Runa

RUNA tells about a twelve-year-old girl named Runa who travels to Sweden to visit her grandfather. While there, she learns of a curse begun a thousand years ago in which all girls in her family born on Midsummer Day, must die on their thirteenth birthday. Runa turns thirteen in three days, and must solve the mystery of how to avoid her fate.

James talks about this book: “Runa’s evolution was organic; ideas stuck together like atoms to a molecule, each idea changing the structure and forming something new. Powerful, mythic stories clustered around a theme of sacrifice, like the story of Iphigenia, the daughter of  King Agamemnon who he had to sacrifice at the start of the Trojan War; or the play Equus. The central catalyst for Runa, was a more personal tragedy. One month before my wedding, my beloved grandmother died. Two years later, a month before my first daughter was born, my mother was killed in a car accident. I was struggling with the unanswerable question of why I had to give up so much to gain such blessings.”

Runa was published a few years before ‘bleak books’ became popular in Young Adult literature. The reviewers, perhaps uncomfortable with the subject of human sacrifice for a modern American child, were inconsistent with each other. The Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books wrote this about the book: “Runa soon discovers that she is the latest link in a chain of sacrifices that goes back to the death of Balder. Centuries ago, an ancestress of Runa’s had disrupted a Midsummer sacrifice to the Norse god when she refused to allow the priests to immolate her beloved horse, and offered them her thirteen-year-old daughter instead. … With echoes of The Owl Service (not to mention Götterdämmerung), the mythic core of the novel is fierce and dark, but the writing, while smooth, doesn’t match the material.” And Ann Welton, reviewing for Voice of Youth Advocates, felt that “While it’s easy to be caught in the plot, caring about the characters is a more difficult proposition. The setting, the Swedish island of Gotland is beautifully described in visual language.”
Wendy E. Betts, writing for The Web Online Review, came the closest to the core of the book when she wrote, “If there is anything more heartbreaking than death, perhaps it is meaningless death: death by cruel accident, by being in the wrong place at the wrong time – death with no purpose, no honor, no redemption. Runa tells the unusual story of a girl who faces her own imminent death and decides to make it a purposeful one, confronting it with pride, acceptance and heroism…. Runa is a haunting, beautifully written book, with a mystical quality that does not stop it from being painfully real and believable. Runa’s horror and fear are vividly drawn, as she faces the terrible past and equally terrible future; her final moments of sacrifice reach an overwhelming peak of existential beauty. Still, Runa is uncomfortable reading…. The end of Runa is like an unexpected immersion into an alien culture: a valuable experience, but a perturbing one.”