"As long as our species does not destroy the planet beyond repair, ferns will likely continue to thrive, as diverse as ever, unfurling in every odd corner of Earth."

Ferns are absolutely fascinating and deeply misunderstood & underestimated. The way they work seems alien and strange, but in reality is ancient & foundational to the world as we know it.

This book is a little denser and a touch drier than many of the other books on the plants quest, but the frank critique of colonialism, sarcastic dry humor, and absolutely stacked Fern Facts™️ completely won me over. I had a great time with this, as evidenced by my husband now knowing far more about ferns than he ever wanted to.

Ferns have the most chromosomes of any organism on Earth that we know of. There is a fern species native to my area that tastes 60 times sweeter than simple syrup despite containing no sugar. Some ferns produce a chemical that causes a chemical reaction in the stomachs of their predators that burns holes through their guts. There are ferns that grow habitats inside of themselves to house ants, and others that produce nectar so that ants will protect them. Ferns are seedless and flowerless. And so much more!

There are also gorgeous illustrations by Laura Silburn! My minor critiques are that sometimes the illustrations dont relate to the text, making them kind of random even tho interesting, and that near the end we get just a tiny bit repetitive with a couple of things. Definitely not a big deal, but noticeable.

If wanna learn more about ferns this is a great place to start!

The Heart of Thomas is melodramatic, meandering and tragic, populated by mercurial, long-legged, angelically beautiful boys at a boarding school who have nothing better to do than fall in love with each other and shout and cry and physically threaten each other over it. The story is haunted by the titular Thomas, an almost angelic embodiment of love, who has died in an "accident" just before a new, far more flawed character who happens to look just like him arrives. While there isn't much of a plot, the story twists and turns with changing affections and outbursts of deep yearning. While suicide, homophobic self-loathing, and trauma from sexual assault are all present in the story (the last being a built up 'twist' that is hard not to see coming) are all present in the story, they are presented in Hagio's signature style that emphasizes symbolism and emotional movement over graphic depiction - one of my favorite things about Hagio's artistry.

It's hard to overstate how gorgeous the art is, how strange and tragic and sincere and heartfelt it is - this was not the very first BL story ever, but it's part of the stellar nursery that helped to gestate and catalyze it. Moto Hagio and various cultural critics have pushed back against labeling it BL, especially as Hagio herself seemed to intend to create androgynous creatures somewhat outside the confines of gender - but saying she wrote her boys as girls, even if she said so herself, feels like an oversimplification. It's true quite a lot of the school drama resembles Class S romance (ie, love between schoolgirls), and the obsessiveness, the quick changeability between hatred and love, the openness with which characters admire each other, certainly seem to more resemble what might be seen between girls rather than boys. IIRC, Hagio wished to create some distance for herself and female readers and free herself from the obligation of portraying specifically female concerns. It feels like selling it short a little to say that a world where boys have just as much capacity to love and be loved as girls do is completely beyond imagination, but maybe I'm just too queer and nonbinary to consider things that way.

Hagio also plays within the realm of Christian imagery - and the setting of Germany - with a confidence some readers may find strange. European settings were very popular for shoujo manga at this time, and while I could not say whether or not this portrayal was very accurate, it certainly felt quite romanticized.

I think some readers who are expecting a more straightforward (lol) romance will find the ultimate (lack of) resolutions frustrating, the tragedy poor representation, the constant switches between very pretty art, tragedy and trauma and slapstick explosions of goofy school antics to be jarring. I think in this particular case, all of these aspects together do a fantastic job of representing the intense emotional life of young people. I would have loved a bit more time for its final moments to land, but given the age of this story and the difficulty it had during its publishing run, and how early in Hagio's career this masterpiece was, I cannot truly take points off my final reading for it.

There is a reason this is an enduring classic, the kind of thing a lot of BL and shoujo fans will tell you is a must-read. Honestly, I thought about just saying READ IT and leaving the review there. So read it.

A note about the Fantagraphics version, which I now consider a must-own: There's a pretty enlightening forward that gives a nice overview of this series, shoujo manga at the time, and Hagio's process in making it. This is... presented in text at the 'front' of the book, whereas the rest of the book is 'backwards' (to preserve the process of reading it right-to-left). This means you reach the end of the book and it drops you off mid-page at the end of the forward. It's awkward. I would recommend reading the forward in 'front' if it interests you/you don't know much about the work in the first place. Don't be like me and think that somehow there was a page missing all the way in the back.

Overview: The Familiar is a beautifully realized historical fantasy about a Jewish girl finding her power amidst the treacherous fanaticism of Catholic Spain. Leigh Bardugo weaves a tale that is at once familiar and fantastical, a fable which is as spellbinding as it is heartfelt. The writing seems to work a subtle enchantment over the reader, drawing one into the music and rhythm of a past which still echoes in the present, and the hopes and dreams for a future of one’s own making.

What to expect: This is not a typical fantasy novel, nor does it try to be one, so I think some of the complaints I’ve seen online about this book can simply be chalked up to a misalignment in expectations vs reality. It’s more of a historical fiction novel with fantasy elements, and the way the magical elements are treated almost kind of remind me of the classic magic realism I read for Latin American literature classes. Character and plot are inextricable, and the close focus on character means that the reader does not get to see too much outside of that character’s field of view. And this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but when most fantasy novels are wider and a bit more expansive in scope, it can feel jarring for long-time fantasy readers who jump into this book blind.

That all being said, I feel like I do need to mention that the plot is pretty lackluster. An intense focus on character development and the emotions and minutiae of their daily life is not intrinsically bad, but it feels almost as if Bardugo didn’t have a good idea of how to handle that in tandem with the wider over-arching plot. There were multiple times where it felt like all the external plot had paused so that the romantic relationship could develop, or so that the same character development beats could be repeated over and over again for no discernible reason. A skilled author will be able to weave plot progression and character/romantic development into one single narrative tapestry, and I didn’t get a sense that Bardugo was able to strike the balance very well from this book.

In-depth breakdown: I feel like I’ve seen some accounts of Bardugo saying that she wanted The Familiar to read like a fable or folktale, and I do have to say that she hit that mark squarely on the head with the writing style she chose. There are number of moments where the text is interspersed with words and phrases from other languages, and the writing has a lovely, lilting rhythm to it, as if the words themselves come to life when their syllables are imagined with sound, ringing a silent song in my head. And it’s so perfect for a book which uses a sense of song as one of its central conceits.

The fairytale style is as much in the writing as it is in the themes; fairytales and folklore are a refraction of our history and past, a storybook preservation of loves and fears from times before ours, and the past has so much magic in this book. The historical details are impeccable! Bardugo clearly did a lot of research into her chosen time period and culture(s), and as a result the scenes come to life in such vivid ways across the pages of this book. I was already familiar with some of the history, so it wasn’t necessarily new information, but I appreciated the detail which Bardugo wrote with because I find that writing really comes alive when it’s infused with so much detail.

The characters are also done quite well, IMO. The MC and love interest are both compelling in their goals, fears, and desires, and their dialogue is sharp and snappy and so damn clever. The side characters are varied and colorful and messy in their own ways, and I loved how Bardugo clearly had taken the time to flesh them out into whole, complete characters who could have stood on their own. My friend complained that the main romance falls into the over-done trope of inexperienced girl x broody immortal guy, and like, they aren’t wrong. But I think Bardugo differs from Booktok Romantasy Author #8239434 in that she does it well. The relationship is convincing and believable, and the ways in which the MC and love interest complement each other are written with such sincerity and care. It’s not exactly Bardugo’s fault that other authors have done a similar relationship dynamic a million times before her, and I think Bardugo’s execution of the romance is elevated for the fact that there is so much thematic depth to it; that the fact that the MC and love interest choose each other is a tangible theme in and of itself, and it means something deeper in the context of the setting and story.

So, with the amount of praise I’ve given this book up until now, you might be wondering why I rated this less than 4 stars! And it’s because of the plot. My main problem with this book is the plot.

The plot, on the surface, makes sense. It’s not illogical by any means; the line of cause and effect is easy to follow, and nothing happens inexplicably. But from a more meta/developmental perspective, this plot really needed more workshopping. It feels like the emphasis on certain things in the beginning—things that were really compelling, like Luzia’s Jewish heritage—is disproportionate compared to how much impact they actually have in the end. The beats in the beginning are also really repetitive, for no real reason. It wasn’t so bad that I wanted to DNF, but I also don’t understand why we had to repeat the exact same internal conflicts so many fucking times before anything else happened.

I complained about the plot stopping for the romance already, and I’ll complain about it again here, because it is the single thing I hate the most in romance-centric or romance-as-a-major-subplot books. A skilled author will be able to come up with a way for the characters to develop the romance while they are also advancing the plot and giving the characters agency in said plot advancement. A skilled author will be able to balance plot and romantic development in equal measure, and leverage one against the other at the same time. This is not a negotiable thing for me; I do feel it is an extreme skill issue if the author is incapable of executing this well. And I don’t feel bad about complaining very loudly and obnoxiously about it because quite frankly I find romance really fucking boring. I don’t pick up books for the romance, I expressly avoid books which are marketed as romance-only, so books which advertise themselves as something other than romance (or mostly-something-else-but-with-romance) better be able to live up to that expectation.

And you know, I get that in actual romance books people are more forgiving about this, so like I’m not going to read The Love Hypothesis or something and complain that no plot happens because the characters are too busy falling in love. But this book specifically is not marketed as romance, and all the plot events and scenes up until the Big Romance-Only Section did, in fact, advance character relationships and plot at the same time. So that was just extraordinarily frustrating to read because nothing about what I’d already read or known about the book prepared me for it! And (minor spoilers incoming) since it happens right after the midpoint, I felt like it effectively killed all the plot momentum we got from the really cool and fun midpoint turn! It just felt really fucking stupid, I’m sorry! It really pissed me off! Why did Leigh Bardugo go off and have the other characters advance all the plot off-screen just so Luzia and the love interest could have sex for a few days?!?! There was just a huge unprecedented magic incident! They could have had sex while also advancing plot events, like figuring out what that magic incident was about! It’s not that fucking hard to write! God! (end of spoilers)

Okay. I’ve said what I needed to about that. I’m good now LMAO.

My thoughts: The sheer scope of the thematic depth in this book is genuinely super impressive, and I think Bardugo was really quite intentional and masterful in her crafting of each character and thematic throughline. There were a lot that I could pick out, which I wrote a big forum post about already, but the one which resonated with me the most was Luzia’s struggle to conceal her heritage—and thereby smother half of her own self—in order to survive life under the Inquisition. The internal tug-of-war, the desperate attempts to preserve traditions and culture which would fade into the unremembered if not for Luzia’s love for her dead parents, the longing and hoping for a future in which she would not need to be invisible; all of that was written with such poignant sincerity, such a profound hurting that it felt like the sorrow ran as deep as bone. I did read Bardugo’s afterword about how she drew upon her own heritage and ancestry to write this book, and as someone belonging to a more recent diaspora demographic I thought she did a really, really good job of portraying how it feels to be lonely in the way that outsiders are lonely.

Luzia knows Madrid as home, and yet Madrid will never view her as one of its own. How do you go on from there? How does one live with that? I absolutely loved how Bardugo’s writing navigated every facet of that conflict.

To start wrapping up this massive review, I’ll say that while reading this book, I was reminded of the historical fiction novels I loved as a young girl: the Royal Diaries series centered on real life princesses and queens, the middle grade books about young women during the Revolutionary War or colonial America, the innumerable YA novels about teenage girls surviving and fighting back against dictatorial regimes. The Familiar is categorized in the “adult fantasy” category, but the lush historical atmosphere, the protagonist being silenced and silencing herself before finding love and joy in her own ability, the struggles grounded in the prejudices and zealotry of a strongly Christian and patriarchal society which actually existed—all of this speaks of a more character-centric historical novel than one of fantasy quests and adventures. And I loved it.

Beyond the nostalgia, this book captured some of the core themes I can remember from my days of being a ten-year-old enchanted by long-ago princesses and girls who lived and died and loved hundreds upon thousands of years before I was born. This book says: we are all but one, and that is enough to change a dozen lives in a dozen small, nigh-imperceptible ways. And a dozen lives changed in a dozen ways will run and gather and flow like water moving downhill, and one day you may raise your head from your own life and see that a trickle has become a stream has become a river which swells with rain from the sky and snow from the hills, and you are only one but you have become a flood.

And just like that, you have made history.

Conclusion: The Familiar is a historical fantasy novel with language that transports the reader to the Spanish Golden Age, to the glittering opulence and brutal repression of an empire born from greed and religious fanaticism. The characters and romance are beautifully rendered, and the conflict and turmoil they face become a folktale that sweeps you away in the quiet magic of a thousand lives and a thousand loves, all coming together to make a song.

⭐ 3.75/5 stars

So brilliant and so, so sad.