Review: The Thirteenth Child

Last weekend, I finally read Patricia Wrede’s controversial book Thirteenth Child, which drew a lot of ire when it first came out for quite literally erasing American Indians from the North American landscape. The premise of the book is that there were no human beings in North America to encounter as European settlers move west, and thus no extinction of the American megafauna. (I realize that whether those extinctions were human-caused is still under debate.) Also, there is magic, so said megafauna includes both mundane and magical creatures.

There’s stuff I liked a lot, notably the characters. Eff and her family remind me very strongly of Little Sister and hers in Gene Stratton Porter’s Laddie, though without the religious component. Miss Ochiba was redoubtable and wonderful, all the more so for that she is in a society that allows her to shine. (There are hints of racism, but they’re subtle, perhaps too much so to be believable.)

Where it falls down, I think, is in the worldbuilding – and this is related to the accusations of racism, because some of the missed items are specifically the ones that European-ancestry privilege could help hide. (I say that based on what I’m afraid I might have missed myself if I hadn’t been looking for it.) Granted the story is from Eff’s perspective and that limits what we actually see clearly, but there are too many unexamined consequences of the changes that make Eff’s world different from ours. One of those is what happened to the Native Americans, and how did that change the rest of the world? I’d expect European settlement into the Americas to be slower, not faster, without all the help from people who had already learned to live in those conditions. I also don’t see any effect on the Avropean (European) or Hijero-Cathayan (Japanese/Chinese, I think) schools of a different population distribution in Asia. The whole slavery thing played out differently, so that the War of Secession was 30 years earlier, yet there were colonies of slaves and of free blacks, both. The only hint of social results is the standoffishness some people have toward Miss Ochiba and the fact that Aphrikan and Avropean (African/European) schools of magic rarely mix (except in one college where they do). What I don’t see is either any of the bitterness and division left by the war that even a child like Eff would see, or else a reason it’s not there. The settlers have horses and herd animals and they use magic, but there don’t seem to be any tamed magical animals. We don’t get a feeling for how routinely magic is used even in the home until very late in the book when a character whose circumstances don’t permit magic use is complaining about it. I don’t find the complete lack of religion believable, either, in an analogue of the American West; I get the impression it was far too embedded in too many settlers’ lives to have vanished without some indication of a reason for it.

On the other hand, I did like the somewhat strengthened position of women; they’re still responsible for the children and the house, but it seems reasonable that, with the burden of housework lightened by magic, they’d be more free outside the home.

There are enough differences from our world that there’s going to be too much to cover in one book, and there would be a lot of things that Eff doesn’t see or understand. I don’t know if Wrede had originally planned this as a series, if later books would cover those things, and even if so, if those plans are still on. Just in my subjective opinion, there are too many consequences not worked out, things missing that would fall inside Eff’s ken for this world to be completely satisfying.