared outside Perry and Brendy's home - far outside his usual stomping grounds - was the night everything changed for the kids... and not for the better. With the eccentric neighbor girl Peaches, who lives alone (save her collection of animals, including a house horse) and has super strength and other powers, they find themselves called to a greater purpose. Someone has stolen songs from Doctor Professor's piano, the Mess Around - and it's the magic of songs that creates and powers and protects Nola. With the terrible forces of a great Storm gathering, the trio - along with others, both in Nola and its mundane mirror known as New Orleans - must undertake a dangerous quest, into layers of dream and memory and other realities, seeking powerful magical artifacts and unlocking dangerous gifts, all while being hunted by deadly haints and others who would see Nola burn to ashes and drown in the sea.

REVIEW: This was billed as a wild, strange tale of music and magic and a modern, New Orleans twist on age-old themes. It started out exactly that, with opening pages that grabbed me like few books have of late. Young Perry (Perilous) Graves and his kid sister Brendy have lived in Nola their whole young lives, taking the strangeness of the place - the floating graffiti tags and their bizarre devotees who slowly transform into something other than human, the zombies and haints and talking humanoid Animals, the floating vehicles acting as city buses, the peculiar club where it's possible to breathe underwater, the songs that power daily life and Nola's very existence - for granted. Their friend Peaches takes after Pippi Longstocking, down to her casual super strength, missing sea captain father, and irreverent worldview (plus a general distrust of all things grown-up). Together, they have adventures that might be written off as mere childhood imagination in other stories, but are acknowledged as very real, and only vaguely noteworthy, in Nola. The magic-mirror version of New Orleans is, as mentioned in the hype, a "love letter" to the city, and particularly the jazz music that runs through its streets like lifeblood; without those jazz tunes, there literally would be no city, as Doctor Professor (and other sorcerers) used their music to create and preserve Nola against the Storm, which is itself the embodiment of every hurricane, literal and metaphoric, that has tried to throw down New Orleans for centuries. Even by Nola's standards, things get very strange (and very dangerous) very fast when Doctor Professor's songs go missing - each taking embodiment as a person, some of whom no longer remember that they are the very songs that form the warp and weft of the city's unreal fabric. Not all of the songs are benevolent or even merely benign, either, particularly the cold-blooded killer Stagger Lee. Meanwhile, a former graffiti tagger from New Orleans finds himself called back to the city he fled as a teen, having turned his back on his art when it started doing strange things... only he's not just him, he's also an echo in Nola, and he'll have a very important part to play... maybe?
Round about this point is where things started to get too surreal and confusing for my tastes, and also about when I generally stopped liking the characters as much. Perry had a magical gift, but turned his back on it after a scary encounter... and, for poorly-described reasons, never told anyone, even his beloved parents or sister, why, making his reluctance to pick up his gifts again even when the fate of the city and everyone one and everything he loves is on the line irritating. Brendy starts out a competent party member, but at some point devolves into barely a sidekick. Peaches always felt like an exaggeration, so later attempts to humanize her fell flat. The whole plot becomes convoluted and almost impossible to follow, wending through visions and dreams and bizarre locations that may or may not exist and other versions of reality, as there seems to be no internal logic to any of it save whatever seems strangest at the time. Rules and restrictions pop up out of nowhere to be ignored or forgotten later. Songs and people drift through like the floating, hallucinatory graffiti tags in Nola's streets. It takes on the sheen of a fever dream. At some point, I just couldn't buy into any of them, even for the sake of the increasingly thin storyline. The whole things started to feel like one of those jazz numbers where the musicians just go completely off the rails and wander all over the place except anywhere in the vicinity of a recognizable tune, seeming to almost take pride in the sound of their own instruments and how they're so deliberately being Wild and Original and Not At All Like A Regular Melody, and the more lost the audience is about where (if anywhere) they might be going, the more proud they are... which is a perfectly legitimate way to play, but not one that I personally like listening to, let alone reading about. As for the ending... it felt weirdly inconclusive, but reality itself had been bent and broken and folded over and thrown out and recycled and deformed and otherwise rendered utterly meaningless even in story context, so how could I bring myself to care about what happened to Nola or anyone in it?
Despite the high praise and high promise and the undoubtedly unique New Orleans flavor, The Ballad of Perilous Graves is just not my kind of music.

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