Reread 2021: you know that great feeling of rereading a childhood favourite and finding it actually manages to hold up to your memories? Yeah, well: this didn’t...
For nostalgias sake I’m keeping it at 4/5 stars because I have wonderful memories of reading this with my mum when I was about 10, but really: this doesn’t age well.
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Summer, my tiny hometown in the Netherlands, quite some years ago…
I had come to the library with purpose today. The scrunched up piece of paper with recommendations in my mom’s crooked handwriting in hand, I entered the building.
I had always known this day would come, but never thought it’d come so soon. I take the right turn, where I have always taken the left, half expecting to hear someone ask me: “are you lost little girl”. But I am not lost. I stand at the threshold, and open a door I have never been able to close ever since.
I loosed a breath I didn’t know I was holding. An endless labyrinth of shelfs lie before me. I am simultaneously intimidated and in awe.
10 minutes later I emerge from the labyrinth, the book from my piece of paper in hand. But I know in that moment that I will return here often. This is my new home: The Adult-section.
I do hope you enjoyed that piece of melodrama… Seriously though, when you are a kid, going to the adult section for the first time seems like a big deal. The first time I went there was for this book. Nowadays, this book would be appropriately shelved as YA, and my mom knew this when she recommended this to me (Don’t worry, she didn’t send her child out to fetch 50-shades of erotica or some traumatizing horror-book). However, this was the zeros and small-town libraries in the Netherlands where blissfully ignorant of the existence of such rebellious new genres.
To prevent this review from becoming a novel in itself, I will get to the book now. I really had a great time with it, and with the entire trilogy for that matter. I loved the setting, the writing, I loved the hint of magic, and loved the character (especially grandma).
It stands the test of time decently, but probably not as much as some other YA/in between books. If I were to read it for the first time now, I’m not sure I would love it as much as back then.
To come back to the start of my review: before you get into this book, you should know that this book was mis-marketed in my opinion (at least it was in the Netherlands). It's very different from anything you know from Isabel Allende. The target audience should definitely be the younger end of YA. Teens and pre-teens, which was me when I read this for the first time.
It won’t be everybody’s cup of tea, but I still feel it does deserve a bit more love and attention than it has gotten so far.