Rebecca Podos’s The Wise and the Wicked is a love letter to the struggles of a young girl as she tries to be herself in the middle of a dysfunctional family. Chock full of magic, sisterhood, and love, The Wise and the Wicked was a fast read that caught me from the very beginning. I found myself really feeling for the main character, Ruby, a 16-year-old who doesn’t expect much out of life. While I finished this book fairly quickly, it’s one that will stick with me because of its well-written, fascinating characters and its open and unpredictable ending. If you like books with strong female characters who take charge of their own destiny while also doing their best to be normal teenagers who fight and fall in love, this is definitely one for you.
Ruby Chernyavsky has been told stories all her life, stories about the women in her family and their once-powerful magical abilities. Her ancestors, powerful women who helped people for a price, were forced to leave Russia and move to America to protect themselves from a powerful enemy. Ever since then, her family’s magic has been a shadow of what is supposedly once was. Ruby isn’t so sure about her family’s heritage, but she does know that she saw her Time — a vision of herself and who she will be around the time of her death — and there is no escaping it. But as Ruby digs deeper into her family’s past in an effort to change her future, she realizes that nothing comes without a cost, and this one might be more than she is willing to pay.
Ruby is a complicated young woman. In many ways, she’s a typical teenager: she skips classes, hangs out with her best friend whenever she can, rolls her eyes when her sister asks her to do her chores, and is definitely attracted to the cute new boy in town. But in other ways, she stands out from the crowd. She knows who she will be when she dies, that her family is probably magical, and that she’ll read anything by Carl Sagan. She comes from a family of strange people, and she’s one of the strangest.
Throughout the book, it was really easy to follow how each character developed. Ruby’s doubt of her family’s heritage manifests itself in her need to cling to science. Her oldest sister Dahlia assumed the role of their absent mother, but she also tries to be a supportive sister. Her middle sister, Ginger, tries not to attach herself too deeply to anything, maintaining her family ties over all else. Each character clearly has complex motivations, personalities, and feelings that Podos skillfully conveys even through the eyes of a semi-unreliable narrator such as Ruby.
The Wise and the Wicked also has several fully-realized, wonderfully queer characters, from the love interest Dov — a trans man, whose gender is recognized even by his family’s gifts — to Ruby’s best friend Cece and Dov’s sister Talia, who are both lesbians. Despite a little awkwardness in the telling of Cece’s Time, and the implications of a queer woman whose sexuality isn’t respected or acknowledged in her future, I really enjoyed their characters. They are never made to feel like their identities are questioned. Dov’s immediate family in particular are amazingly accepting of him, and while Cece is still closeted to most, Ruby never hesitates in her love of her friend.
But there is more to this book than the characters that inhabit the pages. This book is inspired by Podos’s own family history and the stories that families lose post-diaspora. Ruby’s family seem simple, but their secrets are complicated. The stories that have been passed down to her are clouded by the lens of time and shame. Podos skillfully sets stories within stories, each feeding off of each other and affecting the other in different ways. The snippets of an intriguing podcast sprinkled throughout give the story a layer that helps explain the twisting lines of past and future that tangle within Ruby’s own story (and holy crap do I wish that podcast was actually real). Ruby’s story is a series of starts and stops, one event tripping into the next. The podcast lets readers explore the uncertainty of life and the fickleness of the supernatural, even as Ruby struggles to keep her own narrative straight. I admire how Podos wove the two narratives together, showing hope and loss in two parallel stories.
The ending of this book, while cliffhanger-esque and open to interpretation, was immensely satisfying to me. Unclear yet still optimistic, Podos leaves readers aching for more and wistfully thinking about how the story would end if they were the ones in Ruby’s shoes. I spent a good half-hour wondering how I wanted it to end before deciding that it ended in the only way it could. Podos leaves everything on the page, and The Wise and the Wicked is absolutely stunning because of it.
The Wise and the Wicked by Rebecca Podos was published May 28th by Balzer + Bray, a HarperCollins imprint, and is available wherever good books are sold!
