Hangin' with Chitra in the Wood Between the Worlds
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Time travel has always fascinated me. What is most interesting about it is not the time dimension, but the access it offers to other worlds. It doesn't really matter if a book takes me to another time, or another place--what is most intriguing is when it takes me to a new paradigm.
When I find a book that has this power, I tend to read and reread it, give it away, buy it again, and keep some nugget of it with me that takes on a life of its own. Take The Magician's Nephew, by C.S. Lewis. Great book, sure, but what has fascinated me about it since I was eight is the Wood Between the Worlds.
Diggory has rings of two colors: yellow and green. When he puts on a yellow ring, he goes to a dim wood with many small ponds. It is an in-between place, a place you must go to before you get to where you are really intending to go--like Grand Central Station, Atlanta airport, the New Jersey Turnpike. In-between places have little of their own personality, and that can be eerie or depressing or exciting, depending on your destination and your point of view. (Platform 9 and 3/4, for instance, is more exciting than the Jersey Turnpike.)
To get to another world, or to get back to his own world--London at the time when great detectives still lived on Baker Street,--Diggory must put on a green ring and jump into the right pond. Green ring and jump: whoosh--the time/space continuum crumples and shimmies. Jump without a ring: splash. How many times I have longed for those rings and that power.
Books, far more potently than movies, have the power of the rings. Time and Again, Winter's Tale, Time After Time, The House of the Spirits, A Wrinkle in Time, these are crazily good books that not only take you away, but also explain how it happens. Other books, like Watership Down, just create different worlds. Whoosh, you are there, and you cry when you have to leave.
There are dry spells between discovering these books, and it is exciting when a new one appears on the horizon. I know Harry Potter and the Twilight books have the ring power for my daughter and for millions of other people, but when I read them, I just splash in the pools. They lack something that my time/space/travel/magic books need to have. The worlds they create seem too one-dimensional.
But this week, I went to a book reading at the house of Andrea White, one of our Bright Sky authors, and I got the distinct feeling that I was about to discover a new vehicle for whoosing around the cosmos. You know how there are some writers you always want to read, but for some reason, you have never actually cracked the spine of one of their books? And at cocktail parties you sometimes nod knowingly and let people think you have read them and then are filled with book shame?
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is like that for me. I even have a copy of Mistress of Spices in one of the read-this-next piles that make navigating my house somewhat precarious. But when I heard her read from her new children's book, Shadowland, surrounded by friends in shimmering saris, and she explained the magic of the conch and the way she incorporates traditional Indian mythology into the quest tale, the universe started to shimmy. Perhaps there's a reason that the Mistress of Spices sat unappreciated. Perhaps this Shadowland is meant to be my entree into the Brotherhood of the Conch and on into the rich world of her adult writing. I bought my hard-covered ticket that night, and it skipped over the to-be-read-next pile to land on my bedside table, on deck for a rainy Saturday.
I suppose now I have to add parties--sometimes depressing, sometimes exciting--to the list of in-between places. As long as an author with magical rings is present.
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~Mrs. Which
