The meta-fantasy novels of my heart

[epershand]

I've spent the last week slowly working my way through Among Others. It's such a beautiful book, I'm limiting myself to stretch it out as long as possible. I don't want the plot to resolve, I don't want the book to end. I just want to keep following Mori forever.

When Olivia was reading this last spring, she kept reading me the snippets of Mori responding to the books she'd read. Which sounded awesome (hello reading materials of my wayward youth!) but in no way, shape or form prepared me for the book I'm reading.

What I love most about this book is the way that I genuinely have no idea which of two possible books it is that I'm reading:

1) The children's fantasy novel I have spent my entire life waiting to read, about what happens to you once you've left your striking adventures in faerie behind and have to return to the mundane world after defeating the Evil Queen.
2) An entirely mundane novel about an abused teenager who deals with her trauma by imagining that she is living out the option above.

I'm swinging back between the two options on a word-by word basis, reading both books simultaneously. So far, it's the Schrödinger's cat of novels and part of me is terrified to get to the end of the book for fear that the box will open and I'll get trapped in one reading or another. (Hopefully this won't happen.)

I love that the very things that make Mori so identifiable to me are precisely what makes me not trust her. Because... I was that unhappy teenager, and those were the sorts of stories I told myself to deal.

But when I let myself fully believe her, FUCK is that some awesome worldbuilding. I love the deniability of it all, the way that every act of magic could be dismissed as having a totally rational non-magical cause, because part of the magic is to line up all the events in the past to bring something about. It's *brilliant*. I love watching Mori talking about the Pevensies after Narnia and the Drews after Will, in the context that that is exactly where she is in her life at the start of the book. I love the creepy aunties and their magic of lethargy and order and pushing things to play out as they want, for their own benefit. It is so good.

And so is the other book, the one that is more Bridge to Terabithia than it is Narnia. Honestly, I think Terabithia mattered more to me when I was young than Narnia did, because it gave me the assurance that taking the outlet was ok even if the magical land didn't actually pick me up and carry me off, North-Wind style.



I've been burned enough times to be very wary of sequels.

The Magicians was so good. It was the perfect encapsulation of so much emotional and intellectual satisfaction for me. It filled a hole in my soul that I didn't quite know was missing before I read it.

And I really should be able to trust Lev Grossman. He wrote The Magicians, after all, that tight perfect novel that feels like it was meant to complete me. And his essay on fanfiction and his manners in doing research for it has made me doubly fond of him.

But... that book was complete. It was a capsule, it was perfect, and while there are many other stories that could be told in that universe, that book feels like the only one I NEEDED. I don't even want fanfic of it, most of the time. And I'm desperately afraid that another book will throw off the balance, and do so far enough that it will detract from the perfect union that the first book had with my fundamental self.

So I am going to hold off now and let other people read it first, before I make up my mind to take that risk.