Laurel Snyder

I’m not even sure how I came home from BEA with The Girl Who Could Fly.  Maybe it was in the bag I stole after speed-dating?  In any case, it’s amaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaazing!  Why haven’t I been hearing more buzz?

It keeps switching gears on me. And I really dig that.

First I thought it was going to be an updated version of those homey book about salt-of-the-earth types who farm the land and quietly love their spunky children.

Which was pretty awesome.

Then I thought it was going to be about a magical boarding school.

Which was pretty awesome.

But now I see where it’s headed, and it’s WEIRD!  There a great deal of carefully executed political/social commentary (AWESOME) and the most lovely magical details (a glowing giraffe, cricket who sings opera, snapping rose with teeth) and there’s also quite a well-tooled adventure, with some real suspense. VERY well plotted.

(I haven’t learned to do that yet myself)

And everyone, everyone, everyone is complex. There is no EEEEEVIL villain.  There is no perfect hero.  Everyone is human, and yet everyone is bizarre and unusual.

THAT, my friends, is the kind of book I like.

This is a book of magic in the real world.  As much as it begins in a kind of Penderwicky-land, where kids still run around barefoot in the grass and nobody has a cellphone, despite that it’s the 21st century….

Emotionally, it’s very much about the world we live in. Where people are mixed up and neurotic and they try to control everything around them, in a sad attempty to avoid being  swept up…

And about how you gots tah lissen tah yer gut.

(To all the control freaks out there, and that means pretty much everyone– this should be required reading!)

(And to Victoria Forester– will you come over to my house for a tea party? Pretty please?)

This entry was posted on Friday, June 20th, 2008 at 7:46 am and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.