(courtesy Pan Macmillan Australia)
Growing up should be a time of limitless optimism and possibility, a temporal place where imagination runs riot, adventure is the order of the day and all the burdens of the world don’t fall upon your still small shoulders.
But sometimes, all those good and wonderful things don’t happen, at least not as fulsomely as they are supposed to, and we need adventures in reading to provide the escape and diversion we need to make our way through a world that still seems wildly possible but also more than a little limited and dark.
When I was a child, I was bullied horrifically, and my only way to ameliorate the unceasing stress and burden of social isolation was to lose myself in books that spoke of riotous adventure, where worlds wildly different from my own were home to vibrantly diverse people and titanic battles between good and evil that always landed on the side of those morally in the right.
Books like The Emilie Adventures by Martha Wells, acclaimed author of The Murderbot Diaries, in which the titular 16-year-old runs away from the cruel home of her Uncle Yeric and Aunt Helena in a coastal city in an alternate version of our world that is as steampunk and all Jules Verne as you can possibly get.
While Emilie is looked after well enough physically, she is treated terribly by her familial guardians who are very much products of their day and their strata in society and who treat Emilie as someone who must stay in a very narrow lane and do precisely as she is told.
Emilie looked up at Lord Engal, standing next to her, and said, ‘It’s beautiful.’
He glanced down at her, smiling, then took a second startled look. His brows drawing together, he said, ‘Who the hell are you?’
So, like countless others trapped in homes they cannot survive if they stay a moment longer, Emilie runs away from home, determined to get on a ship called the Merry Bell and sail to a town in which her lovely Cousin Karthea lives and where she runs a very successful school for children from the area.
She isn’t entirely sure what she will do there but it has to be better than living under the iron clad strictures of her aunt and uncle.
But as is the way with many a good and thrilling adventure, events conspire to force Emilie to hide on the dark docks on the wrong ship entirely, a vessel, as it turns out, that is about to depart to the centre of the earth using an experimental engine powered by magic and which draws on aetheric currents which thread through all the worlds known and unknown and provide a way of threading between them.
Her departure takes place suddenly as the shop does its best to escape the clutches of nefarious rivals and with barely time to think or feel and with revelatory moments peppering her at a furious speed, Emilie is plunged into a brilliantly expansive adventure into a realm where everything and everyone looks different and yet where many of the delights and problems of our world find some quite amazing counterparts.
The pace established at the start does not let up for a second, with the The Emilie Adventures racing pell-mell from one cliffhanger moment to another, bristling rather wonderfully with an urgency that drives it on and on like a 1950s cinematic serial.
But for all the movement and noise and danger and spectacle, The Emilie Adventures, which combines two books into one collection, Emilie and the Hollow World and Emilie and the Sky World, has more than enough time to establish Emilie as a fully-rounded character who is very much not a product of her misogynistic time.
Like her new adult friend and unofficial guardian, Miss Marlende, whose father leads the adventure into a hitherto suspected but unexplored realm – though some people have ventured there and people of the Hollow World have journey to the surface, it’s rare to have the two places mix – Emilie refuses to simply sit back and let life happen to her.
She wants to carpe diem the hell out of things, and while her initial dive into adventure is driven by a desperate need to escape and is impelled further by a basic need to survive great and terrible danger, it soon becomes something that defines and enlivens her, helping her to become the person she always hoped she might be.
These sorts of epiphanic moments are standard in these types of extraordinary coming of age tales but The Emilie Adventures folds them in beautifully, allowing time, amidst all the noise and adventure, for Emilie to very much grow into who she is deep down.
‘It was something, someone.’ Emilie looked at Miss Marlende and saw her own bafflement and consternation reflected in her expression. A member of the crew? But why only one? And why did they run? ‘What do we do?’
Miss Marlende’s expression hardened and she shover to her feet.
‘Follow it.’
And at the end of the day for all the strange cultures and people and places and plants and creatures, all of which are brought to life with breathless excitement and the thrill of the new and entirely different, The Emilie Adventures comes alive with its enthusiastic embrace of what it means to be human, both good and bad (because what is an adventure without an adversary to add verve to the narrative?).
For all of the differences that Wells so beautifully evokes in both the hollow and sky worlds, there’s also a universality of experience at work here that weaves together friends, and yes, also enemies, with concerns, needs and desire common to all living sentient beings.
In a world where difference and division are being emphatically articulated and weaponised, and where any sense of cohesion and consensus is being blown and well truly out the collective window, The Emilie Adventures is a welcome reminder that, for good or ill but mostly good with Emilie falling in with a wonderful found family that crosses all kinds of boundaries, we have far more in common than we don’t.
But most of all, The Emilie Adventures is a joyous clarion call to the thrill and empowering zest of imagination, adventure and finding yourself in wild and wonderful ways that change your life for the better and which make a once drab and horrible world seem so much brighter and possible.