Also-- I liked the idea of magic in this book, the way it's slippery and deniable and protects itself from analysis. But I really, really couldn't believe that a character as compulsively analytical and self-analytical as Mor wouldn't have spent a lot more time and headspace trying to figure it out-- to what her mother's averted apocalyptic plan had been, what she and her sister had struggled to stop. Even if she has made up all of the magic, I would have expected her to strengthen the delusion by working out the details, not by letting it all slide. Her lack of curiosity comes off as a sign of illness, more than anything else-- a flat affect of the imagination-- but one that's not reflected in her thinking or reading on any other subject.
(Side note: The reading I think makes most sense is that the fairies and their magic are completely real, and that Mor's mother is a sorceress-- but that she's just a hedge-witch, her mental illness and abusiveness are nothing to do with her magic, and she was never brewing up an apocalypse or threatening harm to anyone but her children, and the world-saving is all delusion on Mor's part. But I can't tell whether it's so much that that reading is supported, or that other readings really aren't.)
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momijizukamori and
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Date: 2011-11-13 03:27 am (UTC)Also-- I liked the idea of magic in this book, the way it's slippery and deniable and protects itself from analysis. But I really, really couldn't believe that a character as compulsively analytical and self-analytical as Mor wouldn't have spent a lot more time and headspace trying to figure it out-- to what her mother's averted apocalyptic plan had been, what she and her sister had struggled to stop. Even if she has made up all of the magic, I would have expected her to strengthen the delusion by working out the details, not by letting it all slide. Her lack of curiosity comes off as a sign of illness, more than anything else-- a flat affect of the imagination-- but one that's not reflected in her thinking or reading on any other subject.
(Side note: The reading I think makes most sense is that the fairies and their magic are completely real, and that Mor's mother is a sorceress-- but that she's just a hedge-witch, her mental illness and abusiveness are nothing to do with her magic, and she was never brewing up an apocalypse or threatening harm to anyone but her children, and the world-saving is all delusion on Mor's part. But I can't tell whether it's so much that that reading is supported, or that other readings really aren't.)