Breadcrumbs by Anne Ursu

[lightreads]

Breadcrumbs by Anne Ursu

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Finished the morning of my birthday (no felicitation necessary, this was mumblemumble months ago). A dreamy modern fairy tale for the pre-teen set about being the child of divorce and losing your best friend and being the very brave girl who follows him into another world to get him back.

Wonderful in many ways, and I commend it to many of you and to your kids. I loved all of this set in the ‘real” world, but the fairy tale portions were pitched exactly counter to my tastes. Idiosyncratic thing, ignore me.

But the thing I really wanted to talk about is growing up. Why finishing this on my birthday was a lovely bit of serendipity. I have always, always felt ever since I was very small that growing up is a process of accumulating, not losing. I have never understood all those formulations of childhood and adulthood that require the child to lose to grow up. Lose innocence, or capacity for magic, or whatever it is. I think because growing up for me meant gaining freedom and autonomy and community, and lots of other things I was slowly starving for, the idea that growing up means losing something valuable never sat right. (Plus, I think there’s a lot of *gestures* creepy fetishizing of ‘purity’ going on there that I can’t quite articulate).

And I love that this book doesn’t go down that path. It easily could, and it is working in the liminal space between childhood and adulthood. Right where relationships begin to become a little bit fraught, even if no one is quite clocking sexuality yet. Right where things are a little hard at home, and mom needs you to step up and pull your weight, even if your weight isn’t all that much yet. And that liminal space between fantasy and reality where everyone is telling the protagonist to “grow up” and be present in this world, but all she can do is see her way into the fairy tale.

So this book is right there in those spaces, but it’s absolutely not about losing access to magic because of feelings for boys, or even about magic and adulthood as antithetical. Hazel (a mixed-state name for a transracial adopted girl stuck between worlds, it really is that kind of book) does have a flexibility of mind that lets her do what she has to do, but I feel like that’s because she is who she is, not because she’s nine. This kid is going to grow up scared but brave, and she’s going to read fantasy books and smile secretly to herself, because these are not the childish things that one must put away.




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Comments

[readerjane]

This sounds wonderful. Thanks for the rec.

Reminds me of Lewis' dedication of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to his goddaughter Lucy Barfield: the idea that children may become self-conscious about reading fantasy books for awhile, but if they are really the sort of people who love those stories, they can reclaim them again.

"...But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. You can then take it down from some upper shelf, dust it, and tell me what you think of it. I shall probably be too deaf to hear, and too old to understand, a word you say, but I shall still be your affectionate Godfather..."

[lightreads]

:D. I have been whistfully thinking recently, for obvious reasons, of all the books I'll be able to give to my niece or nephew, when the time comes. (please please please be a reader, unconceived child!) And this one is definitely on the list.

[readerjane]

:D
I think it's possible to nurture readers. As young parents, we were often to tired to do anything but sit on the couch, toddler on our laps, and read. Our kids figured out very quickly that when all other attempts to engage us failed, bringing us a book would always succeed.

There's also the quality of the delivery. When I used to volunteer at my kids' grade school, I was asked to read to my Daughter's class one day. (Lewis' LWW, as it happens.) At the end of the chapter one of her classmates said in an awed voice, "Wow, I see why K is such a good reader."

I think that, as much as any genetic predisposition, turned them into readers.

[cahn]

Hm. Your reviews always make me think. One of the things I do think is lost with adulthood is potential. A baby has, at least in the mind of a third party, the potential to be anything. A child can be almost anything (though even there choices start to be curtailed). An adult... has become the person s/he is, to a large extent.

(Not that it's a bad thing. Or a good thing. It just is. If I may use a dorky physics metaphor, because that's how I roll, it's like the interchangeability of potential and kinetic energy. An adult is all kinetic, a baby is all potential, but they're both energy: different ways of looking at it. But I think there can be a certain amount of perceived loss inherent in looking back at it, even if that loss is an illusion.)

When I originally started this comment, I was going to say, maybe that's part of what's behind this idea of adulthood losing the ability to do magic... but you know what? I don't think so, except in, perhaps, something like Hero and the Crown, where adulthood means making choices that sometimes do or don't preclude other things. For a while. Which is, I think? what you were saying this book does as well.

(Um, I think I'm being even more incoherent than normal, which is kind of impressive. Long day!)

[metaphortunate]

That sounds great! *notes for the Junebug* *and for me*

[readerjane]

Finished the book this morning. Powerful and wrenching. Thank you so much for the recommendation.

I was surprised, as I was reading, at how vivid this book was given how much telling (as opposed to showing) Ursu was doing. Not that she didn't show at all: she did show us quite a lot, but she also spelled out for us, often, what Hazel was learning from her quest.

Many children's lit authors put me off by assuming their audience won't pick up simple queues and therefore underscoring the meaning of events too much. It's condescending, and ultimately unnecessary: readers who care about meaning will glean it from the story itself, whatever their age. And there's nothing wrong with finding a story has grown when you return to it, having grown yourself.

But when this story told me what some things meant, I found I didn't mind. Haven't quite worked out why yet -- perhaps because the storyteller was not condescending to Hazel?

[lightreads]

Maybe because what it's doing is actually quite rich and complicated? I dunno, often when I get annoyed by having a book explain itself at me, it's at least partly because it's obvious, but also partly because it's just not that interesting. But this was very . . . dense and sort of prickly and complicated. Like adolescence.

I feel I missed something about this book, though. Something about the stylistic point-of-view choices she made, and the way she slipped into and out of fairy tale mode, and *hand gestures*. I think there was something very clever there that I didn't get.