“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.