My Swordhand is Singing

My Swordhand is Singing
by Marcus Sedgwick

MY SWORDHAND IS SINGING by

Category: Paranormal

Age Recommendation: Grades 6+

Release Date: 10/9/07

Publisher: Wendy Lamb

Reviewed by:

Rating: 5 Stars

Marcus Sedgwick’s MY SWORDHAND IS SINGING is a dark novel with a heavy emphasis on thick, snowy

forests

of Eastern Europe, gypsies, and superstitious town folk. It is the perfect setting for a scary story, but it is

also much, much

more.

Tomas and his teenage son, Peter, are a pair of traveling woodcutters with a mysterious past that settle down in the

village

of Chust one winter. Before long a string a deaths strike the village. Peter is perturbed by the villagers’

strange reactions

to the occurrences. When he asks Tomas about them, his father brushes away his questions as

silly folk lore. However,

Tomas is also doing his own share of strange things, like digging a trench around their

home and filling it with moving

water. When Agnes, a girl Peter likes, is symbolically married to a dead man and

shut up in a remote hut, Peter tries to

rescue her and runs into a monster.

Sedgwick takes pains to distance his tale from the gentleman bloodsucker that Anne Rice and authors like her have

embedded into pop culture. The word “vampire” is never mentioned and the vampires, themselves, have varying

appearances throughout the novel. He does a great job at weaving various and sometimes seemingly paradoxical

pieces

of folk lore. This gives the story a great sense of immediacy and realism. Sedgwick also shifts the focus from

vampires to

people who have to deal with terrifying occurrences at home. The buildup of the growing atmosphere

of fear and denial

will have readers biting their fingernails.

Marcus Sedgwick seems to take a lot of risks in writing this atypical, historically rich vampire novel. Central to the

story

line is not the relationship between a human and vampire or a girl and a boy (a la Buffy and Angel), but a

wounded

relationship between father and son. While this may seem terribly uncool, the realism of this relationship is

what grounds

the novel and makes the more fantastical elements more believable and scary.