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WoGF Review: Half World by Hiromi Goto
Tanya F. (metalorchid), has been a fan of sci-fi since childhood, a love that kicked off with Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles. She enjoys plots that involve time travel and alternate histories, but also can’t resist a lengthy, world weaving fantasy epic, or a well crafted short horror story.
Editor’s note: This review counts for the July review poll.
When we first meet Melanie Tamaki, the shy and neglected protagonist of Hiromi Goto‘s Half World, she is running with all her might, as she is being chased down the street by a pack of bullies who are slinging pebbles and harsh insults at her back. The opening scenes introduce us to a downtrodden protagonist who seems unlikely to become her own hero. However, deftly weaving together elements of horror, fantasy, and Chinese and Japanese spirituality, Hiromi Goto turns the hero’s quest on its ear, providing us with a believable heroine and a thrilling, fantastical coming of age story.
Melanie is a teenager who has been left to scrape together small bits of comfort while her ailing, disinterested mother spends most of her days wasting away in a daze. The Half World of the title refers to the otherworldly, purgatory setting where Melanie must find her mother, who has disappeared suddenly. But Melanie has already been living in a half world, of sorts; it is a world frequently occupied by impoverished and misunderstood children who must carve out a safe space for themselves when neither home life nor their school provide it. Melanie’s comfort is found with crows circling about the dock side of her town, and with the surly but compassionate neighborhood grocer, Ms. Wei, an older woman who has lost her partner of many years, Nora Stein, and now resides in a world of whispered stories and piles of books.
WoGF Review: Half World by Hiromi Goto
Veronica H. (Parnassus Reads) is a long-suffering bibliomaniac, a has-been English teacher, and a frequently infrequent blogger at parnssusreads.com. Most of her working life has been spent in bookstores. As such, her to-read pile is taking over her desk, well, house really, but she’s always happy to get suggestions for good books and authors, especially in SF/F.
After signing up for the Worlds Without Ends Women of Genre Fiction year long reading challenge, I had to choose who I wanted to read and what I wanted to read by them. Conveniently, the website had a list of authors and their books. I tried to choose authors I hadn’t heard of or read before. Among these was Hiromi Goto. I chose her young adult novel Half World, which tells the story of Melanie Tamaki, her ill-fated mother, and Melanie’s quest to reunite the Three Realms.
Melanie hasn’t had an easy time of life. She is fat, does poorly in school, and has a drunk for a mother. For these reasons, she is frequently bullied by her peers. After running away from the torment one day, Melanie returns home to discover that her mother has seemingly abandoned her. The truth is far more sinister, and thus begins Melanie’s epic quest to Half World to save her mother from the deranged Mr. Glueskin.
Half World is much like limbo, where people constantly relive the trauma of their death. Because the inhabitants of half world have relived this trauma over and over for thousands of years, when the three Realms were initially separated, many of them have become mad, twisted creatures, frequently compared to Hieronymous Bosch’s famous creatures in the Hell panel of the Garden of Earthly Delights. As it soon becomes clear, Melanie must not only save her mother, but also reunite the three Realms and restore balance to the universe.
