Zia Erases the World. Bree Barton. 2022. 256 pages. [Source: Library]
First sentence: Every dictionary has secrets. That's to be expected, seeing as how a secret is made of words.
Premise/plot: Zia, our young heroine, discovers that she has the power (with a little help from a magical eraser and a magical dictionary) to change the world. But are her changes for the better or for the worse? Does erasing a word and all its meanings (definitions) ultimately helpful and healing to her anxiety? Or are words themselves part of the solution to what troubles her?
Zia struggles with 'the Shadoom.' It is her word for the shadow-y doom-y haunting weightiness of the anxiety that she's dealt with (mostly on her own, but sometimes with a little bit of reaching out for support) for the past year.
Quite a bit is going on in her life--at school and at home--and the Shadoom seems to be a little out of control. Will finding this magical dictionary be the solution she so desperately craves?
My thoughts: I wanted to love, love, love this one. I didn't quite love it. But I did really enjoy aspects of it. I'm not sure that magic realism is my cup of tea. I want to be clear that it isn't so much a problem with the book itself as I don't happen to enjoy magic realism. I like realistic fiction. I like fantasy. I don't necessarily like them together.
My absolute favorite quote:
Maybe it’s weird that an old dusty book of words gives me comfort. But words aren’t mean. They don’t make you feel small or broken. And if someone else does, you can look up small and broken in the dictionary and find them in permanent ink, proving someone else felt those things, too. Probably lots of someones. Who wouldn’t be comforted by that?
© 2022 Becky Laney of Young Readers
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