![]() Thirteen-year-old Harry’s “secret” is that she is “a writer,” telling a story of a “mysterious and threatening love” between a romantic winged villain and his captive. Similarly, The Tricksters (like so much of Mahy’s work) is a warning of the destructive power of story-telling. ![]() It’s just there, mysterious and clever, like a code to be unlocked. And yet this is never acknowledged in any way, within or outside the text. In this way, the book plays games with the idea of its own fictionality: the characters are at once real, creators of fictional characters within the story world, and overt adaptations of fictional characters themselves. At the climax, they encounter an immortal, Hampshire-born, 18th-century author, Eleonor Morland, modeled on Austen herself. ![]() The plot itself is a complicated homage to Jane Austen: Emma’s central romance with arrogant Darcy de Winter maps very specifically onto Pride and Prejudice, as you’d expect, but is entwined with characters from Northanger Abbey and Emma (this Emma’s manipulations of reality through the diary are a beautiful analogue for the matchmaking of Austen’s Emma). The faun, we learn, has always been in danger from its authors rather than the other way around.īut it’s better than that. The book investigates the power books have to shape the world, and the dangers of careless words on those around us: Emma is disturbed, for example, when her wish for an apology from her enemy and future lover Darcy causes him to reveal things she has no right to know, and her anger at him threatens his life. On the cover is a picture of a faun, a fictional character created from the book hundreds of years ago who has disappeared without trace. In this book, the thematic sequel to Gläser’s The Book Jumper, 16-year-old Emma finds an old diary at her German boarding school and realizes that whatever she writes in it comes true. Sometimes it’s writing, and not reading, that holds power. Interacting with them is both a great joy and an awe-inspiring responsibility, and these stories-which span from children’s to adult fantasy-know it very well. Our relationship with them goes beyond the text and into our everyday lives. ![]() Stories aren’t contained by pages they have the power to hurt, to heal, and to shape the real world. Perhaps what I love most about them, though, is that so many of them celebrate the power and even the danger of books.Ĭharacters literally spilling out of the page brings to life something we know to be true about reading, writing, and creating (and one thing I wanted to make very clear when I was writing The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heepis that reading is itself an act of creation-stories can’t exist as more than words without a reader doing half the work). They celebrate the bond between a reader, a writer and a book, and they explore the complicated relationship between fiction and reality. Stories about fictional characters coming to life are, at heart, stories about reading and writing. ![]()
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