Maybe, sometimes, there mystery and whimsy and dancing shadow puppets, too. By the end, he realizes that, “maybe death all worms and nothingness. As Stanly’s relationship with Princy changes and grows throughout the course of the book, so does Stanly’s understanding of Death. Spoiler alert: as you probably guessed, Princy represents Death in the story. She wants to be best friends with the skeleton, that she names Princy, but when she starts to get sick more often than usual, Stanly worries that maybe the skeleton isn’t as friendly as Miren thinks. The only person who doesn’t find the skeleton creepy is Stanly’s little sister, Miren. They start to grow, first into a bony hand reaching up into the sky, and then into a full-sized skeleton that only children and a few special adults can see. He hopes to dig up the bones and photograph them in order to win a contest, but the bones have other ideas. In Skeleton Tree, the main character, Stanly, discovers a finger bone in his backyard. For a concrete example, let’s take a look at my first book, Skeleton Tree. The magical element is often symbolic of a larger idea. Think of the magic as a spiritual guide, leading the character on a journey of self-discovery. It is generally there in order to spark or highlight an emotional change in the main character. In magical realism, the fantasy element serves a different purpose.
Think Buffy the Vampire Slayer the beasties are primarily there to drive the plot forward and give Buffy landmarks on her hero’s journey. One of the key differences here is that with contemporary or urban fantasy, the fantasy element is generally a force that characters must strive to overcome. However, we need to take the definition a few steps farther to really understand magical realism, especially if we want to differentiate it from contemporary fantasy or urban fantasy, which are also fantasy stories that take place in everyday settings. I like to define magical realism in middle grade as a story that takes place in an everyday setting with just a hint of magic. Today I’m going to share my specific understanding of the sub-genre and how I have used everyday magic as a tool to develop my characters’ emotional journeys.įirst, a definition. Middle grade authors have developed their own version of magical realism, which, of course, varies just as much as previous iterations.
Nowadays, my thoughts on the subject are not quite so lofty. Magical realism is a flourishing sub-genre of middle grade literature, but what does it mean, how is it different from standard fantasy and why is it so appealing to young readers and not-so-young authors alike? My first introduction to magical realism came in college when I became enamored with the works of Congolese author Sony Lab’ou Tansi although, at the time, I wrote a paper outlining how his brand of magical storytelling differed from the classic magical realism tradition of Latin American authors like Gabriel García Márquez and Jorge Luis Borges.
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