Although I like to think I can appreciate good writing wherever I may find it, I tend to shy away from fantasy, and I similarly have trouble with child protagonists. But then I’ll read something like Charlie Jane Anders’s All the Birds in the Sky, which features two child protagonists talking to animals and casting witchy spells. The first hundred or so pages were magical, in that the reader felt their head in the clouds but their feet still firmly rooted in the earth, and a third of the way in I found myself wondering if this might not be one of the greatest books I’ve ever read. Then Part II began, however, and the child protagonists have grown into adults, and the plot turns into a readable sort of chaos, with global wars and big metaphors and lots of world-building, and although Anders does an okay job keeping her ducks in a row, the literary magic is lost, and the book becomes a book that you keep reading to find out how it ends. Don’t get me wrong. It’s still a solid book. I just wish she would’ve kept it contained.
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