She climbs into bed with The Blind Assassin, “because if you’re not with the book you want, you might as well want the book you’re with.” She doesn’t like her stepdad because, among other things, he doesn’t read the right books. “Everyone is supposed to be a combination of nature and nurture, their true selves shaped by years of friends and fights and parents and dreams and things you did too young and things you overheard that you shouldn’t have and secrets you kept or couldn’t and regrets and victories and quiet prides, all the packed-together detritus that becomes what you call your life.īut every time we left a place, I felt the things that happened there being wiped clean, til all that was left was Ella, our fights and our talks and our winding roads.” – p130Īlice is worth our time, too. Things like this, one of the best list paragraphs I’ve read in a long time: Waylan Jennings is whisky and a suit is an exhausted brown. The way that smells are colors and sounds are food. Albert sings when she is putting us in Alice’s memories: the way a book is evocative of the place you first read it. One of the things that I loved so much right away about Harry Potter was the wordplay.
Because everything felt imaginative and whole.Īs good as the storytelling is, the writing is even better. I was excited reading this, excited like the first time-reading-Harry Potter excited. Albert has come up with a whole new realm, and folks, she’s going to take us there. What I’d like to tell you about is the beauty of the way this was put together, the intricacy of it, and the wild success of it. But you can get a synopsis from anywhere. I’m doing a bad job of explaining it, because it’s just that good.
Danger is endemic to the plurality of stories that exist in this other land. There is unexpected help, there is unexpected danger. Whether the Hinterland is a place or a people, we aren’t sure. And that, my friends, is where Alice must go to find her mom. Everything about this story felt so right on.Īnd while we are in modern New York City, yet… there is something, just a hair’s breath away, just over a slight border, one you cannot see, just waiting. The weird stuff that seems to explode around them. In bits and pieces, we get more of the story, more of her story – the midnight runs, the near misses. Her stepsister is a bitch (who makes her feel like “an awkward breadstick”). It is almost magical realism in its here-and-now-ness. What is so arresting about this book is its immediacy. The booklove in this book! This is literally a bookfreak’s dream come true. This is a newtelling (new-telling? New Telling?) – a wholly new world, The Hinterland, which we learn about from the character searching for the book within the book. But Melissa Albert takes it a step further yet. There has been a lot of buzz in the past couple years about fairytale retellings, sure.
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