“Bibliotropic,” Hugh said. “Like sunflowers are heliotropic, they naturally turn towards the sun. We naturally turn towards the bookshop.”
Where do I begin? What is this book about? Books, yes. A love of books and of libraries. Books as lifeline and language. It’s about a girl growing up, and witches and fairies and boarding schools and grief and Wales and loneliness even amongst those with whom you might belong. It’s the boundary between the real and unreal, magic and the mundane, what it means to have power and sometimes no power at all.
But what I really love about it is the in-betweenness of it all. It begins where most books would end, after a battle between good and evil which Mori has lost. (Alternately, for this book is full of alternatelys, it’s after Mori is exiled to her estranged father because her mother has gone mad and her sister has died and Mori nearly died herself.) And it ends— not with falling in love, coming of age, or finding where she belongs, but simply filling in another page.
You can see Mori’s full arc—the adult she’ll become because of the child she’s been—but it’s between the lines. She’s still stuck in between. It’s her adolescence, literally. The cusp, the not-there-yet. She meets a boy, and he’s beautiful and reads Heinlein, but he’s a friend, a right-now, not a soulmate or savior. She faces her mother at last, but it’s not redemption so much as an anticlimax. She makes an effort with her father, but it doesn’t solve their relationship. An ad-hoc karass still isn’t where she belongs.
It’s the experience of being fifteen. The power you may or may not have; the responsibility of it. The untrustworthy world, which seems to both hang on your actions and operate without you at all. It’s remarkably clever, this book, where the magic is simply the natural order of things. A bus on time or not; anything that can be denied.
And I’m still describing it poorly because this is Jo Walton. It’s not a kid’s book, or a coming of age. It’s not even the science fiction or fantasy that Mori adores. It’s a story, a good one, and it plays with the concept of story itself. Books are Mori’s language. It’s how she communicates, and you see her just dying for someone to listen and then speak the same language. When they do, even imperfectly, it’s on the scale of another book’s grand revelation.
I love her odd little heart. I understand the way her mind works; it’s not unlike my own. I still feel the craving for people who speak the same language, and there’s hope they exist. This is one of those books you can read all kinds of ways because you participate in the story. There are layers and layers. It gives you what you bring to it. And it’s like Mori says, if you love a book enough, the book will love you back.
Name-dropping (bibliography) ⚭
(This list is basically an advanced starter kit for SFF, rivaling What Makes This Book So Great—or really, just literature in general)
- Anne McCaffrey — Dragonquest, Dragonflight, Dragonsinger, Dragonsong, The White Dragon
- J.R.R. Tolkien — Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, The Adventures of Tom Bombadil
- Ursula K. Le Guin — The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, Illusions, A Wizard of Earthsea, The Dispossessed, The Eye of Heron, The Word for World is Forest, The Lathe of Heaven, The Left Hand of Darkness, The Farthest Shore
- John Boyd — The Last Starship from Earth
- Judith Kerr — When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit
- Poul Anderson — Ensign Flandry, The Broken Sword, Guardians of Time
- Roger Zalazny — Creatures of Light and Darkness, Nine Princes in Amber, The Guns of Avalon, Sign of the Unicorn, The Dream Master, Isle of the Dead, Doorways in the Sand, Roadmarks, This Immortal
- Samuel R. Delany — Empire Star, Triton, Babel 17, The Einstein Intersection
- Kurt Vonnegut — God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Cat’s Cradle, Breakfast of Champions, Welcome to the Monkey House, The Sirens of Titan
- Zenna Henderson — Pilgrimage
- John Wyndham — The Chrysalids
- Mary Renault — The Bull From the Sea, The Charioteer, Purposes of Love, The Last of the Wine, Return to Night, The Persian Boy
- C.S. Lewis — Out of the Silent Planet, Prince Caspian, Mere Christianity
- Larry Niven — The Flight of the Horse, Ringworld, A Gift from Earth, World of Ptaavs, The Mote in God’s Eye
- James Tiptree, Jr. — Warm Worlds and Otherwise, “The Girl Who Was Plugged In”, “Love Is the Plan, the Plan Is Death”, “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?”
- Charles Dickens — Our Mutual Friend
- Dodie Smith — I Capture the Castle, The Starlight Barking
- Karl Marx — The Communist Manifesto
- John Fowles — The Magus
- Robert Silverberg — Dying Inside, Up the Line, Born with the Dead, Stepsons of Terra, Voyage to Alpha Centauri, The World Inside
- Harry Harrison — Make Room! Make Room!
- Isaac Asimov — The Left Hand of the Electron, Guide to Science
- Plato — The Symposium, Republic, The Laws, Phaedrus
- Robert Heinlein — Time Enough for Love, Glory Road, Waldo and Magic, Inc., Citizens of the Galaxy, The Number of the Beast, Starship Troopers, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
- Theodore Sturgeon — Dangerous Visions, A Touch of Strange
- The Best of the Galaxy Volume IV
- Marion Zimmer Bradley — The Spell Sword
- SciFi Magazine — Destinies
- Spider Robinson — Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon, Telempath
- Sylvia Engdahl — Beyond the Tomorrow Mountains, Heritage of the Star
- T.S. Eliot — Four Quartets, The Waste Land (poems)
- Ted Hughes — Crow
- Stephen Donaldson — Lord Foul’s Bane
- Mary Stewart — The Crystal Cave
- John Brunner — The Shockwave Rider, Stand on Zanzibar
- Arthur C. Clark — Imperial Earth, Childhood’s End, 2001
- Alan Garner — Red Shift
- Clifford Simak — City
- Frank Herbert — Dune
- Josephine Tey — Daughter of Time, Brat Ferrar
- Nevil Schute — An Old Captivity
- Aldous Huxley — Brave New World
- Pamela Haines — The Kissing Gate
- Susan Cooper — The Dark is Rising, The Grey King, Silver on the Tree
- Jane Austen — Emma
- W.H. Auden — Selected Poems
- Winston Churchill — A History of the English-Speaking Peoples
- Douglas Adams — A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
- Charlotte Brontë — Jane Eyre
- Michael Coney — Charisma, Hello Summer, Goodbye
- Punch (magazine)
- Thomas Hardy — Far from the Madding Crowd
- William Shakespeare — The Tempest, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Winter’s Tale, Richard II
- Keats
- Virgil — Aeneid
- Hal Clement — Mission of Gravity
- Piers Anthony — Vicinity Cluster, Chaining the Lady, A Spell for Chameleon
- Robert Graves — I, Claudius
- H.D.F. Kitto — The Greeks
- John Brunner — Telepathist, Times Without Number
- Martha Finley — Elsie Dinsmore
- Louisa May Alcott — Little Women
- Frederic W. Farrar — Eric, or Little by Little
- Susan Coolidge — What Katy Did
- Eleanor H. Porter — Pollyanna
- Judy Blume
- Nicholas Fisk — Space Hostages
- Keith Roberts — Pavane
- Phillip K. Dick — The Man in the High Castle
- Ward Moore — Bring the Jubilee
- Christopher Priest — A Dream of Wessex, Inverted World
- H. Beam Piper — Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen
- Randall Garrett — Too Many Magicians
- C.J. Cherryh — Gate of Ivrel
- Edgar Allen Poe — The Raven