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profiterole_reads) wrote2024-12-02 05:51 pm
profiterole_reads) wrote2024-12-02 05:51 pm
There Is a Door in This Darkness by Kristin Cashore
There Is a Door in This Darkness by Kristin Cashore (Graceling Realm, Jane Unlimited) was excellent! In 2020, Wilhelmina and her former high school classmate James start getting mysterious magical clues.
This is a lovely book of magical realism that also deals with two serious issues:
- Covid and the relevant safety protocols: I've read all of Kristin Cashore's novels, but I was especially interested in this one because there are so few stories focused on Covid, and many people IRL have decided that Covid isn't a thing any more, so it feels really great to read a book where the characters are masking. Wilhelmina especially wants to protect her asthmatic father and her old-ish great-aunts.
- The US elections: with her great-aunts' mail-in ballots having "somehow" never arrived to her parents' house, Wilhelmina drives her great-aunts from Massachusetts to Pennsylvania so that they can vote in person. Then the characters follow the results slowly coming in until the Biden/Harris win. The horrors of the 2016-2020 Trump presidency are mentioned a lot. This was hard to read knowing that he's now won again.
Wilhelmina's great-aunts are in an f/f(/f) relationship (all-female polyamory is pretty rare rep). Frankie has died of ovarian cancer, but there are a number of flashback chapters with her. Several major characters are POC. Wilhelmina has chronic pain due to thoracic outlet syndrome (like the author, except that it turned out Kristin Cashore had been misdiagnosed and actually had Arnold-Chiari Malformation Type 1, but that's only in the author's note). Her mother has seasonal allergies. Her great-aunt Esther has arthritis. James has dyscalculia.
This is a lovely book of magical realism that also deals with two serious issues:
- Covid and the relevant safety protocols: I've read all of Kristin Cashore's novels, but I was especially interested in this one because there are so few stories focused on Covid, and many people IRL have decided that Covid isn't a thing any more, so it feels really great to read a book where the characters are masking. Wilhelmina especially wants to protect her asthmatic father and her old-ish great-aunts.
- The US elections: with her great-aunts' mail-in ballots having "somehow" never arrived to her parents' house, Wilhelmina drives her great-aunts from Massachusetts to Pennsylvania so that they can vote in person. Then the characters follow the results slowly coming in until the Biden/Harris win. The horrors of the 2016-2020 Trump presidency are mentioned a lot. This was hard to read knowing that he's now won again.
Wilhelmina's great-aunts are in an f/f(/f) relationship (all-female polyamory is pretty rare rep). Frankie has died of ovarian cancer, but there are a number of flashback chapters with her. Several major characters are POC. Wilhelmina has chronic pain due to thoracic outlet syndrome (like the author, except that it turned out Kristin Cashore had been misdiagnosed and actually had Arnold-Chiari Malformation Type 1, but that's only in the author's note). Her mother has seasonal allergies. Her great-aunt Esther has arthritis. James has dyscalculia.
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Oh, fascinating. Just this remark made me want to read it. *adds to "book recs" file* :-)
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