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A review by rachelmac476
Od Magic by Patricia A. McKillip
4.0
Another excellent Patricia McKillip book down in my ongoing quest to read everything she's ever written, still plenty more to go.
This was another excellently crafted story with beautiful magical elements - listening to the wind to hear what plants require, complex illusions, a labyrinth that helps you tackle a nagging problem on your mind, a door to a school underneath a shoe. At the heart of it, as usual with McKillip's books, are deeply human messages. One is the importance of communicating with loved ones - how everyone wants to connect, to be heard - and how you risk losing the ones you love when you don't reach out across that divide, or are unreceptive to others reaching out to you. The other, and probably the stronger message of the two, is how fear - of what you do not know and what you do not understand - creates its own enemies. When you allow fear to dictate your actions, you can only grow to a certain point. When you set fear aside and embrace the unknown, that's when you are able to move forward and grow to reach your full potential.
It can be cumbersome, I think, to sink into this book at first. This is common with McKillip's books - where there are several perspectives introduced in the beginning and you keep switching along different threads of a story. It can be confusing, but she always manages to weave them beautifully together in the end. I for one didn't quite know how to feel about that in the beginning of this journey but I adored the destination.
This was another excellently crafted story with beautiful magical elements - listening to the wind to hear what plants require, complex illusions, a labyrinth that helps you tackle a nagging problem on your mind, a door to a school underneath a shoe. At the heart of it, as usual with McKillip's books, are deeply human messages. One is the importance of communicating with loved ones - how everyone wants to connect, to be heard - and how you risk losing the ones you love when you don't reach out across that divide, or are unreceptive to others reaching out to you. The other, and probably the stronger message of the two, is how fear - of what you do not know and what you do not understand - creates its own enemies. When you allow fear to dictate your actions, you can only grow to a certain point. When you set fear aside and embrace the unknown, that's when you are able to move forward and grow to reach your full potential.
It can be cumbersome, I think, to sink into this book at first. This is common with McKillip's books - where there are several perspectives introduced in the beginning and you keep switching along different threads of a story. It can be confusing, but she always manages to weave them beautifully together in the end. I for one didn't quite know how to feel about that in the beginning of this journey but I adored the destination.