The Book Witch by Meg Shaffer
The Book Witch by Meg Shaffer
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
“All stories are love stories if you love stories.”
The Book Witch is one of my very favorite things: a book about books that actually remains a book about books all the way through. There’s also great banter, housed in a wonderful but star-crossed romance where the romantic interest is also a charming friend, one who makes an excellent partner in crime. And there’s a multilayered mystery to be solved. But at its very heart, The Book Witch is a love letter to all stories, but especially to the ones that make us brave.
I was instantly reminded of the Thursday Next series, beginning with The Eyre Affair. And our main character, Rainy March, has just as kitschy and unlikely a name. If you’ve loved Thursday Next, The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep, Inkheart, or any other book about books where the veil between fiction and reality grows thin, The Book Witch is the book for you.
Rainy is a Book Witch, someone who can dive into books and fix them when their stories go off the rails for any reason. Book Witches have other story-based skills besides diving into and out of books with their trusty umbrellas. The inclusion of those additional talents imbued their magic with extra depth. It was a worldbuilding nuance I appreciated. Rainy tries so hard to follow the Black and White rules of the Book Witches, to live up to the perfect reputation of her departed mother. But nothing she does is ever enough. Then one day, she breaks the biggest rule of all: she falls in love with a fictional character. And he loves her right back. I loved both Rainy and her love interest, as well as Koshka. Rainy’s familiar, Koshka the cat, was an adorable animal companion with a lot of character and charm for a nonverbal character.
The Book Witch is incredibly meta in multiple ways. And the different parts or books were based around different genres, which I thought was a fun addition. If you’re a fan of literary references, this is the book for you. It refers to more wonderful stories than can be named or counted for a brief review. Some of my favorites included those to the legend of King Arthur, Something Wicked this Way Comes, The Great Gatsby, The Count of Monte Cristo, Nancy Drew, and many more. Alice in Wonderland as seen in this story honestly sounds terrifying; it was interesting to see the twistedness of Wonderland through adult eyes. Shaffer even includes light references to her own debut, The Wishing Game, later in the book.
I simply adored everything about The Book Witch. It’s a beautiful ode to literature and the comfort we find between the pages of our favorite stories. There was never a dull moment, and I smiled through almost the entire book. I even found myself tearing up on occasion. And if you’re a reader who prefers their romance closed-door, you’re in luck! There was only one “scene” in this book, and it was entirely fade-to-black. If you’re not only a reader, but a true lover of books, The Book Witch needs to be on your radar. It will undoubtedly be one of my favorite books of the year, and one I return to when life gets heavy and I need the comfort of a story I can trust to lift me up.
Below are some of my favorite quotes from the book:
“People, in other words, need stories. But stories also need people. An unread book is a caged animal, trapped between paper walls. They want reading, need it. To open a book is to set a story free.”
“When the right people read good books once again, the world will be perfect…The world fell apart when people turned their backs on great literature. When we’re done, all the garbage will be taken out and only the classics will remain.” – philosophy of the Burners, the enemies of the Book Witches and wonderful stories everywhere. If a book isn’t on their own approved list, it needs to vanish from the face of the earth.
Rainy’s response to the Burners: “I’m starting to think you don’t actually read the books you claim to love or hate. No, you wave them like flags in a war no one’s fighting but you.”
“Of course good things come from suffering in the real world. You know what good comes from suffering? … Stories. Art. Songs.”
“If you were a book, I would read every page of you in one sitting and then when it was over, I’d start back at page one and read you again. If our life together was a story, I’d want it to be a million pages long, a billion pages. I hope there are scenes in the book of our love that burn holes in the paper. I hope the happy chapters are the longest and the saddest chapters are barely a page. And I hope and pray that however our story ends, it ends with us together and the last word of the story of our life is ‘forever.’” – Hands down one of the most romantic declarations of love I’ve ever encountered. I don’t typically swoon, but this called for it.
“The fictional characters we love stamp their names on our hearts. They show us how to fight our battles, how to change, how to make it to page three hundred a different person than we were on page one.”
“If you’re afraid to read a book, it’s probably because you know it has something to say to you that you don’t want to hear.”
“Stories thrive on conflict. You do realize the fairy tale ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ without the Big Bad Wolf is nothing but a brief paragraph about an uneventful food delivery.”
“…those who love books and those who wanted to ban them have one single thing in common—we all believe reading a book can change you.”
From the Acknowledgements: “But books are resilient. Stories outlive their creators. Shakespeare created so much of our modern English language, we quote him constantly whether we realize it or not. And the pen will always be mightier than the sword, for a sword only destroys and a pen creates.”
You can purchase the book here: Amazon | Bookshop.org | Blackwell’s | Audible | Libro.fm