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

[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.