Guest post written by author Rose Szabo
Rose Szabo is a nonbinary writer from Richmond, VA, where they live with an assortment of people and animals and teach writing at VCU. They have an MA in English from the University of Maine and an MFA in creative writing from VCU. Their work has been published in See the Elephant and Quaint magazines. We All Fall Down is out now.
I grew up reading fantasy as a way to understand reality. One of my earliest memories is of my mother, whom at the time I believed to be my father, reading me The Marvelous Land of Oz. In the book, a young boy learns that he is actually the princess Ozma, kidnapped and transformed by a witch for her own opaque reasons. I remember absorbing calmly the idea that a boy might grow up to be a princess. Later fantasy books would help me to understand things like queerness, child abuse, and the prison industrial complex in ways that were appropriate to my age and experience. I am forever grateful to those works for offering a lens on reality that allowed me to see the world more clearly.
Some of these books use metaphor in order to confront real-world problems indirectly; others address their key issues head-on, with fantasy elements bleeding into a more realistic world. These are some of my favorites, in the order in which I read them:
HOLES by Louis Sachar
A children’s book with magical realism elements, Holes follows the mishaps of Stanley Yelnats, a boy whose family was cursed in the Old Country after a distant ancestor failed to fulfill his promise to an old woman. As a result of this curse, Stanley is falsely accused of stealing expensive shoes meant for charity and who is sent to a penal camp in the desert for criminal boys. He and the other boys are forced to dig round holes in the desert each day. They are told that the digging is about building up their moral fiber, but the Warden who controls the camp has her own nefarious reasons for wanting the desert excavated.
The prison camp in Holes is only mildly fantastical; the novel directly addresses the conditions of real-life prison, in which prisoners perform menial labor to profit others. The book also addresses both past and modern-day racism and the importance of solidarity with others who are struggling alongside you, as Stanley learns that he is not the only one who is imprisoned due to forces beyond his control.
THE BAD BEGINNING by Lemony Snickett
I could say a lot about A Series of Unfortunate Events, which I consider one of the best children’s fantasies of all time. It’s whimsical and experimental, more gothic horror than high fantasy, with wild inventions, a super-strong baby, and a host of grotesque characters. But this book was important to me from an early age because of its realistic depictions of child abuse.
After the Baudelaire children lose their parents in a house fire, they are sent to live with a distant relative, Count Olaf. In later installments the Count is obviously a villain in hot pursuit of their fortune, but in this first book, the children are eager to get along with him and make his house a home. They are floored by the Count’s mood swings, his strange demands, his violent outbursts followed by half-hearted apologies, and they question at first whether they are the ones in the wrong. When they do realize that the Count is after their fortune, they go to their parents’ solicitor for help, only to be told that it’s important that they make this relationship work. In this first book, they gain the clarity to realize that they cannot live in these conditions–and that they must work together if they want to escape with their lives.
PERDIDO STREET STATION by China Mieville
A very strange book about monsters, Perdido Street Station covers a lot of ground but is ostensibly about a birdlike man called Yagharek who has had his wings cut off by his tribe, and Isaac, the scientist he commissions to help him fly again. Isaac initially cannot understand the nature of Yagharek’s crime because of the way it is described, but we learn that Yagharek’s full name, given to him when his wings were taken, is “Too Too Abstract Individual Yagharek Not To Be Respected”–and that the crime he committed is something called “choice theft with utter disrespect.”
This is a book about autonomy and the rights of others, particularly women. A prominent character is Isaac’s girlfriend Lin, a woman with a scarab for a head who has escaped from a cult that taught her that her value was in reproducing and caring for the males of her species. The story winds through a city where people are often deprived of choice for cruel and arbitrary reasons, and it is easy to see Yagharek as another victim of circumstance. But as the story progresses it becomes clear that the harm he has done to others more than warrants the punishment he received, and ultimately Perdido Street Station explores Yagharek’s passage from denial to acceptance of the justice of his punishment.
WHITE IS FOR WITCHING by Helen Oyeyemi
White is for Witching follows a young woman whose family home is out to get her. Miranda Silver is the descendant of a long line of Silver women, whose family estate wants her to stay forever–and hates foreigners of any kind. Miranda tries to get away–first when she is taken to a mental institution to treat her eating disorder, and later when she goes to college–but the house pulls her back toward it, trying to force her apart from her new girlfriend, a Nigerian girl named Ore.
This book felt like a maze with no center at first–where was it going?–until I realized that the point of the book was about the capricious relationship that young white people often have to their own whiteness. As Miranda struggles to make a life for herself, to make friends, to explore her relationship with Ore, the house–and all its ancestral weight–pulls her back into its orbit. She struggles against the house’s edicts, which include the expulsion and murder of anyone it deems other, but Oyeyemi seems to be asking: how do you fight a monster when you are a part of it? And for Ore, the question is: how close can you get to someone who’s fighting a monster of this size?
NO GODS NO MONSTERS by Cadwell Turnbull
School let out a week ago, and I finished this book in one big gulp on my porch swing, drawn in by Turnbull’s unstoppable twists and turns. No Gods No Monsters is the first installation in what is promised to be a sprawling three-part epic about small communities fighting big conspiracies. Set across multiple timelines and featuring a host of main characters, the book begins with “the fracture”, a day when a group of werewolves come out of the closet, breaking the ancient pact between two rival secret societies. The book follows the people who survive The Fracture: a man struggling to help his girlfriend cope with the death of her werewolf brother at the hands of the police, a boy named Dragon who has been forced to burn people alive, a young woman running for political office who fears what exposure might do to her chances of helping her community, and many, many others. The book explores the risks associated with being seen. I was particularly compelled by the way the book addresses the fear that some of the characters–marginalized in other ways–experience when they are asked to be in solidarity with monsters, and the courage it takes them to overcome that fear and stand together in the face of real danger.
