When I was younger I truly believed in magic. And I’m not talking little-kid young. I was in junior high. I spent $5 of my coveted babysitting money ordering a book about witchcraft from the back of a Tiger Beat magazine. Naïve and a little neglected, I was desperate for something interesting to happen in my life.
While waiting for that something, I spent hours camped out on the linoleum floor of my tiny public library scanning the spines for a different world to fall into.
So you’d think the burgeoning genre of Speculative Fiction would be my ideal diversion. But we’ve never quite clicked. Too tech-y, too sci-fi, trying too hard. It’s as if the magic, when it hits the page, loses its…magic.
Until now.
As soon as I read Darkly by Marisha Pessl, something zinged. Pessl had won my reading heart a decade ago with her debut novel, Special Topics in Calamity Physics. And her fourth book is nothing like it: officially YA, definitely Speculative. But just as wonderful.
Teenager Arcadia Gannon is an odd-ball loner in an ordinary American town. Dia (the name she relies on in an attempt to normalize herself) inhabits a world of peers who are too banal to notice her and adults who are too flakey to see what she’s capable of. She’s smart, curious, adventurous—and disillusioned by a life that doesn’t excite her.
Thankfully there are some quirky kids she connects with who play the Darkly board games (which sound like a cultish combination of Risk, D&D, and Catan.) But the reclusive Louisiana Veda, who developed the mind-bending games, has mysteriously died, and the plans for her final game–and supposed masterpiece–Valkyrie, have been stolen.
When Dia receives an invitation to be part of a summer internship tied to the disappearance of Valkyrie, she heads off to London and joins six others seemingly random teens from around the world. The mish-mash group is catapulted into a jarring world where the adults are secretive and officious and the “internship” is a no-frills mission to find the missing game. Whoever stole Valkyrie has turned it into a real-life nightmare. Characters come alive, the capers are deadly, and a boy is missing.
The interns, who slowly realize they have more in common than they thought, are off and running. Scattered through the pages are maps and letters and newspaper clippings, none of which quite make sense in the order you see them (and all of which beg a second reading once you know…) The clues pile up and it’s fun to play along.
There’s a strange and complicated history to unravel, not just to locate the missing game but also to better understand Veda’s meaning behind it. The adults, naturally, are secondary figures— outed as mere performers in the end—and the determined teenagers are the only ones who can open their minds enough to see what’s really happening.
As the pace winds down and things are somewhat resolved, Dia tries to make sense of Veda’s goal in creating the now-derailed game at all:
“I can only imagine her original intention for Valkyrie was good, that she saw the game as a way to test young people, show them that they are stronger than they know…”
It’s not a particularly novel message for a bunch of kids who lead chaotic lives without any supportive adults, but the story Pessl tells to get there is far more interesting than anything I’ve read recently. And the twist, when it comes, is less revelatory than purely satisfying. It’s a little on the corny side, yes, but this old soul who still believes in a little magic thought it was just perfect.
