The follow-up to her admired debut, Jess Richards's second novel is a magical mystery tour that loses its way
If the fable is a wisdom delivery system, then its function remains ever-relevant: to provide dark enlightenment via magical entertainment. It is the sugared pill of literature. Jess Richards's second novel is the successor to the admired Snake Ropes, shortlisted for the 2012 Costa First Novel award. It features Amber and Maya, teenage denizens of the futuristic, privileged, emotionally cold city of Paradon. They are sisters, but their origins differ: while Amber is a spoiled natural child, Maya is a genetically engineered empath, designed to keep her faux-twin happy.
Their journey, involving a classic shift from safety into a world fraught with danger, is triggered by Amber's realisation that Maya must develop a personality of her own. Inevitably, this raises a paradox, because if Maya's desires must mirror Amber's, how can Maya know who she really wants to be?
It's an intriguing starting-point, and one which promises a high-wire act of a narrative. But while Richards has imaginative chutzpah, she lacks the literary precision or conceptual consistency of Angela Carter or Jeanette Winterson, to whom her ambition might be compared.
Quitting Paradon for the earthy village of Seachant, "where birthdays pop up when people want them most", Amber and Maya take over a cottage mysteriously abandoned by Old Kelp, a witch who until recently cooked medicinal honey-cakes for the locals.
Spotting some empty shoes to step into, Amber finds the witch's recipe book and transmogrifies into a psycho-culinary goddess. Here's suet pudding as you have never encountered it before: "Add enough milk for a soft dropping consistency. Drop your intention from the spoon into the mixture. Clarify your intention. Stir again … steam for as long as it takes for your own mind either to clear or fog." "Clarify your intention" is advice which Richards might well heed: while she obviously revels in this fey line of whimsy, the reader remains none the wiser.
When the corpse of an old woman appears on the kitchen floor, along with a bloodied rock, Amber suspects her befuddled empath twin has become a killer. This is potentially suspenseful. But with all the other distracting flavours Richards keeps hurling into the mix (missing villagers, cross-dressing children, troubled marriages), Maya's identity crisis is drowned out as a central ingredient. And when the empath herself steps in, her narration is so mentally and linguistically chaotic that we're left baffled: "All the things you want since we've lived here make my insidehalf and outsidehalf feel invisible," she reproaches her sister. "Now I've got feelings that jump, I've got to learn how to bitelip and swallow words."
Meanwhile the increasingly narcissistic Amber has discovered a new motivation: sex. Swamped by lush urges induced by a surfeit of sugar and spice and all things available at new age fayres, she recruits a doctor she calls Medic ("Your body. Its moistures are my tutor") to service her body.
Finally, a ghost materialises and the real meaning of "cooking with bones" emerges. But it's too little, too late. It's a shame, as Jess Richards has originality and talent which, if harnessed with rigour, could yield something truly powerful. As it stands, Cooking with Bones is a pill that's sugar all the way through.
• Liz Jensen's The Uninvited is published by Bloomsbury.