Weave a Circle Round Is a Timeless Fantasy Debut

Though there is a lot of the fantastic in Kari Maaren’s accomplished first novel, Weave a Circle Round, she grounds it so beautifully in the confusing, mortifying reality of growing up. The weird is just an extension of the everyday, and sometimes more legible. “Why am I doing this?” thinks 14-year-old protagonist Freddy Duchamp at more than one point, and it’s a thought just as applicable whether she’s hiding in the forest from a Viking raiding party, or ducking into the bathroom to avoid two girls who she’s known forever who have inexplicably stopped being her friend. At least the Vikings have axes, though when you’re a teenager, the danger from ex-friends may seem more mortal.
At the start, Freddy is just keeping her head down. She drifts around the house on Labour Day, half-musing about how maybe school will be better than the languor of summer. But then her younger sister Mel and her same-aged step-brother Roland suck all the calm from the house with their obnoxious role-playing games—ugh—and her new neighbors on Grosvenor Street wrap their moving van around a tree, and the tail end of summer suddenly becomes much more interesting. Freddy, Mel, and Roland end up helping the new residents, Cuerva Lachance and Josiah, move into their house, which turns out to be just as strange as its new inhabitants: teenage Josiah is all put upon exasperation, and Cuerva Lachance flits about in odd dress, announcing non sequiturs. This may not seem so odd in a family made up of a single mom and a teen she’s just moved cross-country, but Josiah claims not to be Cuerva Lachance’s son. Moreover, everything about them is just… off.  Meanwhile, their parlor fills up with far too many squashy armchairs, and the massive pipe organ on the second floor blares music out into the night.
Freddy likes Josiah well enough when they meet, but at school, it’s a whole other thing. Freddy’s grade school friends snub her hard; they’ve blossomed over the summer in all the ways Freddy hasn’t, and her idle thought of how little they spoke during vacation flowers into full on social horror. Worse, Josiah attaches himself to her, and Josiah, unlike Freddy, does everything in his power to get noticed. He antagonizes everyone, from the teachers to the class bullies. Things then go from bad to worse: younger sister Mel treats Cuerva Lachance and Josiah like a fun mystery to unravel, step-brother Roland inexplicably takes to warning her off their acquaintance, going so far as to breach the social lines between the deaf kids (of which he his one), and the hearing. No one is staying where they are supposed to; nothing is as it seems; and worst of all, Freddy keeps getting noticed. Soon, she’s dragged along into an adventure she never asked for, and in-between Cuerva Lachance and Josiah, and a conflict that’s been going on far longer than it has any right to have been. Maybe since forever, or near enough.

Freddy is an unchosen one, the opposite of Meg Murry from A Wrinkle in Time, the antithesis of Harry and Katniss and Katsa. Nonetheless, strange and inexplicable things keep happening to her, things stranger and more inexplicable than the usual horror show of adolescence. Though it’s billed as a book for all ages, and classifying it is a slippery thing, Weave a Circle Round plays with a lot of tropes of young adult fantasy fiction—the absent parents, the inexorable pull of destiny slash adulthood—but it always seems to come at them widdershins and sidelong. Freddy reminds me of a number of strong young female characters (in particular, Sophie from Howl’s Moving Castle, and indeed the whole novel is drenched in the stuff of vintage Diana Wynne Jones), not because they are stupendous badasses, but because they’re quieter, and more frightened, precisely like you would be if destiny came calling. This is a tale for those of us who were never quite the great ones. Those of us creeping along, trying not to get noticed. But, Maaren tells us, when we do get noticed, we have a choice, and that makes all the difference.
Weave a Circle Round is available now.