Illuminations (T. Kingfisher)

Illuminations
T. Kingfisher
Tantor
Fiction, MG Fantasy
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: Once, Studio Mandolini produced the best illuminations - magical artwork, capable of nearly anything from keeping food fresh in the pantry to turning back a raging housefire - in the city. But those days are fading, and today's Mandolini family of artists seem to be fading with it, disappearing into their own projects. Young Rosa hopes to become an illuminator herself, but she grows so bored with the lessons, with having to draw the same things over and over and over again, when all she really wants to draw is monsters like fanged radishes. It doesn't help that she also still can't infuse her art with power, the key to a true illumination, though everyone agrees that she's almost there; "almost" still isn't good enough, and it makes all the tedium of practice, practice, practice seem all the more useless. Discouraged and more than a little bored, Rosa ends up rummaging around in the studio's basement and the collected artistic detritus of several generations of Mandolinis... which is where she found the forgotten box with the crow on the lid - a crow that must have some powerful illumination magic infused, as the very sight of it keeps making her turn around and temporarily forget she even saw the box. But one thing she definitely has in common with her family is her stubborn determination; if a box doesn't want to be seen, let alone opened, nothing is going to stop her from doing just that.
Which is how Rosa unleashes a magical monster that may well spell the doom of Studio Mandolini: an enspelled mandrake root known as a Scarling, whose charcoal scribbles can come to life and drain power from illuminations.
Helped only by the talking crow Payne, come to life from the box lid, Rosa decides that, since she unleashed the Scarling (and since nobody would believe her anyway), it's up to her to stop the malicious little beast... but the Scarling has had centuries to plot its revenge against the Mandolini family, and Rosa can't even paint a working illumination to fight against its ever-growing army of evil scribbles.

REVIEW: I had hoped that Illuminations would follow in the vein of T. Kingfisher's rather enjoyable A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking, which had an outwardly light premise that hid darker shades and a sharper tooth underneath. This story, though, is a doodle that stays on the surface of the page, aimed younger and being rather more silly, and even at its relatively short length it felt a little long for the story it contained.
Rosa starts out as, frankly, a whiny and selfish little kid, complaining to her family about her boredom and expecting them to solve the problem. Everything about the crow box in the basement screams "Dangerous Magic - Do Not Touch", and a girl raised in a studio full of people who work with magical artwork should well recognize trouble when she sees it, but nevertheless she does the selfish, short-sighted thing... after quite a bit of drawing out and dithering by the story, enough that I came close (more than once) to finding another audiobook. Once the Scarling is released (along with its guardian, the living artwork crow Payne), things pick up a little, but still often wander into tangents about the exaggerated and often silly Mandolini family (who are Artists in the purest, most eccentric and distractable sense of the term) and Rosa's frustrations with being a kid, often talked down to when she isn't outright overlooked. There are some themes about family and friendship and forgiveness and how complicated all three can be, and how art as a job can feel more like a repetitive grind and less like a joyous connection with the muses (further exacerbated by how illuminations work: styles and specifics differ, but each illumination must contain specific elements if it is to do its job, meaning that, for instance, a cat must have blue eyes if it's to ward off mice... and painting dozens of cats, even of different sizes and in different poses, with blue eyes will inevitably start to feel monotonous by the fifth or six feline on the easel, even if that's what one must do to pay the bills). Rosa does some growing up, of course, and it's almost inevitable that she levels up in the art department while fighting malicious scribbles (that her family initially assumes must be her, even though she never once, not even as a child, drew on the studio walls or made art in such a crude style and would have no reason in the world to act out against the other Mandolinis). Some points are repeated more than even a younger reader should need to figure things out, and characters often need several blows to the skull to figure some things out. The ending draws itself out (and never follows through on an earlier setup that I was absolutely positive would come into play, given how much time went into showing off that particular project), after a climax where I was almost shouting at the characters to do the one thing that they obviously needed to do (which they eventually did even without my input).
There's a light, whimsical tone and several silly moments, and Payne in particular was a fun character (for all that even he could've used a rap on the skull more than once for wandering off on tangents and not spitting things out clearly). The concept of illuminations also was interesting. I just found Rosa and the others a bit too frustratingly obtuse and the story itself a little too thin for my tastes.

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