BOOK REVIEW: Sarah Arthur’s ‘Once A Queen’ Will Make You Fall In Love With Reading Again
Photo by Nur Demirbaş
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“The most potent muse of all is our own inner child.”
I think I’m finally finding pleasure in reading again.
The thought was like a warm blanket around my shoulders — an unexpected joy that brought a private smile to my face. I grew up reading dozens of books every year in every possible spot or circumstance. I read from the tire swing, in the car, in the waiting room, in the armchair, in bed, and lying in the long warm grass of sticky southern summers. I was never without a story to engulf myself within, never without another world to disappear into for an hour or two.
In high school, instead of New Year’s resolutions and lists of goals, I wrote out long reading lists for myself — often 50-100 books a year. I loved the leisurely process of looking through our home library, writing down the titles I was sure I needed to read within the year on a legal pad in careful handwriting. Checking off each title was a delight, a victory, a surge of book-lover’s adrenaline.
In college, I decided to major in English with a concentration in writing. Books were my life; reading countless pages and writing countless more were my everyday, my work, my purpose. And I loved it.
Until I graduated. Suddenly, I didn’t want to read. When I did read, it seemed cumbersome, and I couldn’t turn off the constant analysis my brain seemed stuck within. I simply wanted to enjoy a book! I tried several different genres but to no avail. So I took a break. A long break.
Until one day, in a rather difficult season of life, I realized I was longing for a good story. A fairy tale, actually. Something simple. Something absolutely true. So I read children’s books. Picture books, chapter books, middle grade, and YA. I dipped my toes back into some non-fiction and peaked around the corner at some nature essayists, but I found myself returning again and again to the children’s corner.
This spring, while reading an article in World Magazine on new book releases, I came across Once a Queen by Sarah Arthur. I had never heard of her, but the cover was delightful (Yes, I do judge books by their cover. My not-so-sincere apologies.) The description sparked memories of Narnia, and I promptly purchased the YA novel.
I honestly think I cried after reading the first three chapters. I felt myself becoming a child again. Arthur has a talent for drawing the reader in with beautiful but not-too-lengthy descriptions, and who doesn’t want to move to a mysterious, old English manor house for the summer with the main character?
Eva is a young teenager and much too old for fairytales. A coming-of-age story, Once a Queen is shared in the first-person from Eva’s perspective as she awakens to the realities of adulthood… and the even greater truths of childhood.
In the midst of yet another family move, Eva is surprised by a mother-daughter trip to England to see her grandmother. The grandmother she has never met in all her fourteen years.
Upon her arrival, Eva meets a delightful yet secret-keeping crew of characters that spark deep-rooted questions within her: Why has she never been here before? Why won’t her mother answer her questions? Why do all of her new friends act as if they know more of her family history than she does? Are the fairytales she grew up with actually true? And who is she, herself?
A fast-growing friendship with the gardener’s grandson entwines Eva in the mysteries of the old manor house, her grandmother’s true identity, and therefore her own. With a maze of gardens, shimmering pear orchards, and strange life-like topiaries, the reader is drawn into a world reminiscent of both The Chronicles of Narnia and The Secret Garden.
“Frankie studied me again. ‘You know those stories? About Ternival?’
I gave a short laugh. ‘I used to believe they were true actually.’ …I expected him to laugh, but instead his voice was low, earnest.
‘Well, when you see the dryad up close, you might change your mind.’”
Eva doesn’t know what to do with this strange new world where the stories she was told as a child seem to emerge as reality…and are possibly believed by even adults. What is true? That is the question that keeps burning in her mind as she wakes night after night to find a gigantic, glowing stag in the garden… along with a woman who claims to be the queen of a magical land… a woman who seems strangely familiar.
Once a Queen asks us the same question: What is true? Is it the everyday, machined world of a critic’s making? Is adulthood the embrace of reality as it is presented to us by culture, education, and politics? Or is there another option? Is the magic, imagination, and openness of our childhood the truer reality? Is our spiritual state our more authentic self?
“We turned. At the end of the drive stood Carrick Hall, transformed by sunlight from an old gray dragon into a winged creature of sparkling beauty, as if released from a century-long spell. And above it, beyond the hilltops, even more fantastically lit than the house itself, soared a towering edifice of golden clouds, turreted like a fairy palace from beyond the walls of this world.
Unbidden joy sprang up in me, a gladness so close to sorrow that tears burned my eyes.
‘There,’ said the housekeeper with satisfaction. ‘There it is.’”
One of the special delights I relished in with Once a Queen, was its not-so-tidy ending. Through twists and turns and unexpected sorrows, Eva does discover her true identity… and all the complexity that comes with it.
Truth and beauty are only fully experienced when deep sorrow and the harder realities of ourselves and the world are also embraced. Sometimes, what we are called to accomplish in life is for the benefit of others, for future generations… and not always for ourselves.
Once a Queen shimmers with magic, but it grounds us in the responsibility that comes with choosing to truly believe in something as well.
“I thought I’d be torn to pieces between my ache to follow the horn and my instructions to return to Frankie on the far side of the door. But I knew what was required of me. I was being asked to do the hardest thing of all: return from a realm beyond the walls of my world, a place I’d been longing to find my whole life, back to an ordinary afternoon, on an ordinary day, in the ordinary world where I’d been born. Where I had to try to make things right.”
As we grow up, we are inevitably confronted with the world, with darkness, with our own cultural and personal dragons. Arthur reminds us that there is a choice when confronted with the requirements of modernity, with the not-so-simple decisions of adulthood: do we go forward grounded in a deeper reality of beauty, chivalry, and spiritual identity... or do we fade in with the hardened and spiritually starved hearts around us?
Truth, magic, the possibility of something else — maybe of other worlds — the reality that this is not our home is, “Not lost. Merely hidden.”
In short…
If you’re looking for an adventure or simply a book to cozy up with this summer, consider Once a Queen and take some time to return to childhood. Who knows... maybe you’ll fall in love with reading again too.
