How lush a literary landscape is the one that enables a reader to enter several worlds and make a home in each.
Sylvia Engdahl, the author of Enchantress from the Stars, says, in its preface, that it is not very important whether any of the people in her story are our ancestors or our descendants. Still, because she created them, and placed them there for both our scrutiny and our delight, it should be important to us, in my opinion, that they could be part of our future—and our past. Feeling a familiarity in fiction is what makes it live. Recognizing ourselves and our possibilities is what keeps us turning pages to the end, and keeps the story lingering in our thoughts, as this one does, long after the last page is turned.
Elana, the spunky stowaway who travels both forward and back—and confronts the moral issues inherent in the journeys—is the now in each of us. With her enthusiasm, her occasional petulance, her introspection, she could be my daughter, or my neighbor, or even my long-ago self. Life works well for Elana. She has a sturdy footing in her own world and her own family: a knowledge of her place and an understandable pride in her role.
Then, quite unexpectedly, she is tumbled backward into the world of myth, magic, and dragons—and of Georyn, with whom she falls in love. (Who among us has not, at some time, been jolted to find that the past is not entirely past?)
And for Georyn, she becomes the Enchantress.
As a writer, I am impressed by the deftness with which Sylvia Engdahl veers between several points of view and several styles of language—even, amazingly, melding Georyn’s formal speech with Elana’s casual vernacular into a believable back-and-forth that moves from conversation into a deep emotional connection. At the same time she maintains the fine balance in Elana’s character, so that even as she pretends to sophisticated powers of enchantment to manipulate Georyn, she genuinely enchants him with her very human charm. Yet throughout, she is still Elana: guilty, dutiful, frightened, and very young. Like every teenager, she speaks in a jaunty flippancy and stirs with rebellion as well. Newly stunned by the awareness that she—despite the technology of her highly evolved society—cannot change the injustice of the world, she asks, “Father, haven’t you ever questioned this policy?”
With that hesitant question, later to become a firmer, more confident plea, Elana joins the multitudes of literature’s impassioned young protagonists forced to face the inadequacies and hypocrisies of their parents’ generation: my own Jonas, Robert Cormier’s Jerry, Katherine Paterson’s Lyddie, even E. B. White’s Fern. One by one they do what they can to set things right, to make things fair.
And Georyn! What a heartbreaking, wonderful hero he is! The remarkable dexterity with which the author shifts viewpoint and voice brings us into Georyn’s world, a world that embraces chivalrous honor and the structure of fairy tales as well. There is a sense of familiarity when he faces the three tasks (of course there are three! There are always three!) given him—the disk, the light, and the cup—in order to be able to confront and slay the dragon.
In the predictability of the once-upon-a-time world, however, his courage would earn him the hand of the princess. Here, in the multilayered world where past and present briefly blend, it will not be possible. Reading, we know it will not. The demands of the complex world preclude the romantic resolution we have learned to expect from fairy tales.
He knew all along. His brother warned him. “Think, Georyn: even if she should let you look through such a door, the time will surely come when it will be sealed again; and when that happens you will be not on her side of it, but on ours.”
The story of lovers from different and opposing worlds has been told for centuries, yet we love it no less for its repetition or the sad inevitability of its ending. Juliet will whisper sweet nothings from her balcony, but she and Romeo will die eventually anyway. Pinkerton and Butterfly will never live happily ever after. But as readers, we yearn for the possibility of it, and our hearts break as those doors close.
Then, as the Lady’s voice faded, he glimpsed the world as she saw it, from above.…
And after that, she was lost to him. Yet he was sure, as he would be sure for ever after, that the powers that were hers to tap would endure beyond time and space.
Even in these days when politicians overlook the separation mandated constitutionally and invoke religion in their campaign rhetoric, spirituality remains a topic largely unaddressed in fiction for young adults. But in essence, Enchantress from the Stars is a story about sacrifice and compassion, two of the main ingredients of religious faith, and about the power of believing in that which one cannot understand. His belief in an unexplainable power saves Georyn’s life. Elana’s sacrifice of her own happiness restores Georyn’s future. And the compassion of the Starwatcher—the overseer, the father—is the orchestrating chord.
Many books, including some of my own, contain a character like the Starwatcher: the elderly adviser, the one who understands outcomes and risks, the one who steers a young protagonist, points the way, and then lets go. Parents, of course, know the pain of that letting-go. I remember writing the passage in which The Giver, in the book of that title, tells Jonas that he will not go with him on the final, difficult journey. It was hard for me to send Jonas off without him in exactly the same way that it had been hard for me to see my own children move out into the world beyond my protection.
Elana’s father undertook such a task with the wisdom, courage, and blind surging faith it requires. When she asks how he had known enough to stand aside and let things happen as they did, he tells her, “I didn’t. I trusted you.”
Maybe trust is the key element in the book. All good Young Adult literature is about leaving childhood and innocence behind. It is about the recognition and acceptance of responsibility. But every young person who goes forth—Jonas, Elana, Gilly, Maniac, and countless others—does so buoyed and strengthened by the knowledge and trust of those who have made the journey before them.
Today’s children find some of those empowering mentors only in books. For them, and for all of us, it is a wonderful thing that the Starwatcher is still there.