The right book at the right time
Kate Alice Marshall's Glassheart
They laughed, and for a moment, it didn’t matter that they had Stories coursing inside of them, that there were villains prowling outside. They were just Pip and Otto and Eleanor, and they were friends, and they were enough.
—Glassheart, by Kate Alice Marshall
Hi, friends,
This one got surprisingly personal—sometimes the right book at the right time can do a whole lot to bring a nebulous swirl of Unidentified Feelings into suddenly sharp focus?
I hope you’re well.
The first time Eleanor, Pip, and Otto faced off against the People Who Look Away, they managed to buy themselves a little time. They made a deal to save their own lives—and the lives of their loved ones, not to mention the lives of everyone else in the world, no pressure—in the hopes of finding a better solution before the terms of the temporary arrangement ran up.
But making deals with powerful centuries-old storybook beings hellbent on achieving their goals is tricky.
Now, heading into their last adventure, the three friends aren’t just facing oblivion at the hands of Mr. January and his sisters. They’re rapidly losing their memories, relationships, and identities to the Stories themselves—they’re gaining magical power as it happens, but they’re being rewritten from the inside out.
They filed down the hall together. Up ahead, one of the Empty appeared. Eleanor didn’t feel even the tiniest flutter of fear as the man strode past them. She could never have pretended to be this calm, she realized. She had so very much anxiety and fear and worry in her when she wasn’t Empty, it was a wonder she got anything done. How easy. How simple it was, with nothing inside.
—Glassheart, by Kate Alice Marshall
Glassheart is an adventure-fantasy about facing off against impossible odds. It’s about found and chosen family, about loss, love, friendship, and trust. It’s about the power of story and about how adhering to a simple narrative can powerful in some ways and constricting in others—looking at things as black and white is easier, but a whole lot of important stuff is in the nuance.
And, the big one. It’s about choices: having them, making them, and most crucially, allowing others to make their own.
The very quick version: It’s an absolutely fantastic end to the trilogy. Like the others, it’s smart and scary and funny and heartfelt. It continues to expand the worldbuilding, and it goes in delightfully unexpected directions. I laughed, I cried, I worried, I turned pages so fast I had to keep telling myself to slow down.
Also, based on two specific lines, I’m 99.9% sure that it’s set in the same universe as Seanan McGuire’s fantastic Wayward Children series? (If I’m wrong, honestly I don’t even care, that will be my headcanon forevermore and there is no convincing me otherwise.)
The much, much longer version: It deals, very much, with emotional pain and how it can twist us. It’s about how love can be used against us, can be used to manipulate us. It’s about abuse, and how so often, the people being abused are desperate for the love and approval of their abusers.
It’s about the desire to be free from emotional pain.
Marshall shows people choosing different paths: She shows characters who embrace making decisions based purely in rationality, and she shows characters who allow their judgement to be affected by emotion. The characters who choose rationality alone want to achieve a goal, so they take the easiest path to that goal, regardless of the consequences. All that matters is the endgame. The characters who allow emotion to affect their choices have a harder road—sympathy, hope, and love can be used against us, and loss is painful—but in trusting one another, they are ultimately stronger.
Even when bonds are broken or damaged, the memories of what that relationship was, the lessons learned as it ran its course, remain. Emotional pain leaves scars. But Glassheart does a beautiful job of showing characters learning from those scars and eventually, healing. Not healing perfectly and not into the same people they were before, but into new ones.
Wander shook her head. “Eleanor, I am myself. Not the person I used to be, no—but everyone changes. Some change more than others. I won’t undo what I’ve become.”
—Glassheart, by Kate Alice Marshall
All of that leads to what was, for me, even bigger. And here’s where it gets personal, because wow, as I said up top, the right book at the right time can really be a game changer. Glassheart, for me, was a game changer.
This book is so, so much about identity, and about how our own identities shift as we age and grow and learn. We are so many different people over the courses of our lives—the person I am today is not the same person I was ten years ago is not the same person I was twenty years ago. I will be a different person ten years from now. And that’s scary and weirdly sad—transitions always involve some amount of grief, I think?—but it’s also okay. It’s good, even. It means that I have continued to question, to learn, to grow.
I will continue to do all of those things. There will be pain sometimes, and worry and fear, but the trade-off is worth it. And honestly, the alternative isn’t very appealing: A gray world, stagnant and boring.
So, thanks very much to Kate Alice Marshall for unexpectedly helping me process a pretty huge shift that I’ve been working on in my backbrain for the last couple of years. I’d been tiptoeing closer and closer to a crossroads for a while, and somehow, Glassheart was the book that helped me finally identify the right path.
While I read books geared towards all age groups, there’s something so special, for me, about middle grade fiction. Maybe it’s because everything at that age is so in-between? We start to really actively figure out who we are as individuals at that age—or, at least, that version of ourselves—and what we think about things. Instead of looking to someone older—a parent, a guardian, a sibling, a mentor—we start to have our own distinct opinions and ideas, and we start to question things that we might not have even wondered about before.
We start looking at the world outside of ourselves, and figuring out our place in it. We start to understand that adults are flawed and muddling through, that they don’t have all of the answers, that they’re not always right.
And then hopefully, we continue doing that over the course of our lives, but that first time… it’s a lot. Middle grade fiction allows for Big Feelings to be considered and processed in a way that strips away a lot of the extraneous baloney, and so maybe it’s not so surprising that it can lead to really big realizations for adult readers?
I hope you have a great week.
Talk soon,
Leila
This is a really surprising premise for a fantasy series, especially MG - although we never shy away from the emo, do we? I was just looking at the covers over the weekend and thinking, "Ooh, pretty!" but wow - now I have to read these.
You're making my TBR pile ridiculous, just so you know.
I love that a good MG book can take an adult and move them past something going on in their heads that they hadn't realized was there. #writinggoals