63 pages • 2 hours read
The Book of Magic
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Themes
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of illness or death, death by suicide, and emotional abuse.
The Power of Books
As the title indicates, the novel centers on books. These include literary texts, such as poetry and fiction, as well as occult texts, or grimoires. In addition, as repositories of books, libraries play a large role in The Book of Magic. The novel’s various allusions and discussions about books highlight how they empower people.
Books offer knowledge, a form of power. For many years, women weren’t taught to read and were punished for having books other than the Bible. Women being “drowned and beaten and hanged” (371) for having books in Massachusetts illustrates that books offer knowledge that could help women improve their social status and quality of life. One kind of knowledge is literary: “Life was like a book, Jet thought, but one you would never finish […] Fiction made sense of the world” (45). The novel mentions specific works that help people understand the world, such as Wuthering Heights (1847) and Jane Eyre (1847). However, Jet’s favorite writer is Emily Dickinson, whom the novel mentions and quotes throughout. Jet hides a message for Franny about breaking the curse in a copy of Dickinson’s poems.
Jet’s note concerns a grimoire, a magical text that confers power through the occult.
