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Book Review: Through the Witches’ Stone by Scott A. Johnson

Cover art for Through the Witches' Stone by Scott A. Johnson

 

Through the Witches’ Stone by Scott  A. Johnson

Timber Ghost Press, 2023

Available: Paperback

Buy:  Bookshop.org  |  Amazon.com

 

 

12 year old  Hadley and her younger twin brothers are stuck for the summer on her grandma’s isolated farm. It isn’t as boring as she expects: she learns she is descended from a long line of witches, and her grandmother starts teaching her magical spells. Hadley’s grandma has only three rules: stay out of the locked rooms upstairs, stay out of the woods, and don’t invite strangers into the house. But while the twins have each other, Hadley has no one her age to talk to, until one night she spots a girl in a white dress and sneaks out to meet her.

 

Although her brothers are uneasy, Hadley keeps it a secret from her grandma. There’s a magical barrier that prevents the girl from crossing between the house and the woods, so she lets the girl lead her into the woods, and they become friends. Then Hadley makes the mistake of inviting the girl into the house. She turns out to be a changeling, who kidnaps Hadley’s brothers and grandma. Hadley must go into the inhospitable woods alone and attempt to find and defeat the changeling to rescue her brothers and grandma. She saves a pukwudgie (a short creature with hedgehog quills down its back and a large nose that originates in Native American mythology) She is also accompanied by a duo of brownies she calls Tom and Jerry. Despite the unfriendly folk and forest, Hadley wins them over and eventually, after some really creepy and compelling adventures, rescues her family.

 

There’s a lot of grief work going on. Hadley’s father was killed in a car accident she blamed her mother and herself for. Her mother is grieving her sister, husband, and father. The pukwudgie is grieving his family. Much of this is about making peace and letting go of grief and fear, but it does not overwhelm this fantastical, scary tale reminiscent of Mary Downing Hahn’s books, the Spiderwick Chronicles, and Outside Over There.

 

 

Booklist: The Magicians by Lev Grossman and Doors To Other Worlds

I recently discovered The Magicians while surfing NetflixYes, I know I’m late to the party. It’s based on a book of the same name by Lev Grossman, and I’m going to say that in this case the show is much better than the book. The Magicians tells the story of Quentin, a nerdy, WASPY, and very unhappy teenager obsessed with a series of fantasy novels about four children who escape the real world through portals to a magical world called Fillory where they go on quests and eventually become kings and queens. Quentin turns out to have magical powers and receives an invitation to attend a school of magic. Brakebills, which he travels to through a portal. Despite being located in upstate New York, it is always summer there. Unfortunately, eventually the students graduate, their idyll ends, and they have to function in the real world. Quentin and his friends find the means to visit Fillory through a portal, but they haven’t been invited or given a quest and they’re just as lost there as they are anywhere else. It’s like forcing your way into Narnia, a child’s world, after already getting jaded and aging out.

Reading The Magicians is kind of like reading Harry Potter if the characters were always drunk, the teachers weren’t involved in students’ lives, and there was no plot or character development except that Quentin isn’t unhappy all the time when he’s at Brakebills.  The characters are mostly unlikable and the story is mostly uninteresting. The characters that are most interesting to me in the television series are ciphers in the book. The action and character development that keep me going back to the show were probably the only reason I managed to get to the end of the book– I kept waiting for something to HAPPEN.

But what the book did do was make me think about the stories I know that do have portals and doors to other worlds (and the Neitherlands in The Magicians very much reminded me of the Wood between the Worlds in The Magician’s Nephew). Some of them may make you roll your eyes (I know there are radically differing opinions on the Chronicles of Narnia) but they are an essential part of many stories. You might not even realize how many portals there are.

Rudine Sims-Bishop writes

“Books are sometimes windows, offering visions of worlds that may be real or imagined, familiar or strange. These windows are also sliding glass doors, and readers have only to walk through in imagination to become part of whatever world has been created or recreated by the author. When lighting conditions are just right, however, a window can also be a mirror. Literature transforms human experience and reflects it back to us, and in that reflection we can see our own lives and experiences as part of the larger human experience.”

If you are a reader, you know what she’s talking about in a figurative sense. Here is a short list of books (that do not include The Chronicles of Narnia or Harry Potter) that have literal windows, portals, and doors.

 

Outside Over There by Maurice Sendak.

In this strange and beautiful picture book, Ida’s baby sister is kidnapped by the goblins, and Ida climbs out the window backwards (accidentally) to search for her. This book inspired the movie Labyrinth, and you can spot it in the main character’s bedroom if you search for it.

Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire.

Portals and doors show up in a lot of Seanan McGuire’s books, but this spare, poetic novella is heartbreaking. What happens to the children who go through a doorway to another world when that world no longer wants them, or they can’t find their way back? It’s not a pretty thing. McGuire has written two other related titles, Down Among the Sticks and Bones and Beneath the Sugar Sky, but while I also enjoyed them, Every Heart a Doorway is, in my opinion, the standout.

The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett

There’s nothing officially magical about finding the key and opening the door to the Secret Garden except for the changes it makes in two prickly, miserable, spoiled, lonely children. There is plenty to find fault with in The Secret Gardenthere are racist comments about Indians, and negative stereotypes about disability. But there is so much to love, as well, in the ugliness, anger, fear, grief, and finally, after the door is unlocked, the joy we see in Mary and Colin. That’s especially true if you have read the gratingly irritating Little Lord Fauntleroy(I have), in which Burnett spends most of her time describing the titular character’s physical and moral perfection and engaging personality as the cure for his grandfather’s awful behavior and treatment of others.

The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe by Kij Johnson

Vellitt Boe is a middle-aged professor of mathematics at Ulthar Women’s College in the Dreamlands who is sent to retrieve a gifted student who has run away with a man from the waking world. This novella is a response to a Lovecraft story called The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, which I have not read (and didn’t need to in order to enjoy it)  but is apparently a polar opposite, with a male adventurer from the waking world adventuring through the Dreamlands. This is an inversion of the portal story, in that there is someone from the portal world who travels into ours as an adventurer, rather than the other way around.

Eric by Terry Pratchett

This loose take on the Faust story is not Terry Pratchett’s strongest book by far, but it does have entertaining moments. It also has multiple portals and, yes, a literal door. Rincewind is the Discworld’s worst  and unluckiest wizard, who by pure chance hasn’t yet met a fatal end (he is also one of my least favorite characters, but works out perfectly for this story). He is accompanied by the exceedingly loyal and carnivorous Luggage wherever he goes.  While passing though the Dungeon Dimensions, somehow he has been summoned by Eric, a thirteen year old demonologist, who insists that Rincewind grant him three very grandiose wishes, which Rincewind fulfills in his typical unlucky and nearly-fatal manner. In the meantime, a struggle for power is going on in the city of the demons between those who like doing things the old-fashioned way and the current king, who is trying to modernize.  For Rincewind and Eric, the only way back home is through the door to Hell, but they’ll have to work their way through the mutinous members of a newly-established bureaucracy and a number of people who are unhappy with them for things they said and did on their journey, but relieved to see them go.

 

Reader’s note: The quote from Rudine Sims Bishop originally appeared in “Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors” in Perspectives: Choosing and Using Books for the Classroom, volume 6, no.3.

Book Review: The Changeling by Victor Lavalle

The Changeling by Victor Lavalle

Spiegel & Grau, 2017

ISBN-13: 978-0812995947

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook.

 

 

There are few horror authors who get the reader to sit back in awe of their pure storytelling, using language that flows in an enthralling, dark manner. Victor LaValle ranks near the top of the list. Sit down with The Changeling, and be warned that the hours will disappear. The novel is a masterful reworking of a dark fairy tale, but reads like it’s entirely original.

Apollo Kagwa’s father left many years ago, leaving behind only a box of memories labeled IMPROBABILIA. Now Apollo has his own family, but the odyssey has already begun. When his wife, Emma, leaves following the birth of their son, after committing a terrible act, Apollo finds himself on his own hero’s journey. This story is more like Homer’s tale than anything Grimm put to paper, but the Gaiman-esque conversational voice that LaValle wields pulls the reader along the journey with him to strange places, meeting even stranger people. What Apollo discovers is both breathtaking and heartbreaking, a rarity in the genre. Each chapter is a mirror Lavalle uses to reflect us so we can see ourselves: the good, the bad, and the just plain awful. The characters, all of them, have been deftly drawn, with compassion, then dragged through horrors in a way reminiscent of Stephen King, although it’s entirely Lavalle’s own. Apollo and Emma’s tale is one worth telling, and should be savored, even though it is tough to slow down.

Do yourself a favor and pick up The Changeling. The subtlety may be lost on those expecting pure horror, but for those who want more than the standard fare, you will be highly rewarded. Once you’ve finished with it, be sure to look for Lavalle’s previous works, The Ballad of Black Tom and The Devil in Silver.   Highly recommended.

 

Reviewed by Dave Simms