(courtesy Harper Collins Australia)
Have you ever wanted you could live inside a book?
This phrase, replete with melancholy longing and wishful hopefulness begins and ends The Astral Library by Kate Quinn, its use embodying the need many of us have had at one point or another in our lives to escape the exhausting burden of everyday life.
The moment I read this, I thought two things – what a brilliantly evocative and inviting way to begin a book, and the way I used to read books during a childhood full of bullying and social exclusion, wishing with all my heart that the love and happiness and community in many of them could be something I lived with every day of my life.
I was lucky though; while I went through hell and back at school and often in the church where I grew up, where people’s ideas of what a good pastor’s son should be weighed me down almost to the point of breaking, I was loved very much by parents and siblings which went a long way to keeping my emotional head above water.
Not so lucky at all is Alix Watson, the protagonist of The Astral Library who has spent a sad life bouncing between a multitude of uncaring foster homes after being abandoned by a mother who cared more about being with her latest loser boyfriend than being a good mother to her daughter.
A voracious reader, the phrase that bookends the novel is made for her.
Have you ever wanted to live inside a book?
I [Alix] saw that written on a library wall once, in curly purple script over the doors to the children’s section. Complete with a mural of an annoyingly adorable girl crawling between the covers of an oversize book, pulling the pages up like clean sheets over annoyingly adorable ringlets. She looked so smug. I wanted to slam the book on her head … but the curly scripted question lingered.
Have you ever wanted to live inside a book?
While she’s now well and truly aged out of the foster system, her life remains one of hard scrabble and stingingly intense of never being chosen, and thus loved, by anyone.
One night, after a day of working multiple jobs, being evicted and having her identity stolen, she takes refuge, as she often does, in the reading room at the Boston Public Library, a place where she can lose herself in the books she loves and dream of a world where she is wanted and loved and where her life means something.
It’s clearly the worst day she’s had in quite some time and all she wants is to steal some hours away on lands where hope flourishes and community holds you nurturingly close.
But her temporary refuge becomes something wholly different when a hidden door opens in the wall of the reading room and she tumbles into the titular library which is every bit as magical an escape as she could ever have hoped for.
Here, the lost and unloved, the broken and the abused can find sanctuary in the books they love (as long as they are out of copyright; quite why that is makes for a delightful piece of commentary on the need for the IP of all creators, including authors, to be respected) and live out lives impossible in a world that only seems to reject them at every turn.
It’s the deepest wishes of Alix’s heart come to life and it marks The Astral Library as something quite special indeed.
But everything is not as bright and shiny as Alix thought, and while the library is the sanctuary she hoped for, forces are gathering to try and take it down for reasons that must be left to the reading.
Suffice to say that even the most magical of things need to be fought for, and much of the page-turning wonder of The Astral Library comes from the adventure that Alix and other go on to save a place that offers hope where there is none, and a place of safety for those long shorn of it.
Theirs is an intense and furious battle that takes everything they’ve got, and which requires all the ingenuity and inventiveness they have, and it proves that you often have to fight for what you love to keep it from vanishing off into the ether.
In some ways, it’s kind of cruel that the library comes under threat just as Alix finds it, or rather the library finds her for it invites in souls it knows are at the point of breaking, but in other ways, it’s perfect timing because the freshness of Alix’s discovery, the wonder and joy of finding she has a home, pushes her harder and faster to making sure it’s saved and protected.
While Alix may not have financial resources or a lot of life experience in certain things, one thing she does have is a love of books and the rich literary knowledge that comes from that, and it is this knowledge that makes all the difference in the battle at the heart of The Astral Library.
‘My hero,’ I [Alix] sang out to him like any damsel worth her stuff, and as d’Artagnan bounded to his feet with a whoop and he and Beau engaged Chester between them, I swiped the green tablet open and thumbed us back to the Astral Library.
Full of breathtakingly wondrous world-building, characters full of magic but achingly human and troublingly lost and hopeful all at once, The Astral Library is, like many of its fantasy counterparts, well aware that even the most magical of things can be soured and souled by the bleak destructiveness of ambitiously cruel humanity.
It is also not afraid to embrace the fact that while life can be beautiful and electrically alive, it can also feel like a dread weight around the soul for those who have only witnessed its capacity for loss, cruelty and hate and who ache to be taken into the arms of people and places that will unconditionally love them and where they can find a home.
And yes, the battle that comes to define the storyline of The Astral Library is a vigorous and perilous one and it seems at times like the library itself could be lost, but the novel also holds hope and love and possibility close to its narrative heart and it’s this beacon of life as it should and could be that powers the novel through to its forever after end.
The Astral Library is a page-turning joy to read, the kind of novel that knows things can be bleak and dreadful and that people suffer because of that but which also knows that places of literary magic and sanctuary and inclusive community exist, and that if we find them, we must fight for them with every thing we have and value more than life itself because they will be what makes it worth living again.