While reading The Fair Folk on the plane home for the holidays, I already had a sense that this was going to be next on my reading list. Even though I started another recommended book, I couldn’t get myself to sink into it, possessed of this vague unease that this book needed to be the next on the list.
I take you back, back to one of the best and most cherished school memories I have of elementary school, shared by many of us: the Scholastic Book Fair. I believe this is a Book Fair book, although to be fair it’s also possible it was a birthday book (my copy of Anne of Green Gables was a B&N birthday gift, came with a locket, and I to this day wish I could remember who gave it to me). It was a random pick, if it was from the Fair, and I’ve never really heard it show up on lists of childhood books a la The Witch of Blackbird Pond and others similarly situated. That being said, I love this book something fierce. Fun fact, I paid $2.95 for it which just is mind blowing in today’s day and age.
McGraw writes in an author’s note that this book came about when she was researching changelings and Folk and found it all a bit horrifying. The stories are always about poor, pious villagers being put upon by mischievous, plague-y Folk, and the frankly gruesome ways that the villagers fight back–bonfires and rowan and iron and the like. But then she flipped the script–because surely, if the alternative was living a carefree life in the Folk world, whatever changeling the Folk left behind as a switcheroo for the human baby must be having a terrible time of it as well, no? And such was born Saaski, or Moql.
When the Folk discover that half-Folk, half-human Moql is unable to turn into an animal or invisible to hide from prying human eyes, they decide to swap her with a human child for the safety of their world, the Mound. Moql falls asleep in the earthy, mossy, warm Mound and wakes up Saaski, swaddled in a scratchy straw trundle bed, cold and with the tang of iron everywhere, and promptly begins to scream her head off. Eventually she begins to forget her prior life, sort of, but is never able to shake off the villagers’ aspersions of “weird.” She finds herself drawn to frolicking in the moors, scampers up trees in ways that make people stare, and sometimes makes allusions to memories that she shouldn’t have.
In that sense it’s the flip side of The Fair Folk–Saaski too doesn’t feel like she fits in but has no ability to choose to go back, but can’t stay either. Willing it with all her heart doesn’t do anything but cause grief and sap her ability to figure out who she is and where she can fit in. I wonder how reading this book so young influenced me, because it clearly has stayed with me since.