The Tricksters

Sweater: H&M Shirt: Anne Taylor Hair Thing: Handmade locally (not by me!) Jeans: Abercrombie

Last night I stayed up till some rediculous hour finishing The Tricksters by Margaret Mahy. HOLY SMOKES GUYS. It was a flipping masterpiece. Just as good as The Changeover, and with a lot of similar themes of growth and love vs. infatuation, except with crazy mad twists. (Warning: this post contains spoilers.)

It was so intellectual, because it was about how we fall in love with things of our imagination that don't even exist, or impossible ideals, or certain pieces of someone, when you really need to accept all parts of them. In some ways Harry fell in love with the very notion of love. Although I think the realness of Felix as a person, not an idea or a story character, came through towards the end. Even so, he was still a ghost, and so her love couldn't be rooted in anything substantial enough to last.

Not to say that I don't think the love between Felix and Harry was true, and real, in it's way; he certainly loved her, and they consummated their relationship and even sort of "got married." But he was a ghost, and a memory, and an imagined thing, and that couldn't last, even in the eternities hidden within moments. She explains:
"Time was too much a part of love, for even in fairytales the proof of love was not in it's first moments, but its latest ones-- that people lived happily ever after. Love at first sight was nothing but infatuation until proved by time, and time was what Felix and Harry didn't have."

The language and metaphors she used were like, gahhhhhhhh I wanted to post-it like every page, it was just so glorious. Here's just one quote I liked, out of SO MANY that I wanted to mark but didn't because I was too wrapped up in the book to get my sticky notes, and now I can't find them (the quotes I mean.)

"It's what writers do, isn't it?" he said. "Make love with ghosts."

Luckily, I own it now! :D And I also own a pretty annotated Pride and Prejudice, and a rather ugly but nonetheless effective Wuthering Heights, which is also pretty grand. So... awesome!
Keep reading guys. Keep reading, and keep remembering that YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL, and so is every day, and it's worth putting in some effort to greet it.








Photo Credit to Alex, who was pretty good except when he failed. By taking eight pictures of the ground. On purpose. To annoy me.