The Dandelion Riots

This is a compellingly strange tale that mixes a hard-boiled style with what might be called an anti-fairytale in which some girls – ‘the damned’ – are cursed at birth with magical powers by malicious older women, called Aunts, who condemn their victims to ostracism and persecution. Our narrator is sixteen-year-old Drinn, whose curse is never to find love and, for reasons that become apparent, has lived a sequestered life under the care of a series of foster parents. The tale begins when Drinn’s particular tormentor, Aunt Melusine, detecting a bond of affection between Drinn and her temporary carer, slaughters the poor man. In the melee, Drinn uses her own powers against Melusine for the first time and follows Melusine into the wider world. Gradually, Drinn meets and teams up with others of the damned and leads a guerrilla campaign against the Aunts, the gang adopting the dandelion as their insignia (hence the book’s title). Their campaign leads to an apocalyptic confrontation in which Drinn and Melusine meet for the last time. The novel moves rapidly from one danger to another and from one revelation to the next, with intervals for Drinn to catch her breath and muse on the nature of love and where she might find it. But there is little space to fill in how the society in which she finds herself functions from day-to-day. I particularly like the way the novel sets up a kind of gender negative of the male adventure story. Here women and girls fill all the major roles, whether heroes or villains. The one token male unfortunately suffers the fate of so many token characters in literature and film.  The novel is marketed as a young adult title but I would think it might also be enjoyed by younger teenagers.