#magical books

Our Crooked Hearts

By Melissa Albert

Melissa Albert terrifies and inspires me in equal measure.

Her books have an otherworldly quality that gives you the sense that as you read them you are changing - or the world around you is changing, or perhaps, being revealed for what it truly is - and if you don’t stop, things will never be the same. Our Crooked Hearts is no exception.

I read Our Crooked Hearts late into the night while peering over my pages to make sure nothing was lurking in the shadows. Unspooling in dual narratives of a mother and daughter during their tumultuous teenage years as they discover themselves and their magic, Albert renders a world of misshapen motherhood, flailing youth, forging friendships, and just-this-side of possible witchcraft.

But if we’ve learned anything from The Hazel Wood, it’s that nothing is free. What I love most about Albert’s work is that there is nothing gratuitous or excessive. She manages to conjure fear, terror, sadness and rage - and it all serves a purpose. The characters are all flawed and flailing but not feckless; they strive to protect, to learn, to rectify, to save. This is evident in the conclusion of the book, which I won’t spoil for you here, but what I will share is wholly satisfying and positively positive. Yes, amidst a book that is terror incarnate, there is, dare I say, somehow, hope.

What is also remarkable about Albert is her ability to wield the written word. She is not only writing, she is crafting a new language. Her prose is like if Neil Gaiman and Maggie Stiefvater had a baby and it were raised by Patti Smith. She crashes words together and creates the most unlikely metaphors that make so much sense it hurts. She writes with the angst of a teenager but the wisdom of a beat poet and the heart of a goddess who still loves humanity. Her text is so palpable that in reading it, I feel like I am participating in a secret ritual that may in fact conjure actual magic. Her writing is the stuff of future lore, of fractured spells, of midnight swims in moon-bleeding waters. She is inventing a story and a form - and it’s the perfect love letter scrawled in black magic for the raging teen trapped inside of us all.

All the Impossible Things

by Lindsay Lackey

“There is nothing like clean middle-grade fiction,” my Aunt recently told me. 

I have long eschewed the genre finding it overly trite, predictable, and patronizing. Then I received the ARC for All the Impossible Things in the mail and with my Aunt’s wisdom ringing in my ears, I started reading.

Finally, a middle-grade story that is sweet without being saccharine and heartwarming without being cloying. The characters are nuanced and conflicted, their stories concurrently fantastical and realistic without feeling contrived or heavy-handed. 

With an addict mother in jail, Red, our tween protagonist, counts down the days until her Mom’s release and their reunion. In the meantime, she is unceremoniously shuttled between foster homes, leaving unidentifiable destruction in her wake, because, well, her emotional life is connected to the wind.

Could her latest home at the curiously fascinating Groovy Petting Zoo tame her wuthering ways? Or is she destined to destroy everything in her path just like her mother? 

This book offers parents and children a plethora of opportunities to discuss what happens when we keep all of our turmoil bottled up inside. Because if Red’s wind were a ubiquitous phenomenon among young people, I suspect that our disconnected culture would find itself with much stormier weather…

With notes of The Great Gilly HopkinsandAll the Bright Places, an added touch of magic makes this lovely little novel a worthy addition to the cannon of children’s delightful and discussion-worthy reads.  

*B3 received an ARC in exchange for an honest review. 

**All the Impossible Things will be released September 3, 2019. 

Leo. // We will not be buried.