Vivia, Waking by Mary Patterson Thornburg

Vivia, Waking by Mary Patterson Thornburg
Publisher: Uncial Press
Genre: Sci-Fi/Fantasy, Historical
Length: Short Story (40 pages)
Rating: 3.5 Stars
Reviewed by Astilbe

For almost thirteen years, Vivia has been a child. Now, suddenly, she’s a woman. That’s startling enough, but she’s pretty sure she can learn to handle it. She’s not so confident, though, about other things. She’s begun to know what people are feeling. She can change what they’re feeling. She can make things happen—make water boil, make the wind around the campfire slacken—just by willing them to happen. All this is unsettling, but even scarier is the fact that she’s been careless with her new-found powers. Her older brother knows what she can do, what she’s becoming. Witchery, he calls it, and he also knows what will cure her. Now Vivia has a choice to make, and she’d better make it fast.

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Vivia was a brave and mature character who seemed much older than her chronological age. Some of this was due to the people and situations she was exposed to while growing up on the road, but it also seemed to be part of her natural personality. When I first began reading, I wondered if this was supposed to be written for a young adult audience. Based on Vivia’s personality and all of the unseemly things she was exposed to during her family’s travels, though, I soon realized that this was definitely meant for adult readers.

There were pacing issues. After the characters were introduced, it took a while for the plot to develop the amount of conflict in it that I was hoping to see. While I still enjoyed the storyline itself quite a bit, the slow beginning surprised me. I had to encourage myself to keep reading until it picked up and I figured out what the choice was that Vivia was going to have to make.

One of my favorite pieces of this tale had to do with all of the cultural differences that exist between our modern world and the rural, medieval-like one that Vivia lived in. Everything from the medical treatments that were available to people in that area to how they dealt with dangerous troublemakers was nothing at all like life in the twenty-first century. I genuinely felt as though I were visiting a society that was completely different from my own. That’s exactly what I want to find when I read stuff set long ago and somewhere far away.

Vivia, Waking should be read by anyone who enjoys the fantasy genre.