“They call you Kate, plain Kate,” says Petruchio in a famous scene from Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. Erin Bow’s eponymous heroine in Plain Kate (Scholastic, 2010, ISBN: 9780545166645), while easily as self-sufficient as Shakespeare’s Katherine, is no shrew; she’s a wily teenager forced to make it on her own after her parents’ deaths. This is a remarkable novel with a unique storyline that sets it apart from much of the YA fantasy fiction currently on the market.
Plain Kate: Overview and Themes
Plain Kate takes place in a Russian fairytale-type setting, a vaguely medieval otherworld where burning women for witchcraft is common, though catching actual witches is less so. This seems about to change when the newly-orphaned Kate, who possesses an uncanny knack for carving, is accused of witchcraft and forced to flee her village with a band of gypsies (here called “Roamers”).
Yet Bow thwarts readers’ expectations of the genre in an enjoyable way; Kate possesses no magical power, only talent. It’s her friend Drina and the mysterious (and compelling) villain of the story, Linay, who are the true witches. Kate sells her shadow to Linay in exchange for a talking cat and a chance at a new life, but when she discovers the dark magic he plans to work with it (returning his murdered sister Lenore to life by avenging her death), she and Drina (along with Taggle, the wonderfully realistic talking cat) set out to stop him armed only with their wits and “Plain” Kate’s carving knife.
Plain Kate Review
If one word could describe Plain Kate, it would be “refreshing.” Bow succeeded in subverting my expectations time and again—from the empathy with which she views her villain to her refusal to sugarcoat the troubling questions the novel raises about human nature to the plot twists of the haunting, elegiac final act. Equally refreshing is the author’s use of literary references, from Shakespeare to Edgar Allan Poe.
If there’s a weak spot in the novel, it’s in its overreliance on poetic symbolism and allegory. The book works well as a complex metaphor for loss and grief, but this type of structure tends to distance the reader from the actual story. The Russian-flavoured setting is ill-defined and largely uninteresting. For a character that is, on the face of it, so likeable, Plain Kate comes across as oddly opaque and one-dimensional, like a fairy-tale heroine. In one memorable scene, Kate is wounded (and the wound cauterized), yet though the story is told from her perspective there is no mention of physical pain. While Bow’s restrained but poetic use of description is a refreshing departure from the style of many YA authors, it does create a hollowness at the centre of the narrative that aptly mirrors the novel’s core theme but keeps readers at a distance. Despite this, Plain Kate is easily the best fantasy novel I have read in the last year.
Teens who enjoy Plain Kate may also like A Curse Dark as Gold by Elizabeth C. Bunce, The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman and Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine.
Heather Fawcett - Heather Fawcett is a Vancouver-based writer and editor. She holds an M.A. in English Literature and specializes in teen fiction, having ...
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