I'm a sucker for a good metaphor. When I was in early high school, I was surrounded by the kind of people who read simply for pleasure. They were, as the writer of my twelfth-grade English textbook would say, escapist readers. They propagated the idea that we shouldn't shred books down to their individual parts to find deeper meaning. The curtains are blue; the curtains are blue. Their crowning sentiment was that books say what they mean, and no more. And while I would still argue that my twelfth-grade English textbook writer was a pretentious prick, I'm quite proud that I've moved on from that crowd. Because although maybe when an author says that the curtains are blue they say that simply because why not blue, there is absolutely nothing wrong with also deciding that the blue means something to you. Because, as YA-giant John Green so often says, books belong to their readers. And this reader wants to think about things. She wants to take the world for more than just face value, she wants to dig deep and pull people apart into their component pieces and try to figure out what makes them tick. She is so deeply unsatisfied with so many people's answer to the question of "why?" because people never pull the truth out from inside them, explain the whole background and every bit of reason to it. They just go with the easy, even if they believe it's the hard. She's been told that science explains the how and religion the why, but "By relegating the things we fear and don’t understand to religion, and the things we understand and control to science, we rob science of its artistry and religion of its mutability." I suppose that's a good enough transition as any to the true topic at hand: the book from whence that quote came. Maggie Stiefvater's new stand-alone novel, All The Crooked Saints, came out less than a month ago, and thus she is on tour. One of her many stops was last night at The King's English Bookshop in Salt Lake City and I, as a metaphor-loving college student with a car that likes to be driven and a rapidly disintegrating social life, ordered a book at lunch so I could make the drive five hours later to meet my favorite author. Whoever it is that does the bookings at The King's English is undoubtedly a member of my karass, because my only other experience there was beyond amazing. And last night, as The Maggie Stiefvater stood in front of me and played the bagpipes, I thought in awe about the words she'd said before she did so. Partially because I got to hear her speak (and, later, actually talk to her), but also because she fully and openly admitted -- with giddy pride, I might add -- that her newest novel was unapologetically riddled with metaphor. After briefly discussing her lifelong dance with OCD (sidenote: OCD's a terrible dance partner. It doesn't know the steps and it likes to trod on your toes), Maggie talked about how our inner darknesses manifest in strange ways. In college, hers manifested in competitive bagpiping. Now, it's in an army of passionately driven muscle cars. All The Crooked Saints is about literal, physical, obvious manifestations of people's no-longer-inner darkness. It's about owls, and radio DJs, and bad things happening to eyeballs. It's about the 1960's deserts of Colorado. It's about Saints and their pilgrims and the miracles that save and destroy them both. It's about love and loss and coming to terms with yourself. To me, it's about a girl with feelings she doesn't know how to express because they have never been like anyone else's. It is, in all honesty, about people coming for a saving grace and instead getting stuck in their darkness: snakes wrapped around necks, coyote's heads, permanent rainclouds. And as these people fight to cleanse themselves of their darkness, the Saints are forced to avoid them out of fear that they may inadvertently help, releasing darknesses of their own. And thus, most of all, it's about metaphor. The metaphors of each pilgrim's darkness are so intentionally obvious that I am certain even the most escapist of readers will pick up on them. Metaphor is the fuel All The Crooked Saints runs on, it's what makes the story work. And, hopefully, the blatant metaphors open the reader's eyes to the more hidden ones, the deeper ones. The book is about miracles and Saints, and the quote from above on science and religion is exemplary of the deeper meaning coming out of that fundamental part of the plot. Daniel, the Saint, prays to his Mother. Their small town has a carefully constructed Shrine. Their lives revolve around miracles, and religion will always play a part in a book about miracles. And while this is not a Christian book, I would dare say that, at the very least hidden in the binding, it is a spiritual one. Perhaps I am more susceptible to this kind of meaning as a deeply dissatisfied BYU student, but as I read the following line earlier this evening I encountered a sentiment that everyone needs to read this book to fully comprehend. "Miracles and happiness are a lot like each other in many ways," the epilogue reads. "It is difficult to predict what will trigger a miracle. Some people go their entire lives full of persistent darkness and never feel the need to seek out a miracle. Others find they can exist with darkness only for a single night before hunting for a miracle... Some may need only one miracle; others might have two or three or four or five over the course of their lives. Happiness is the same way...." There's a reason Maggie Stiefvater is my favorite author. The Raven Cycle books entrap me totally in their world and their woods; I breathe their words like I breathe air, fitfully and often. Maggie has a way of pulling you into her dreams. "Subtle storytelling," she called it more than once last night. She doesn't put everything onto the table at once, she lets you travel through it with her, discovering the story in real time. This habit of allowing you, as a reader, as yet another other-worldly visitor to the carefully-curated time and place, to be a part of it all makes her novels so much more powerful, I think. All The Crooked Saints is deservedly no exception.
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I'm Audrey, a college student and existential rambler.
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