James Nicoll Reviews

Nisi Shawl’s 2022 Speculation is a stand-alone middle-grade book.

Winna Cole’s broken glasses would be a calamity at the best of times. When her mother is sick and in hospital, the broken spectacles are a disaster. Winna cannot see without them and there’s no way that the family can pay for new glasses. Luckily, Winna’s Grampa Carl has a solution: Winna’s late Great-Aunt Estelle’s spectacles.

Estelle’s glasses are old-fashioned but more than functional. They won’t necessarily solve Winna’s problems, but they will make those problems very different.

As expected, the glasses help Winna see the world more clearly. In fact, the magical spectacles make Winna see the world so much more clearly that she can see ghosts. This development is of considerable interest to one particular ghost, that of Great-Aunt Estelle. Too bad the glasses are not sufficiently magical to render Winna able to hear ghosts.

With a bit of thought and some experimentation, Winna bridges the communication gap. Estelle explains that the Coles are cursed and that the frequency with which Coles die young is directly related to that curse. No doubt Winna’s mother’s current illness is caused by the curse. There is hope for Winna’s mother and the Coles, but only if Winna can succeed at a nigh-impossible task.

A century before, Winna’s great-great-grandmother, Winona Gonder Cole, fled slavery for freedom. The pregnant former slave took refuge with a white family long enough to bear a baby boy, Key. Soon after the baby was born, the barn in which mother and child were hiding was burned to the ground. Winona woke in time to save herself, but she was unable to find Key before the flames forced her outside.

Winona was convinced that Key did not die, that he was stolen by whoever had set fire to the barn. Winona vowed a mighty vow to find lost Key. She died before she could find her missing son. Her vow, or rather the failure to fulfil it, cursed her descendants both living and dead.

The solution is straightforward. Find Key. The curse will be lifted from the living Coles and the dead Coles will be able to rest easy. Estelle is certain Key is still alive.

Finding a nearly hundred-year-old man whose name and location are unknown won’t be easy. If it were easy, a previous Cole would have done it. At least Winna has her magic glasses… provided nobody breaks them.

~oOo~

Although the title consists of a single common word, Speculation is easily to find on bookseller websites, even if one does not add the author’s name. That might sound like an odd detail to note, but there are a lot of books out there whose titles do not lend themselves to searches.

Slaves did not enjoy being slaves. Even the slaves in what were regarded as less onerous positions did not enjoy being slaves. In fact, the situation of slavery was sufficiently unpleasant that a pregnant slave might well flee north rather than provide her owner with another victim. I understand that this revelation may be extremely alarming to Gone With The Wind fans, to whom the idea that African Americans neither enjoyed nor benefited from slavery is entirely novel [1].

While 1962 might seem comfortably distant from the first American Civil War, Winna has to live with the repercussions of events leading up to, during, and after the war. She would have to in any case, but the vow weighing on her family makes her situation very immediate.

Shawl steers a skillful path between underlining the reality of the US, past and present, without doing so in such a way as to traumatize the middle-grade readers for whom the book is intended [2]. Winna has to deal with challenging family history, as well as the very real possibility that failure on her part to solve a nigh-impossible-to-solve mystery will kill her mother. The tone of the novel is far less dark than one might expect from that description.

Recommended for middle-grade readers. This somewhat older than middle-grade reader enjoyed the novel as well [3].

Speculation is available here (Amazon US), here (Amazon Canada), here (Amazon UK), here (Barnes & Noble), here (Chapters-Indigo), and here (Words Worth Books).

I did not find Speculation at Apple Books.

1: Fun fact. Author Steven Barnes’ blog contains quite a few entries attesting to slavery’s costs to slaves, presumably because there are a lot of people out there who thought and probably still think that slaves had a tolerable life. Of course, based on my experience with the particular subset of SFF fans he was trying to educate, discovering that slavery is misery only made them more enthusiastic about bringing it back. I guess if the election in the US goes badly, we will find out if I am right.

2: Am I still angry about a kindergarten double-bill of Old Yeller and The Red Balloon? Yes. Yes, I am.

3: Some discourteous person pointed out that the interval between 1865 and 1962 is only about fifty percent more time than has elapsed since I was born.