Review: "Spirit of the Mountain" by Shelley Davidow

Spirit of the Mountain by Shelley Davidow
Published 2003
★★★

I decided that I'd make some headway on my TBR, so I picked this up, because it's been on my list for years...only to find that it never actually made it to my Goodreads list. It was about time regardless, but I'll have to double-check next time!

At any rate: in Spirit of the Mountain, a young teenager from Durban goes to the countryside to stay with her uncle. She's already anorexic when the book starts, and she deteriorates as time goes on; her mother (who is city-bound and racist) is not enthusiastic about Emily's time away, but Emily's uncle is convinced that the countryside is what will cure her (never mind that he has exactly zero plan for how this will happen).

This is interesting—in many ways it's more of the same thing, one of many similar YA "issue books" about eating disorders from a particular era...albeit at the end of that era. What distinguishes this is the setting; when Spirit of the Mountain was published, apartheid had been over for less than a decade. Although Emily's uncle is the prototypical good guy who gets along with everyone, tensions are high...but also, it's eventually a sangoma (traditional healer), not a Miracle Therapist, who sets Emily on the path to wellness. (Unfortunately the sangoma does fulfil the role of the Miracle Therapist—tells Emily that her illness is because she's afraid of becoming a woman, knows exactly what she has to do, et cetera. I'm also decidedly skeptical of the idea that the right thing to do for a struggling infant is to tell its mother that she can't have him back because an equally unwell teenager is caring for him and they need each other to get better!)

Ultimately I think this is trying to do some interesting things but the timing of writing perhaps gets in the way. Anna, an African woman who works on Emily's uncle's farm, is allowed to be a smart and resourceful character, but she's not given much personality or role beyond helping other people get better; the sangoma is a peaceful man with all of the answers, but most of the other local Africans are an angry, spear-wielding mass just outside the gates; Emily is treated as a gold-star exception for not looking down on various characters on the basis of skin color. None of this feels particularly unusual for a book from this time and place (lots of trying to figure out how to write about race in a post-apartheid South Africa, I think), but it does feel dated.