When I was thirteen I wanted to be a witch.
I also wanted to be a witch at ten and fourteen and sixteen and twenty-one and let’s face it to this day, but it was at the age of thirteen that my passion reached its height – and became action. And by action I mean, “read every single book about witchcraft I could find in the public library, even the super-dry historical stuff, and project a general ‘I’m a witch’ mood around school.”
Well, it worked. Not to be a witch part! The part where I got my classmates in eighth grade to think I might be a witch, but definitely weird, which was not acceptable until the ninth grade at the earliest.
But I did not need “friends” and “mall dates” and “popularity” – not when I had Juniper and Wise Child and Witch Baby and repeated views of The Craft and this one crusty library book that contained an actual spell, to turn into a hare , which I remember every word of the day today and just discovered is attributed to the Scottish coven queen Isobel Gowdie.
Our Crooked Hearts is a magic book made of two bound threads: one is the story of Dana, who discovered and was almost destroyed by witchcraft in 1990s Chicago. The other is the story of her daughter, Ivy, a modern suburban kid who realizes that all the disturbing things that have happened to her – starting with almost driving over a naked woman standing in the middle of a night road – can be traced back to her enigmatic mother, and what happened when she was sixteen.
Dana’s story pays homage to my teenage dreams of witchcraft, and the wave of paranormal YA novels I swallowed. But with Ivy’s story, and the benefit of a little distance from middle school, I got to see for myself how the high cost of magic can resonate for the next generation. If I had managed to become a witch, and caused hare chaos all over the suburb of Chicago, how could it overshadow the child’s life story? To put it another way: What if, for example, Renesmee Cullen got her own book, except instead of being a little psychic engaged to a teenage wolf, she was instead a confused teenager, wondering what she should do about the mother?
Here are five more books and series that, like Our Crooked Hearts, play with magic and its aftermath.
Chosen Ones by Veronica Roth
In his first post-YA novel, Roth explores the idea of adulthood as a long epilogue to a rich and succinct story we have read a thousand times: that of a crew of child saviors fighting a supernatural (or sometimes, business) threat against absolute domination or destruction. She centers her story on Sloane, a reluctant celebrity / survivor / formerly selected who is still trying to understand what was done to her. While her public duties as a heroine increase around the tenth anniversary of her trauma, Sloane digs into source material around the defeat of the dark that has never left her – and then falls in the middle of the book through a trapdoor right back into the nightmare.
The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson
This phenomenal multiverse story begins after the death of the main character Cara – in all but eight of the 372 known worlds. In the world where our history has its origins, Cara is a steely stone of the Ashtown waste, identified for her gift to die almost everywhere, but in the world where it counts: the one where the Eldridge Institute has perfected multiverse travel, sending agents across worlds to gather information. The catch is that agents can only survive the trip if their other world — I’m dead. The book is instantly gripping and unfolds with operational scope, but it is only as you continue that you discover how much of the story has already happened, how much plot and trauma already resides inside Cara’s skin, and overshadows everything from her potentially fatal choices for her melancholy flirtations and flings with different versions of her unattainable trades.
The Magician’s Land by Lev Grossman
(Spoilers ahead, but no more than you would read on the book’s jacket copy. Read also : Amazon Prime Video signs an agreement with Warner Bros. Discovery, to premiere HBO Max Originals in India.)
All good portal stories of a certain type must end with their children’s characters being carefully thrown out of the fairyland. Before we reach this, the last book in the Magicians trilogy, we’ve seen the main character Quentin Coldwater anxiously through the magic school and onto a throne in the Narnia – like land of Fillory – before it throws him out on his ass. The Magician’s Land opens on a very humble, deposed King Quentin who wanders around a bookstore with a strip center, hoping to get a freelance magic job, which turns into one of my favorite fictional robberies. It gets even better from there. In the earlier parts, Grossman riffed magnificently on magical school stories and mission books such as The Voyage of the Dawn Treader; The Magician’s Land is getting wider and weirder. If books one and two spread across the map of existing fantasy stories, this one lives off the edges, where dragons are.
The Wayward Children Series by Seanan McGuire
Speaking of children thrown out of wonderland! The tropics are so traumatizing and worn McGuire built an entire beloved series on its feet. All the books are weird and ingenious, but Down Among the Sticks and Bones has a special place in my heart. Aside from cheating: while other books in the series focus directly on what happens after a child is let into a world that steals their heart and spits them out, this one, book two, focuses on the backstory of characters we met in book one. Read also : Book Pages: Finding an old list of favorite books hidden on the shelves. We already know what the siblings Jack and Jill – one analytical and restrained, the other remarkable and frightening – will do and be. In this short story, McGuire shows us how to get there, from their distorted childhood to their time in the gloomy and brutal Moors, the scary other world that takes them in and sharpens their most logical (Jack) and evil (Jill) instincts.
Cinderella Is Dead by Kalynn Bayron
This book’s killer premise: two hundred years after Cinderella’s death, her “legacy” lives on in the form of an oppressive, misogynistic regime in which ornamental obedience is a woman’s only way to marriage – and marriage is her only chance to live beyond eighteen. Based on a hagiographic version of the Cinderella story, the kingdom’s marriage market revolves around a mandatory annual ball where young women dressed in devastatingly expensive clothes must accept the suit of any man who offers. Read also : Perform magic with a little high-tech help. The quirky, headstrong Sophia would rather run away with her boyfriend Erin. And when Erin refuses, Sophia decides to dismantle the entire patriarchal structure instead.
Melissa Albert is the New York Times and indie bestselling author of the Hazel Wood series (The Hazel Wood, The Night Country, Tales from the Hinterland) and a former bookseller and YA blogger. Her work has been translated into more than twenty languages and included in the New York Times list of notable children’s books. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.
