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    Riddance: Or: The Sybil Joines Vocational School for Ghost Speakers & Hearing-Mouth Children
    Riddance: Or: The Sybil Joines Vocational School for Ghost Speakers & Hearing-Mouth Children
    Riddance: Or: The Sybil Joines Vocational School for Ghost Speakers & Hearing-Mouth Children
    Audiobook14 hours

    Riddance: Or: The Sybil Joines Vocational School for Ghost Speakers & Hearing-Mouth Children

    Written by Shelley Jackson

    Narrated by Allyson Johnson

    2.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Eleven-year-old Jane Grandison, tormented by her stutter, sits in the back seat of a car, letter in hand inviting her to live and study at the Sybil Joines Vocational School for Ghost Speakers Hearing-Mouth Children. Founded in 1890 by Headmistress Sybil Joines, the school-at first glance-is a sanctuary for children seeking to cure their speech impediments. Inspired by her haunted and tragic childhood, the Headmistress has other ideas.

    Pioneering the field of necrophysics, the Headmistress harnesses the "gift" she and her students possess. Through their stutters, together they have the ability to channel ghostly voices communicating from the land of the dead, a realm the Headmistress herself visits at will. Things change for the school and the Headmistress when a student disappears, attracting attention from parents and police alike.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHighbridge Company
    Release dateNov 14, 2018
    ISBN9781684418480
    Riddance: Or: The Sybil Joines Vocational School for Ghost Speakers & Hearing-Mouth Children
    Author

    Shelley Jackson

    Shelley Jackson is the author of the short story collection The Melancholy of Anatomy, the hypertext novel Patchwork Girl, several children's books, and "Skin," a story published in tattoos on the skin of more than two thousand volunteers. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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    Reviews for Riddance

    2.5/5

    9 ratings2 reviews

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    • 2/5
      Riddance revolves around a strange school in which children with stutters are trained to become spirit mediums. (Stutterers are particularly suited for the task, as their difficulty speaking in their own voices provides space for the dead to speak through them.) In particular, it recounts the life stories of Sybil Joines, a white woman who founded the school in the late 1800s and serves as its headmistress, and Jane Grandison, a mixed-race student who becomes the Headmistress's amanuensis and aspires to one day succeed her in running the school. Along the way, it provides lengthy disquisitions on the nature and purpose of language.

      In theory, it seems that the Headmistress and Grandison are supposed to share the role of protagonist. In practice, it is much more Sybil's story than Grandison's -- even if their life stories are given equal page time (I didn't count), the inclusion of Sybil's correspondence and transcripts of her journeys through the Land of the Dead give her more focus. She also seems a more central figure, narratively, than Grandison. In particular, it is established through a frame narrative by a modern scholar researching the school that every successive headmistress is Sybil; that is, their job is to channel Sybil so that she may continue running the school after her death. Thus, Grandison's ambition (which she does, ultimately, achieve) is to abnegate her own identity to become a vessel for Sybil.

      In Grandison's narrative, she explicitly raises several questions about race in the context of spirit-channeling that the novel then immediately drops and never returns to. Why, she asks, are all the spirits channeled by Sybil and her students white people who are fluent English-speakers? The reader will never know, as the issue is not explored -- simply mentioned and then forgotten. What, she wonders briefly, does it mean for her as a mixed-race person to become the headmistress and allow a white woman to speak through her? Is the opportunity for a position of authority worth that cost? This issue, too, is never mentioned again, and the reader is not privy to the thought processes that lead her to go through with it in the end.

      In addition, for a novel that purports to be about language, it seems to have very little understanding of linguistics. Of course, it is possible to talk about language in a literary sense without delving into linguistics, but the problem is that the novel does attempt to get into topics such as grammars and writing systems, and when it does, the lack of research is evident. For example, the Headmistress at one point creates a writing system for English based on drawings of the mouth and tongue positions required to make a given sound. This is described as resulting in twenty-six characters, one for each letter of the alphabet. The problem is that sounds (or, in linguistics terms, phonemes) in English don't correspond neatly to the alphabet at all -- standard American English has thirty-eight to forty different phonemes. And I'm sorry, but if you don't know the difference between a phoneme and a grapheme, I am not interested in anything you have to say about writing systems. This is basic stuff.

      Ultimately, despite an intriguing concept, Riddance fell flat on several counts, and I felt its halfhearted attempts to address racial issues were almost worse than not mentioning them at all.
    • 4/5
      This is a very hard one to review, which in itself is a compliment. I'm not sure what its frame of reference should be.First, this is not a book to own on Kindle. The illustration and design are masterful, and complement the writing very well. You'd lose something from having one without the other. Plus, there's copious footnoting throughout out the book. Not only does a hardcopy feel good in hand, it'd be difficult and exasperating in digital format, I'd think. Also--bonus--I'm pretty sure Zachary Thomas Dodson also did Bats of the Republic? This - like that - is unconventional in storytelling and format.The story is a murder mystery, involving ghosts. It takes place in the Sybil Joines Vocational School for Ghost Speakers & Hearing Mouth Children in which children who stutter or have other speech impairments are taught by headmistresses to channel the voices of the dead. The writing is superb, as is the detail. The vocabulary is rich with words that are not and never will be in daily use, but are amazing and wonderful. Some of the sentences and paragraphs I found myself reading over and over, just to absorb and bask in their crafting. This is not an action packed book, by any stretch. The reading cadence is a slow, languorous ooze and it took me awhile to finish, not because it was bad, but because there wasn't anything compelling me to turn pages more rapidly.The sepia colors of this book capture its tone perfectly. It's not bright and colorful, nor is it black and dark. It's like a vintage photograph that retains some mysteriousness. I think if you read this more than once, you'd pick up something different each time.If you like books and authors that are unconventional, unpredictable, small press/indie, and a bit experimental in form or structure, this is definitely one you should try.