Beyond Selidor

Just letting you all know I've put up a Savage City reaction post over at romanitas_fans. Anyone who's got the book, feel free to spread the word.

This was my involuntary response after (and during) reading Savage City, the third book in sophiamcdougall's Romanitas trilogy. I read the book with a kind of desperate, yearning hunger. I'd been waiting for it for several years, I loved its characters (in particular, its heroine, fierce, introverted, determined Una), and I couldn't bear not knowing how things would end.

The last time I read a book like that, I was 22, and it was the final Harry Potter book. I think this is significant, because the last time before that, I would've been in high school, reading Darksong, the follow-up to Isobelle Carmody's Darkfall. And, indeed, this was the way I read all my favourite books, as a child and teenager.

I devoured them, much the same way as Sara Crewe (a childhood heroine) is said to 'devour books' in A Little Princess. Their characters were as real, as close to me, as real people. Their lives mattered as much or more. I felt every blow that landed upon them, and I wanted their happiness with a fierceness that I couldn't even believe I was capable of feeling. When I read those books, curled up in the wing chair in the living room, my feet resting on the coffee table, as a child and teenager in Canberra, I was oblivious to everything else, as my family will attest. I didn't hear when people spoke to me. I didn't notice when the natural light disappeared. My heart-rate increased. My mouth was dry. I was terrified for the characters.

I'm so much more detached these days. Oh, I still enjoy books, and I still find books that I love, but it is a different kind of love, a different kind of enjoyment. Less emotional investment and identification, more literary analysis and serenity. More thinking, less feeling.

I cannot regret these changes. They snuck up on me as quietly and imperceptibly as the day I looked at my old dolls and realised I no longer knew how to play. That girl, who cried for three days without stopping upon reading the ending of The Amber Spyglass, who rewrote Catherine Jinks' Pagan Chronicles because she couldn't bear not knowing what happened to Pagan, who finished the sixth Harry Potter book and then sat on the floor, literally beating her fists on the floorboards, begging her sister and mother to finish the book so she could talk to someone, anyone, about what had just happened, she is both me, and not me. I lived like that, I felt like that, it shaped me and strengthened me and taught me.

She was me, she is me, and I love her. But she is mostly gone.

And that is why I am so grateful to Romanitas, and to Sophia McDougall. She has written something that allowed me to get back, if only for a few hours, to that place, to that girl, once more. It was wonderful. It was perfect. It could never have been any other way. But it was exhausting. Loving in such a fierce, desperate, focused way, caring that much, feeling that much - I honestly don't know how I did it.

This post originally appeared on Wordpress, but I think it's more a Livejournal-style post (according to the way I organise my blogging) so I put it here too.