Wren
Hoarders of knowledge, those uphillers in their walled fortress. Best thing you can do is steal as much of it as you can and run.
Whelp. It happened again. For the second time in a goddamn row, I was lured by a bright, beautiful, sunny cover into reading something sad. At least this time, I had a clue that there’d be reasons for tears: the main character’s parent getting seriously sick was right there in the summary. But I was like, well, how bad can it get, really? This is middle grade, and more importantly, look at that cover! Surely it will all work out at the end.
Well. Uh. Without spoiling it, some things do work out, and some don’t, and most of the tears I’ve shed have been good tears, but you really should mind the trigger warnings and brace yourself for heartbreak and bittersweetness going in.
That said, it’s actually an excellent book. Despite the sadness, I would very much call it life-affirming. It’s on the mature end of middle grade, and it touches very sensitively on all sorts of issues. It’s diverse in a way that includes same-sex parents, disability, being nonbinary/bigender, class inequality, and more, and never feels like a checklist. The setting is extremely low fantasy: an out-of-time alternate version of the Azores where plants are Very Important, to the point that there’s a hint of magic in all the gardening and potion making. We get to see several parts of it, from a remote island where only one family lives in an abandoned monastery to a bustling capital, and they’re all enchanting. I actually wish I could learn more about the setting, see it perhaps through a more adult lens. It feels so ripe with opportunity.
Ultimately, it’s a book about coming to terms with endings, and figuring out what beginnings can stem from them. It’s about exhausting every opportunity before saying goodbye. It’s about friendship born out of initial friction. It’s about learning about the others, and the world, and yourself in it. It’s about discovering that sometimes you can’t get exactly what you’ve been working so hard for, but that doesn’t mean the journey was all for nothing.
Really, it’s very much worth the tissues.
Hoarders of knowledge, those uphillers in their walled fortress. Best thing you can do is steal as much of it as you can and run.
Whelp. It happened again. For the second time in a goddamn row, I was lured by a bright, beautiful, sunny cover into reading something sad. At least this time, I had a clue that there’d be reasons for tears: the main character’s parent getting seriously sick was right there in the summary. But I was like, well, how bad can it get, really? This is middle grade, and more importantly, look at that cover! Surely it will all work out at the end.
Well. Uh. Without spoiling it, some things do work out, and some don’t, and most of the tears I’ve shed have been good tears, but you really should mind the trigger warnings and brace yourself for heartbreak and bittersweetness going in.
That said, it’s actually an excellent book. Despite the sadness, I would very much call it life-affirming. It’s on the mature end of middle grade, and it touches very sensitively on all sorts of issues. It’s diverse in a way that includes same-sex parents, disability, being nonbinary/bigender, class inequality, and more, and never feels like a checklist. The setting is extremely low fantasy: an out-of-time alternate version of the Azores where plants are Very Important, to the point that there’s a hint of magic in all the gardening and potion making. We get to see several parts of it, from a remote island where only one family lives in an abandoned monastery to a bustling capital, and they’re all enchanting. I actually wish I could learn more about the setting, see it perhaps through a more adult lens. It feels so ripe with opportunity.
Ultimately, it’s a book about coming to terms with endings, and figuring out what beginnings can stem from them. It’s about exhausting every opportunity before saying goodbye. It’s about friendship born out of initial friction. It’s about learning about the others, and the world, and yourself in it. It’s about discovering that sometimes you can’t get exactly what you’ve been working so hard for, but that doesn’t mean the journey was all for nothing.
Really, it’s very much worth the tissues.