You have identified two things that I love in particular about this absolutely brilliant novel.
"There's no ambiguity in the end that Polly has had an encounter with the world of Faerie, yet what actually happened is quite ambiguous ... organic strangeness ... take on numinous meaning." Very little that's overtly supernatural happens in this book, yet the feel of magic is utterly pervasive. It's impossible to overstate how different this is from fantasy novels in which characters throw around spells like they would cell phone calls, yet which have no feeling of the weird or magical about them whatsoever.
"It covers nine years in Polly's life, and her perspective changes dramatically as she goes from age ten to age nineteen." How many other novels, even coming-of-age stories, cover such a vast span of childhood development in the protagonist's life, all of it depicted from an interior perspective, and still convey such a strong sense of her being the same person, whatever her age?
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2013-02-13 07:19 pm (UTC)"There's no ambiguity in the end that Polly has had an encounter with the world of Faerie, yet what actually happened is quite ambiguous ... organic strangeness ... take on numinous meaning." Very little that's overtly supernatural happens in this book, yet the feel of magic is utterly pervasive. It's impossible to overstate how different this is from fantasy novels in which characters throw around spells like they would cell phone calls, yet which have no feeling of the weird or magical about them whatsoever.
"It covers nine years in Polly's life, and her perspective changes dramatically as she goes from age ten to age nineteen." How many other novels, even coming-of-age stories, cover such a vast span of childhood development in the protagonist's life, all of it depicted from an interior perspective, and still convey such a strong sense of her being the same person, whatever her age?