Do you believe in magic?

I read three books recently that presented magic in ways I want to muse over. Each surprised me by how they explored what is real, what is not and what is left somewhere in between.

The books are BREADCRUMBS, a middle-grade by Anne Ursu; WHITE CAT, a YA by Holly Black, and THE WOOD WIFE, an adult mystery by Terri Windling that I recently wrote about.
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In BREADCRUMBS, Hazel, an adopted girl who's darker than her classmates, feels she never fits in, except when she’s imagining fantasy worlds with her next-door friend, Jack. But one day Jack turns as mean as other kids and then he disappears. Even though she is more fragile than ever, Hazel is determined to bring him back from wherever he went.

Because Hazel is well-read, despite her trouble concentrating in school, Ursu drops references to all sorts of fairy tales and fantasy books as Hazel takes in the world. It’s as if Hazel steps in-and-out of stories every day. She accepts an alternate universe as not only possible but, often, preferable. In fact, when she met Jack years earlier at age six, she was disappointed to discover his eye patch was only for show until she realized that it was the imagining that mattered. “This was a secret truth about the world, one they both understood,” Ursu writes.

Alone, Hazel follows Jack into an icy wood where a white witch has taken him. Although Hazel faces all kinds of deceptive and nasty characters, who are real enough to hurt her, she never gives up on saving her friend.

A snippet: Maybe she could do it. In the real world Hazel was an ordinary thing, a misshapen piece with no purpose. Maybe here she could be a swan.

In the end, it isn’t the witch Hazel must defeat but the coldness Jack has let into his heart.
This is a story about real magic. How thoughts, wishes and dreams can alter our world and how believing in yourself not only helps you but others, as well.
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What I like most about WHITE CAT is the way Black makes the price of using magic so immediate and real. She’s always been masterful at urban fantasy, at finding the underbelly in any world she imagines. In this story, she makes magic prohibited and, therefore, a tool of crime families.
The word "blowback" and its descriptions alone made me love this book. Many fantasy stories talk of a price to be paid for using magic, but Black makes blowback instantaneous and appropriate. Kill someone? Lose a piece of yourself. Mess with their memory? Part of your own past slips away. Play with another's emotions? You become a basket case.

Magicians are called workers, and everyone in Cassel's family works magic but him. He attends a private school where he tries to fit in but still uses criminal cons he learned at home to earn cash. As he begins to question mysterious events around him, he discovers he's a pawn in a dangerous con and the only way out is to out-con the conmen.

A few tidbits:
The family legend says that Barron is just like Mom, even though he works luck and she works emotion. Mom can make anyone her friend, can strike up a conversation anywhere because she genuinely believes that the con is a game.
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My memories are full of shadows, and no amount of chasing them around my head seems to make them any more substantial.
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She looks at me so intently that I drop my gaze. Then she clears her throat and starts talking like I wasn’t just incredibly rude. “Memory magic’s permanent. But that doesn’t mean people can’t change their minds. You can make someone remember that you’re the hottest thing out there, but they can take a good look at you and decide otherwise.”

I’m behind in this series and plan to catch up with RED GLOVE and BLACK HEART.

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I already wrote my love letter to the poetic quality of THE WOOD WIFE here, so this time I’ll keep to the magic, which is steeped in the most ancient roots of earth. My favorite kind.

A woman, who lives between London and Los Angeles, learns she’s inherited property outside of Tucson from a poet who she only knows through years of correspondence. Once she arrives in the wilds of the desert, she feels a strange pull to the land, as if it holds some profound secret.
The longer she stays, the more layers of mystery peel away, only to reveal deeper mysteries. Here are little tastes of the writing from various characters’ POVs:

Shape-shifter: The voice of the wind was a rustle in the leaves, speaking in a language she’d once known and had forgotten. She did not have a name. She had not earned one yet. Or perhaps she had, and had forgotten that too.

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Cooper: There are poems in these trees, in the rock underfoot. I resist it, this slow seduction.
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Lines from a poem: Time is not a river; it flows in two directions…Time is a land I wander in, through smoke, through sage.

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Letter from Cooper: We spend whole days in the hills. The nights are dark and growing cold. I am learning to wait, to watch, to listen. I have never been a patient man. I’ve never been so empty of words, and never felt so full.
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Maggie: “He used words like they were an incantation, a spell, a glamour—do you know what that old word used to mean? A glamour was a kind of spell or enchantment. Somehow Cooper learned to speak the ‘language of the earth’ while he was living up here.”
Dora: “But those images in his poems: the Wood Wife, the Spine Witch, the boy with the owl’s face, the drowned girl in the river…Maggie, are you saying you think they’re real, not symbolic?”
Maggie: “Why can’t they be both?”

A novel of poetic beauty

Sometimes prose is poetry. As National Poetry Month kicks off, I want to shout out THE WOOD WIFE, a book that’s new to me but has been around since 1996 and won the Mythopoeic Award.
I ordered it after reading a good review and because I’m a fan of Terri Windling’s skill as an editor of many fantasy and horror anthologies. One of my all-time favorites is THE FAERY REEL, which she co-edited with Ellen Datlow.
I haven’t finished reading THE WOOD WIFE (about 2/3 inhaled), so this isn’t a review. It’s more of a love letter to a story that keeps fascinating me and to words that make me pause and sigh.
And because it’s about a fictional poet, Davis Cooper, and filled with snippets of his poetry, it’s perfect for National Poetry Month. The book isn’t a verse novel it’s just filled with poetic language, pieces of Cooper’s poems and musings on arts of all kinds.
The hills call in a tongue

I can not speak, a constant murmuring,

calling the rain from my dry bones,

and syllables from the marrow.—THE WOOD WIFE, Davis Cooper

This story is as elusive as its shapeshifter characters, making you question what is real, what is imagination. But it is solidly set. Windling, who is also an artist, paints the scenes with vivid words that carry the reader to the wild desert and hills surrounding Tucson:
She turned slowly, and saw the great white stag pick its way up the rocks of the creek. His eyes were black as a starless night. His hide was velvet, his horns were ivory, he was made of more than flesh and bones. He gathered the dying light of the sky into his being, like a radiant star.

The protagonist, Maggie Black, is forty and a respected poet herself who inherits Davis’s house after his strange death, which appears to be murder. She goes to check it out, not intending to stay but interested in the mystery and any writings he may have left behind. She finds herself enchanted by the desert and its magic and drawn into something beyond time and space.

The Drowned Girl leaves wet footprints,

plaits her hair with pond weed, fingers

white as milk, as death, as loneliness,

upon root, wood, black stone…--THE WOOD WIFE, Davis Cooper

At one point Maggie is surprised to figure out that she’d always seen Davis’s poems as set in England where he was born. But instead of lush, green woods, she realized he was writing about the desert landscape. Her new friend, Fox, responds: “What does it matter whose head those images came from? ‘Poetry is a conversation not a monologue,’ Fox quoted Cooper in a passable English accent. “A writer can only put the words on paper; the vision has to come from the reader, right? It’s language, not paint, not film. That’s the beauty of it to me.”

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Anyone want to have a conversation on poetry, on this book, on the beauty of language?