May 16

May 16 The Woman Who Loved Reindeer by Meredith Ann Pierce

Intuition; it's a hell of a thing. I didn't truly understand how much I took it for granted until it pulled through for me while reading The Woman Who Loved Reindeer.

I'm getting ahead of myself.

Caribou (Yes, that's her name) is a seer sort of person who lives outside of her tribe on account of errbody being afraid of her. At the onset of the book, she's thirteen and lives by herself. Then her sister-in-law foists a two-month-old baby onto her. It's very obviously not Caribou's brother's child due to its golden hair and fair skin, and her brother is due home from driving the caribou herds any day now. He cannot know about his wife's infidelity.

So Caribou takes the baby. (Un)fortunately, in this world, there's an herb that'll cause anyone with a uterus to lactate. Caribou hits that plant up and breastfeeds the kid. Even though she's thirteen.

But disaster strikes. Somehow a golden reindeer steels the kid, and long story short, the reindeer is killed and she retrieves the baby, but she's far from home. Worse, it's winter and night is coming.

In a desperate fight for survival, she skins the reindeer and huddles in the pelt with the baby. To keep her strength up, she eats its raw flesh (which tastes delicious, by the way) and manages to make it through the night. In an act of supremely poor taste, she decides to name the baby Reindeer.

At this point, two things are going through my mind:

1) She, very obviously, just skinned and ate Reindeer's father and now sleeps in Reindeer's father's skin every night.

2) Wow, I expected this to be a romance novel, but Caribou is basically Reindeer's mother! Neat.

Time passes, and, naturally, Reindeer is an unusual child. He's serious and doesn't seem to understand human emotion. He's obsessed with the reindeer as they stampede past on their migrations. You get the picture. He’s Different. This difference only grows with time until neither can deny the obvious anymore: Reindeer is a reindeer daemon. He can shift between reindeer and human form at will.

He then leaves to join the reindeer on their migration.

Things get dicey here. Caribou is more than upset; she's crazily despondent. And while it would be reasonable for a mother to lose her shit over her 13-year-old son leaving, perhaps for good, Caribou behaves like one of those women who joke about how their son is the only man that'll never abandon them ... after their son leaves. There's something not healthy here, but it's hard to put a finger on what, exactly.

So Caribou mopes and obsesses and leans into being a mystical shaman sort of person to the local village. Something's not right, though. The world is behaving strangely: good pools of water are turning sour. Mountains are erupting. The very earth is cracking and spitting forth toxic fumes. How will the village survive? What can they do?

Caribou doesn't know. She settles in to spend a night dreaming on the topic when Reindeer appears at her door. He's now 15, and while he's still calm and detached, he admits he missed her and couldn't resign himself to being fully reindeer. He spent too much of his life human for that. Still, he cannot give up on being a reindeer daemon, either. Luckily, there's a loophole. He learned how to turn her into a reindeer daemon, too. She need only ride on his back during the next migration, and they'll reach this place of magic.

She refuses; she must help save her people. Aha, but Reindeer has some idea of why the world is suffering, but getting to the bottom of it will involve traveling with him...

Alarms were going off in my head. I can't tell you why, but I knew things were all sorts of wrong. Perhaps it was the way they talked, the insistence in Reindeer's voice and the neediness in Caribou's, or the way Caribou shivered at the hearth while talking with Reindeer. I can't give you a specific reason, but I knew.

So I flipped ahead, but a stone's throw from the end of the novel. And Reindeer rests his hand on Caribou's stomach and says that he'll return when their child is born.

...

I just …

...

Caribou breastfed him. I don't care that they're not related; she changed his diapers and was the sole person who raised him from infancy. Not to fucking mention, Reindeer is fifteen when they first have sex. Caribou is twenty-eight.

This is gross on so many levels.

Needless to say, aside from double-checking that, like, a decade or two didn't pass between Reindeer re-appearing and them getting busy, I didn't read any further. I'm not gonna read a "love" story about a woman and her adopted, underage son. Nope. Just not gonna do it.

What I really want to know, though, is what all the people giving it high reviews are thinking. Did they … not read the first 40 pages? Are they fans of incest-light? What the hell? Fucking Andre Norton called it “In every way a superior piece of writing.”