Flora's Dare

Please pause a moment before diving into this second fantabulous adventure featuring that remarkable and redoubtable and realm-renowned heroine, Flora Fyrdraaca, to recall her debut in Flora Segunda (2007). There we met for the first time young Flora (she attained her pivotal 14th birthday by that book's climax, and the new volume opens a mere three months later), only child left still at home in Crackpot Hall, a moldering pile of some 18,000 rooms, most of them inaccessible due to the incapacitated condition of the house's resident demiurge, or supernatural Butler, Val. We met Flora's best pal, Udo, possible romantic object, he of the foppish yet courageous mien; her demented Dad, Hotspur, or Poppy; and her militant Mom, General Buck. We learned the history of the land of Califa, a half-free fiefdom chafing under the thumb of the brutal Huitzal Empire (don't call them "Birdies" except as insult). And we watched as Flora and Udo engaged in a series of pulse-pounding madcap escapades revolving around High Politics and Low Hijinks. And all while Flora strives to emulate her personal inspirational icon, the legendary Ranger of Califa, Nini Mo.

As Flora's Dare opens, Flora is disgruntled with her life. She finds school a useless bore. Despite her prior life-or-death adventures, she still can't stay out past midnight. And Udo seems to have found a new love interest in the form of the egregious Zu-Zu. Moreover, the simmering dissent against the Huitzals is turning into fullscale rebellion, and Flora's sister, Idden, proves to be part of it.

As if this revelation weren't enough to absorb, the City is beginning to experience unprecedented earthquakes that are growing stronger and stronger. Flora manages to discover their source: a powerful elemental, the Loliga, long chained below ground but now on the verge of erupting. With the advice of Lord Axacaya (an expatriate Huitzal who lives in the City and seems to have Califa's best interests at heart), Flora becomes determined to save her beloved City. She sets out to retrieve a longlost diary that holds the key to soothing the Loliga. But to achieve her quest, she has to face mortal and supernatural dangers, including Udo, transformed by a pair of magic boots into the notorious murderer, Springheel Jack!

Fantasy that rejects all cliches to fashion a unique and fully alive world

Before I start to tickle these two books to make them confess all their wondrous secrets, let me just say that Wilce's second novel Flora's Dare is equal to or perhaps even better than her first, and that, taken together, these two books herald the dawn of an immense talent. Although marketed as Young Adult, they are no more exclusively so than, say, the Oz books, one of the classics whose spirit they share.

Having disburdened myself of that lofty praise, which I had been dying to release since reading the first book, how can I substantiate it?

Let's tackle the language and style of this series first.

Wilce has fashioned a charming and captivating voice for Flora, utterly consonant with the girl's distinctive personality, ideals and ambitions. The narration is assured, yet never false to Flora's POV or expanding worldly knowledge or shifting self-awareness. The rhythms of Flora's speech and thoughts are rendered elegantly and captivatingly on the page. But here's the kicker: Flora's vocabulary and sentence constructions are utterly otherworldly, with slang and exclamations and forms of address reflective of the entire culture and history and mythology of Califa. Behind every sentence of Flora's lurks a secondary subcreation, and just as Flora's words strengthen that imaginary world, so does the subtext of the world strengthen her words. One gets the feel, as with Tolkien, that Wilce has volumes of secret history about Califa that she's doling out in judicious bits. Flora's slangy vernacular supplies what is so often missing in cod-medieval fantasy novels: a sense of a truly distinct other dimension. And the fact that Califa and the City are wacked alternate-history versions of California and San Francisco lend a piquancy to the tale.

As for the style of Flora's Dare: Can you say breezy and delightful, suspenseful and comic, scary and propulsive? Flora—or actually Wilce, of course—propels her narrative at a rollicking, sure-handed clip. Flora's adventures are simultaneously old-fashioned yet postmodern, while not being wink-wink-nudge-nudge, heavy-handedly ironic. Wilce is all about retro (actually, eternally classic) thrills updated for contemporary sensibilities, which means, among other things, looking biological realities in the face. (How does Flora first sense the threat of the Loliga? When a tendril intrudes up from the toilet as she's sitting to pee!) In this she recalls Williams Goldman's The Princess Bride (1973), as well as such authors as William Moers, James Blaylock and Tim Powers. You might detect a bit of mannerpunk in her novels as well. Older figures such as James Branch Cabell, Ronald Firbank. Mervyn Peake and Jerome K. Jerome figure into the mix too. But the Wilce blend of these influences comes out utterly singular.

Yet beneath all the madcap shennanigans that will hold you enthralled with Flora's Dare are important themes and issues, deftly evoked and considered: political and personal freedom; the nature of heroism and friendship; the path to maturity; the nature of ambition and idealism; lineage and destiny; the triumph of will over appearance (Flora is plump and moderately pretty, but no looker like Zu-Zu). Moreover, Wilce is unfraid to shake her world to its roots. No return to the status quo ante at book's end for her.

This lively, inventive, alluringly daft yet touching romp is a meaning-packed adventure that will resonate with young and old alike, long after the flavor-of-the-month fantasies have faded and been forgotten.

Google the word "stilskin" that occurs in Flora's Dare to uncover a secret Tuckerized allusion to one of the author's pals.

-—Paul