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Just finished reading Frances Hardinge's The Lost Conspiracy/Gullstruck Island and it was delightful! (An aside: why do US publishers insist on changing the names of UK books and why do Canadian library systems deal with this by acquiring both editions and cataloguing them completely separately so you can only tell they are the same book when both holds arrive? Cross-referencing is your friend.)
Set on a not!Pacific island colonised by not!Europeans, this is the story of Hathin, a Lace girl (the Lace are a particularly oppressed indigenous minority on this island) brought up to take care of her sister, who everyone hopes will turn out to have magical powers that will increase the social standing of her family and village, but may in fact merely be developmentally disabled in some way, a fact which Hathin is required to conceal from everyone around her. And then everything goes straight to hell and it all gets deliciously complicated.
( Spoilers for plot and ending )
Set on a not!Pacific island colonised by not!Europeans, this is the story of Hathin, a Lace girl (the Lace are a particularly oppressed indigenous minority on this island) brought up to take care of her sister, who everyone hopes will turn out to have magical powers that will increase the social standing of her family and village, but may in fact merely be developmentally disabled in some way, a fact which Hathin is required to conceal from everyone around her. And then everything goes straight to hell and it all gets deliciously complicated.
( Spoilers for plot and ending )
