Charlotte Kersten

“If I scream forever, they will have to hear me forever.”

Year published: 2021

Categories: YA, magical realism, retelling (The Snow Queen)

LGBTQIA representation: pansexuality, main character

Summary: Graciela Cristales’s whole world changes after she and a boy she barely knows are assaulted at the same party. She loses her gift for making enchanted pan dulce. Neighborhood trees vanish overnight, while mirrored glass appears, bringing reckless magic with it. And Ciela is haunted by what happened to her, and what happened to the boy whose name she never learned.

But when the boy, Lock, shows up at Ciela’s school, he has no memory of that night, and no clue that a single piece of mirrored glass is taking his life apart. Ciela decides to help him, which means hiding the truth about that night. Because Ciela knows who assaulted her, and him. And she knows that her survival, and his, depend on no one finding out what really happened.

My Thoughts: I really, really loved some things about this book, but a few others left me less than satisfied. The story’s strongest point is absolutely the relationship between Ciela and Lock – the way they support each other, laugh together, fight back against their perpetrators in silly and serious ways and develop a friendship that blossoms into love. Their relationship is incredibly sweet and a powerful demonstration of survivor solidarity and how transformative it can be.

McLemore also depicts the aftermath of sexual assault quite well, I think, in the way that Ciela pieces together her distorted memories over time and is convinced that keeping it secret is the only way to survive. The perpetrators have an entirely different view of the assault and don’t even think that they did anything wrong, instead believing that they did something friendly that was then maliciously misinterpreted and blown out of proportion.

The author is also keen on expressing that aspects of oppression and identity influence the experience of being victimized and being a survivor. Ciela makes it clear that being brown and curvy makes the perpetrators sexualize her, there is one line where one of the kids says that Ciela is only making a big deal out of what happened because she doesn’t “like dick,” and Lock expresses how he feels doubly victimized and shameful about his assault because he is a boy and didn’t think that boys got assaulted. Overall, I feel that the exploration of Lock’s struggle was given the most care.

The only big possible caveat for the story’s treatment of sexual assault is that Lock and Ciela have sex while Ciela is hiding the truth that she is the one who performed oral sex on him while he was drugged. When he finds this out he is incredibly betrayed and makes it clear that he wouldn’t have had sex with her if he had known this. When we take into consideration the fact that consent has to be informed -meaning that no one is withholding any information that would prevent the other person from consenting – I don’t think it’s wrong to say that this could be interpreted as another huge violation for Lock, even if Ciela didn’t do it maliciously. I think this is a very interesting and bold choice for the book to make, but it just kind of…fizzles when it’s dealing with the ramifications. Lock ends up taking a bit of time away from Ciela, Ciela apologizes, and then their relationship resumes by the end of the book. I can’t help but wish that the book had really dug deeper into this, and how complicated things can get when someone you care about crosses a boundary even without ill-intent, especially when you have prior bad experiences. Reader mileage will certainly vary regarding how this is dealt with by the book and I can see others feeling differently about how it is explored.

My other main problem is that the fantasy elements here don’t work very well for me. This is a very loose retelling of The Snow Queen – the key thing is that a mirror shard gets in the fairy tale character Kai’s eye just as it gets in Lock’s eye in this book, and it magnifies people’s bad features and doesn’t show their good ones. I think this parallels how Ciela filters the world after the assault, blaming herself and holding all kinds of cognitive distortions. In execution, the book just features scene after scene of mirror shards appearing, Ciela hiding them in her closet and describing her heart being embedded with shards. I know that hiding the mirror shards also represents hiding the story of the assault, but the whole thing just falls a little bit flat and repetitive for me. The one bit that really worked for me was the conclusion when the mirrors shows the perpetrators who they really are – Ciela thinks that she has to hide the mirrors, but they are actually the things that set her and Lock free.

I really liked the other bit of magic in the story – Ciela is able to tell what kind of pan dulce bakery customers need to help them with whatever they’re struggling with, and this magic is influenced by how she stands up for herself in other areas of her life. My unreasonable quibble with this magic, though, is that lots of lines are spent rattling off the names of pan dulce without really describing them. This is just more of a missed opportunity than anything, I think, when I compare it to Robin McKinley’s Sunshine and how dedicated McKinley was to describing baked goods in mouth-watering detail!!!

Overall, I am very grateful for McLemore’s courage in telling a story of survivorship that is clearly very close to their heart and their own experience of trauma. That is an incredibly difficult thing to do, and I think the world is better for it every time a survivor gives voice to their experience.