“My brother teaches an undergraduate writing course at a university in New York, and he recently shared with me a thesis statement from one of his students’ papers: “Words are very important in A Passage to India.” It was, perhaps fittingly, a poor choice of words on the student’s part—it’s a novel, after all—but I think I see the point about word choice that the student was trying to make. Words, after all, are not simply bricks in the path upon which an author is leading a reader, identical and interchangeable and valuable more for their sequence than for their individual qualities. They are much more than that. They have shades and contours. They catch light in different ways. They are meant to illuminate a pathway that already exists, and when enough of the right ones are strung together in a great novel, they are just as tangible as the things they represent.
One of the reasons I love working with Anne Ursu, and especially on her latest middle grade novel Breadcrumbs, which releases this September, is because she knows how important words are. Anne is one of the most talented wordsmiths I know – her ability to turn a phrase is boundless, fluctuating so smoothly between humorous and heartfelt that the two almost seem to form one quantum state (“It was not the greatest insult ever, but one thing Hazel had learned at her new school was when it comes to insults it’s the thought that counts”). But Anne takes things much further than that in Breadcrumbs. It’s a contemporary fairy tale set in present-day Minneapolis which draws its structure and inspiration from Hans Christian Andersen’s classic story “The Snow Queen.” In Anne’s book, a young girl named Hazel and a young boy named Jack are best friends, and they’re both dealing with hardship, but it’s their friendship that holds them together. They spend their days talking about Joe Mauer’s batting average and Batman’s utility belt and the Chronicles of Narnia, but what they’re saying with all of it is “I know you, and I am here.” They’re just saying it with different words, and it’s the words that make the difference.
If you’re familiar with “The Snow Queen”, you know what happens next. Jack’s heart is frozen by a broken piece of an evil mirror, and he decides to leave everything in his life behind – including his friendship with Hazel. Jack is still there, he is still speaking English, but the language they had created is gone. Now, baseball and comic books and talking lions are just baseball and comic books and talking lions. As in the original story, Jack eventually leaves, taking off into an enchanted forest with a woman made of ice. Hazel, of course, follows him, and under normal circumstances, this would be fine. She has read Alice In Wonderland, The Hobbit, A Wrinkle In Time. If she has to kill a sinister queen, slay giant spiders, or tesser, she’ll be good to go. But how do you save someone you can’t talk to anymore? How do you convince someone to come back home when no one there speaks the same language? How do you connect when words have lost their meaning?
Part of the brilliance of Breadcrumbs is that it is so deeply concerned with the shades and contours and light-catching that make words much more than interchangeable bricks. Hazel navigates the fantasy world in the book the same way the reader will – with the stories she’s brought in with her. It’s finding the right words that will save Jack or lose him forever at the end, but Hazel thankfully has enough words and stories to light the pathway to him. And we hope that readers will find a similar path lit for
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