Who Gets Magic?, a guest post by Candice Ransom

Once, an eleven-year-old girl gazed at the rounded Blue Ridge Mountains from her Virginia house. She wondered if magic could be found in hazy hills that looked like a parade of elephants linked trunk to tail. She had read Mary Poppins Opens the Door, about kids whose babysitter took them on magical adventures. The girl had never had any adventures at all. The things that had happened to her when she was little could hardly be called adventures. She sighed. Magic was a closed door.

The idea for Juneberry Blue came to me all at once. I wanted to write about a forgotten town with only eight residents—five adults, three children, plus one dog. Other residents include long-dead employees of the abandoned soft drink factory, once the lifeblood of Morning Glory, and the factory’s ghost cat. And I wanted magic, the kind in fairy tales. While fairy tales star princesses and kings, more often they feature “ordinary working people, toiling at ordinary occupations,” as Marina Warner states in her book Once Upon a Time.

Ordinary working people I knew. My mother and stepfather worked three jobs between them and raised a truck garden to pay taxes. The kids in my rural school had ordinary working parents, too. Dads were shade-tree mechanics. Boys rode with them to pick up loads of sawdust. Girls in faded shorts and flipflops built frog houses on creek banks. Me? Deep in our woods, I read stories of fantasy and magic. It seemed most of the characters in those books lived in castles or mansions. Not kids who lived in cramped rented trailers. 

While I was outlining Juneberry Blue, I pondered these questions: Are forgotten kids allowed to have magic? Who decides who gets magic and who doesn’t?

The girl believed she didn’t deserve magic. She felt lucky she now lived in a real house with her own bedroom and had a kind stepfather. But earlier, someone had decided that she would live with an aunt and uncle who didn’t want her or her sister. Her sister went to school, but the girl stayed outdoors in all weather, all day. The rest of the time she sat quietly in her crib, long after she had outgrown it. She never knew why she was banished, or why she was slapped, or had her palms beat with a tablespoon. When anyone spoke to her, she trembled.

In the woods behind my house, I devoured library books and scribbled my own stories, listening to the small rustles of wild creatures. Thorny memories rose and I knew I had to set my feet on the right path to find my way out of them. A path scattered with toads and diamonds, glass slippers and golden apples. I needed magic.

So did the characters in Juneberry Blue. My ordinary, rural kids who dream modest dreams, who see with the clarity of mountain spring water, who are fortunate to live far from mundane suburbs and strip malls, where the sky is open and their feet will find the surest track. I gave them magic. Lots of it. Once I endowed the town with magic—a kleptomaniac potted morning glory plant, self-aware antique embroidery scissors, a dusty thrift shop with goods that choose their owners—my cast embraced their different destinies. I showered gifts on animals and humans—sometimes unwanted, sometimes denied, sometimes unexpected—but always for a reason. I made the world of Morning Glory and loved it dearly.

The town has its own magic. Morning Glory is in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, nestled in a time-slip sliver I stumbled upon while scouting locations for my setting. I decided the county it lies inside blocks radio waves. Cellphones, Wi-Fi, even garage door openers don’t work there. Not just to give the place space for magic, but to allow language and old ways—all given rise from the land—to shine. Although the story is contemporary, releasing my characters from today’s digital thicket gave them—and me—room to breathe.

Andie, the main character, expects to inherit her matrilineal gift in this, her eleventh summer. As the eldest daughter she must create a recipe from juneberries that will be so special, it will bring customers to the failing family diner. The gift would mean her future would be tied to the diner. Even though she didn’t want that, she did want to bring her long-haul truck driving father home. Nothing had been the same since he’d left. In a fairy tale twist, Andie’s recipe flops and her little sister possesses the gift instead. Then Andie learns she has another ability—she can see and hear spirits. This gift terrifies her. But the ghosts need her help. The whole town needs her help. Does she, an eleven-year-old girl, have the power to do the impossible?

It’s not unusual for families, especially girls and women, to hold certain powers. My mother’s family was from a hamlet in the Shenandoah Valley, ringed by gentle Blue Ridge hills like old men napping under afghans. A mix of German and English traditions were passed down. My mother’s aunt told me, a mere child, that she had second sight. I wondered what that meant.

As I grew older, I recognized small abilities in myself. Once, stopped at a traffic light beside a truckload of live turkeys flattened in dozens of cages, I felt their combined fear roll over me like a tsunami. I’d always preferred animals to humans and understood them better. Whenever the phone rang, I often knew who the caller was before answering (this only worked with landline phones). Sometimes in an antique store, I will sense children’s book I’d once read and desperately wanted to read again, is there.

Throughout my novel, I consciously wove the fairy tale “Sleeping Beauty,” after the Story Box Andie crafts as a prop to retell the story to her little sister. The town is asleep and needs to be awakened. Someone needs to hack through the overgrown woods to find the secret recipe for the soft drink Juneberry Blue, once famous for its ability to make people happy, and keep it out of the hands of an unscrupulous developer. Three big tasks for Andie, but she has her best friend Tanner and helper animals. In the end, Andie discovers her most important power, one she’d had all along—the ability to unbox her voice and tell her own stories.

Once powerless, the girl now realizes that stories have the power to take her anywhere, even the distant mountains. In her eleventh summer, she decides she will be a writer. Unleashing her personal magic, her gift, she opens the door. The world, she knows, always needs stories.

Meet the author

Candice Ransom is the author of 180 books for children and young adults, including the classic picture book, The Big Green Pocketbook. Among recent titles are Bones in the White House: Thomas Jefferson’s Mammoth, a Junior Library Guild Selection; the easy reader “Day Family” series; and middle grade novels, Rebel McKenzie, and the Iva Honeysuckle books. A ninth generation Virginian, Candice spent much of her childhood listening to family stories. She has an MFA in Children’s and Young Adult Writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, and an MA in children’s literature from Hollins University. She has been on the faculty of Hollin University’s graduate program in children’s literature for eighteen years. She lives in Fredericksburg, Virginia, with her husband and two naughty cats.

About Juneberry Blue

Taking inspiration from Sleeping Beauty and rural settings, this contemporary magical realism novel includes a mistaken destiny, a dying town, and a determined ghost cat.

Eleven-year-oldAndie Jennings, of Morning Glory, Virginia (population: 8), is set to inherit a matrilineal gift on Test Day, and she plans to use it to bring her dad home for good from his long-haul trucking job. Except her gift doesn’t come.

Instead, Andie starts seeing and hearing unexplained things, and a see-through cat seems to be following her. Turns out, she didn’t fail Test Day. Her gift just isn’t what anyone expected. But Andie’s ability to communicate with the ghosts at the town’s shuttered Juneberry Blue factory may be the very thing that Morning Glory—and her own family—needs.

ISBN-13: 9781682636695
Publisher: Holiday House
Publication date: 06/18/2024
Age Range: 8 – 12 Years

Filed under: Guest Post