Review: Sarah Connell’s Pay the Piper
The debilitating lifelong trauma of early parental death and the specific emotional solitude of the orphan is the engine of this slim novel about lost and found magic. Mischief abounds, and there’s plenty to delight in: witches and bishops and ravens and magicked objects, but plenty more, too, to consider in the silences—what I mean to say is that Sarah Connell’s brilliance lies in the areas of quiet melancholy found between the blood and action sequence; nested joyfully in her studies of cognitive shadow, and the particular, mindful resilience of well-wrought thought. Set carefully against Pietro Lorenzetti’s “The Burial”’s muted intentionality, the novel scrubs some flavor of medieval stoicism back into the light that, for the most part, is lost in today’s drunken stabs at the fantastic—this is the stark imagery that I’d utilize to describe Connell’s novel to an interested friend. Connell’s confident stabs at capturing the adolescent desire for sanctioned identity in Pay the Piper are commendable, easy-breathing things that live and talk in that alive way only fully-reasoned characters are want to do. The action is breathless and well-designed, while the plot cradles the reader’s desire for the comfort of the familiar, while still providing surprise, laughter, and the much-needed ingredient of heartbreak. We’re speaking Fable, after all, and Connell’s reimagining doesn’t disappoint. The scenes between children flower foremost in my thoughts due to their remarkable innocence; there’s both candor and light, and have the proper makings for the stunning youthful blemish of the re-calibrated fairy tale to function fully and heartily beneath the pages of this brief novel. Sarah Connell’s Pay the Piper utilizes trauma and history to fashion a story about marginalization that places loving emphasis on the yesteryear and the heritable potency of community, while establishing the medieval teen as speculative fiction’s hottest new archetype. The kids are alright, after all, despite it all, and then some.