At that moment, downstairs in the shop, a small golden light flashes and a book appears on the desk. The book is blue, the colour of the centre of an iceberg. On the cover are the words The Grimoire of Kensington Market.
In both her Acknowledgements at the end of this book and in her own review on Goodreads, author Lauren B. Davis explains that The Grimoire of Kensington Market was inspired by both Hans Christian Anderson's The Snow Queen and the addiction and suicide of her own brother. The first thing I did after finishing this book was to revisit The Snow Queen, and I thought that the concept was so fitting: Anderson starts his classic tale with a hobgoblin, “a real demon”, who had invented a mirror “which had the power of making everything good or beautiful that was reflected in it almost shrink to nothing, while everything that was worthless and bad increased in size and worse than ever”; and doesn't that just sound like the despair of an addict? When that mirror breaks and shards pierce a boy's eye and heart – blinding him to goodness, numbing him to love – he is easily led astray by false glamour, starting the sister who loves him on a quest of rescue. By updating this story to the present, with both magical mirror shards and a powerful new drug transforming the landscape and people of Toronto, Davis brings a really interesting concept to life. The narrative feels like a fairytale, and is itself filled with shorter dreams and fables, but it also addresses the addictions crisis that is currently transforming the landscape and people of so many communities. Interesting and timely isn't quite enough though: I wish this book was twice as long and went deeper than it does (but if I tell myself that it's only meant to be a modern fairytale, I do find it more satisfying).
That was the way of elysium; it demanded a price for the beautiful visions. It burrowed into your darkest crannies – your memories, your heart – and found the things you regretted most, the things you feared, the things of which you were ashamed, and dragged them out into the world, first in dreams, and then in hallucinations.Elysium is the newest street drug plaguing Toronto, drawing addicts to pipe dens (even if that means parents leaving their children to fend for themselves on the streets) and transforming the Regent Park neighbourhood into a dangerous wildzone nicknamed “The Forest”. Once it gets its hooks in (usually literally with a shard of an enchanted mirror), elysium can transport a user to an enchanted “Silver World”; a dreamlike state in which the pain and ugliness of our own world has been wiped away. What people don't realise is that the Silver World is a real place, and the more people from our world visit it, the thinner the boundary between worlds become. As familiar Toronto streets begin to move and morph around her, Maggie – the proprietor of the enchanted bookstore of the title and the only addict to have ever kicked elysium – receives a message from her elysium-addicted brother Kyle: he needs rescue from this other plane, and it might require Maggie picking up the pipe again to follow his trail.
A pang of longing gripped her. The Silver World. The Forest. Borderlands. The Below World. The Bright World. Her head hurt. And Kyle was bait.The bulk of the narrative follows Maggie on her quest, and after rereading The Snow Queen, I can say that Davis cleverly followed in Anderson's footsteps; placing Maggie in much the same settings and situations as Anderson's Gerta, but without being too literal or derivative. I also really enjoyed the organic ways that Davis inserted Maggie's backstory and relationship with Kyle; really enjoyed the way that the siblings seemed to dream in competing fairytales. But here's where my complaint of this not going deep enough comes in: in a lot of ways, The Grimoire of Kensington Market reads like a sequel; like as though I missed a previous book about Maggie's addict years, a book that had gone into much more depth about the magical bookshop and how it functions, and one that showed Maggie's relationship with Mr. Mustby and how he groomed her to become his heir. I didn't much like that Maggie is handed three magical items before she leaves on her quest which are then used in obvious and uninteresting ways, and ultimately, the final confrontation was a bit of a letdown. Also, why mention that there are a multitude of other worlds, but not go there? Ultimately, if I think of this as a novel, these complaints are failings. But if I think of it as a fairytale, then that's how those work; you trick the witch with a chicken bone and then shove her in the oven. Simple. I'm left of two minds here, but I found much to like in this read.
