Hemlock & Silver, by T. Kingfisher

This author never disappoints me, and I especially love her adaptations of fairy tales and classic literature. HEMLOCK & SILVER (sic) is based on “Snow White,” with elements of Alice’s trip through the looking glass. It involves a possibly evil queen, a poisoned princess, enchanted sleep (apparently, anyway), apples, creepy mirrors, portal fantasy, a doppelganger dimension, and a talking cat. The opening sentence is irresistible: “I had just taken poison when the king arrived to inform me that he had murdered his wife.” Narrator/protagonist Anja experiments on herself with carefully measured doses of poisons to study their attributes and discover antidotes. She also uses roosters as experimental subjects, since chicken breeders often have a surplus of them. And she keeps a snake, which she describes as more of a colleague than a pet, for the useful qualities of its venom. The king’s unheralded arrival in her solitary workshop throws her into confusion. After all, she isn’t nobility, only a prosperous merchant’s daughter. The monarch killed his queen when he caught her in the act of cutting out their daughter’s heart. Now his surviving daughter, twelve-year-old Snow, suffers from a mysterious chronic illness. Grief and depression? Some kind of food or drink sickening her? Or poison? Having heard of Anja’s expertise in the latter field, the king asks her to tackle the problem because she has no court entanglements.

A royal request, however affably presented, amounts to a command, so despite her trepidation Anja packs up, snake and rooster in tow, to travel to the palace. How will the king react if she fails to solve the case? Suppose Snow really is being poisoned and Anja becomes a target, if the culprit sees through her guise of being the princess’s new natural history tutor? Whom can she trust? It quickly becomes clear that Snow isn’t deliberately making herself sick, yet Anja believes she knows more than she’s admitting. The girl’s volatile adolescent moods complicate the investigation. Anja methodically sets up procedures for ruling out possible causes, employing the scientific method she excels at and enjoys. On the other hand, she finds attendance at court dinners an ordeal. Dealing with people has always been hard for her, especially since her typical conversation focuses on poisonous and venomous plants and animals along with other bizarre natural phenomena that fascinate her. According to the Healer who’d been her beloved mentor, most members of their profession regard cases as people with problems; Anja, although she’s sincerely driven to find cures, sees a case as a problem with a person inconveniently attached.

When she discovers the strange mirrors made of sand from the late queen’s native country, Anja is baffled. She doesn’t believe in magic. Therefore, she addresses the conundrum of the mirrors and the other world inside them with the same experimental rigor she applies to poisons. She gets help from one of the local bodyguards assigned to her as well as a one-eyed, talking cat who has no patience with answering tedious human questions. The solution to the mystery and the connection between the mirror realm and Snow’s illness will astonish most readers as thoroughly as it does Anja. Although still unwilling to believe in magic, she keeps an open mind. Between her lack of confidence outside the boundaries of her profession and her bodyguard’s taciturn manner, it takes her a while to begin to recognize their mutual attraction. Its gradual development from friendship to passion is charmingly awkward. The supercilious, enigmatic feline is also a constant delight. (According to the afterword, by the way, he’s based on the author’s own one-eyed cat.) As usual with Kingfisher’s first-person narrators, Anja is an entertaining character whose combined intelligence and vulnerability can’t fail to engage the reader’s sympathy. I'm especially taken with her because I suspect she's meant to be at least slightly neurodivergent.

Margaret L. Carter

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Portal Fantasy Aftermaths

"Portal fantasy" is one of my favorite subgenres—tales of people transported to other worlds by magic, e.g., C. S. Lewis's Narnia series, which I've reread countless times. In children's fantasy of that type, the young protagonists usually return to the primary world in the end. At the conclusion of Lewis's PRINCE CASPIAN, Peter and Susan learn they are now too old for Narnia. Their younger siblings, Edmund and Lucy, receive the same news at the end of THE VOYAGE OF THE DAWN TREADER. Everything turns out fine in the last book of the series, however, when all the characters are reunited in a recreated, eternal Narnia. (Except for Susan, who, as a young woman, has convinced herself Narnia was only a childish game; Lewis hints in some of his letters, though, that she may eventually find her own way back.)

Seanan McGuire tackles the issue of growing "too old" and getting evicted from the faerie realm in her "Wayward Children" series. Two books have been published, with the third, BENEATH THE SUGAR SKY, forthcoming in January 2018. McGuire explores the anguish of this kind of exile as well as hinting at the dysfunctional backgrounds that may lead some children to prefer other worlds over this one in the first place.

What happens to children who fall down rabbit holes, step through wardrobes or mirrors, or otherwise travel through portals to alternate worlds, after they come back to mundane existence? How do they handle the trauma of never being allowed to return to their true “homes”? In EVERY HEART A DOORWAY, McGuire answers these questions. Miss Eleanor West, once just such a child, runs a boarding school for others like herself. The children's parents think it’s a school for emotionally and mentally troubled youth, where the teen inmates will get “cured” of their “delusions”; the students, however, learn the truth as soon as they arrive. Here, they don’t have to hide their true selves. Each one fervently hopes to find a doorway to the place he or she was exiled from, a desire that has hardly ever been fulfilled. Nancy, who cultivates stillness and wears only white and black, spent years in the Halls of the Dead. Her new roommate, Sumi, spent her time away from Earth in a Nonsense world. Miss Eleanor and her colleagues have developed a system of classifying such realms along four main axes, Nonsense, Logic, Wicked, and Virtue. Other residents (comprising many more girls than boys) include Lundy, a backward-aging woman in an eight-year-old body; Kade, a transgender boy, Miss Eleanor’s probable heir, who runs a wardrobe exchange in the attic; Jack and Jill, female identical twins who have lived in a world similar to a Hammer horror movie setting, Jill as bride of a vampire lord, Jack as apprentice to a mad scientist; and Christopher, who spent time in a realm of animated skeletons and retains the gift of playing music to bones. When a murder occurs, most of their classmates naturally blame Jack. It proves to be only the first of three deaths, which Nancy joins with Kade, Jack, and Christopher to investigate. The glimpses of the realms the students visited convey a numinous impression that made me want to read more about those worlds.

The prequel, DOWN AMONG THE STICKS AND BONES, gratifies that wish by telling the backstory of twins Jacqueline (Jack) and Jillian (Jill). Their parents have no concept of what parenthood and children will be like. They want living dolls they can show off in order to fit in with their peers. Mrs. Wolcott expects a dainty, feminine, perfectly behaved girl. Mr. Wolcott has his heart set on a son. Jacqueline (whom their parents refuse to call Jack) gets molded into the frilly-dressed, obsessively dirt-averse daughter. Jill becomes a soccer-playing tomboy. At the age of twelve, exploring the attic, they discover a trunk that holds a downward staircase instead of old clothes and costume jewelry as expected. Descending, they emerge in the Gothic world of the Moors. They stumble upon the castle of the Master, a vampire who rules the adjacent village. There they also meet Dr. Bleak, a mad scientist who lives in a converted windmill. Jack chooses to go with Dr. Bleak and become his apprentice, while the Master adopts Jill as his daughter. Their mundane roles reverse: Jill becomes a sheltered, spoiled princess in flowing gowns. Jack wears sturdy, practical clothes and learns hard work. Dr. Bleak truly cares for her, in his reserved way. Jill, eagerly waiting for her promised conversion into a vampire at age eighteen, remains the vampire’s cherished daughter only as long as she obeys the rules of the castle. She grows selfish and cruel. The sisters rarely see each other, and little remains of the love they once shared despite their differences. Readers of the previous novel know they’ll return to their mundane birthplace eventually. If we weren’t expecting that conclusion, the crisis that forces the girls out of the world they’ve come to regard as home would be almost too painful to read.

I haven't seen or read many films or books that confront the issue of how a character adjusts after returning, usually permanently, from a magical world. RETURN TO OZ begins with Dorothy in a mental institution, facing electroshock treatment, because of her insistence that the land of Oz was real; she escapes and returns, however, so she doesn't get permanently trapped in her mundane life. A similar danger faces Alice in the TV series ONCE UPON A TIME IN WONDERLAND, and she also finds her way back to her magical realm. At the end of PETER PAN, Wendy seems happy with her choice to return home, grow up, and become a wife and mother. The cycle continues with her daughter and granddaughter, who enjoy adventures in Neverland until, they, too embrace adulthood. As for Peter himself, his immortality and eternal youth include an amoral view of the universe, a carelessness about life-and-death situations, and a "living in the present" attitude with a downside of defective long-term memory. (To adult Wendy's surprise, he has forgotten Tinker Bell.) This dark side of PETER PAN is seldom reflected in adaptations for children such as the Disney animated movie. These story elements illuminate the issue of fantasy as "escape." While a character may have good reasons to want to escape from this world, is that choice justified as a permanent solution? In "On Fairy Stories," Tolkien defends the function of "escape" by distinguishing between the flight of the deserter and the escape of the prisoner. When shut up in prison, isn't one justified in thinking about the outside world and seeking release if possible?

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt