The best realist novels that use magic to say hard things

I've resisted ‘cli-fi’ novels thinking I didn’t want or need more post-apocalyptic doom and gloom in my head.

Finally, after feeling like I was missing out on an important cultural moment, I asked a friend who reads in this genre, and he suggested I start with Lilly Brooks-Dalton’s novel.

Set in an undefined near future, The Light Pirate is more realist than fantasy or sci-fi, but the author makes clever use of an unexplainable, possibly supernatural element to set up the novel’s central question: Are humans going to adapt to climate change or will we die off as a species?

We meet protagonist Wanda, at her untimely birth, during the destructive peak of the hurricane she's named for. Readers invest in Wanda’s unlikely survival as it quickly becomes clear that a key environmental tipping point has come and gone, wiping out her home, indeed the entire state of Florida, leaving it underwater and in the dark.

The surreal story element emerges as teenage Wanda discovers she has an unusual ability involving light. By this point, Wanda, and her older survivalist friend and found family, Phyllis, are living in a treehouse, their survival a day-to-day struggle. 

With Wanda’s tragic, uncertain character arc, I took her character to represent both the innocent victims of our failure to reverse our dependence on fossil fuels—that is, the youngest among us—and the human race taking baby steps towards evolving to adapt, meaning survive. 

The author’s choice to pose but not completely answer the question of whether Wanda's special ability is explainable by as yet undiscovered science or a supernatural gift, aka magic, compels the reader to deeply consider the complexity of evolutionary adaptation and our chances of meeting this challenge—and this is the hard-to-say thing in this novel—the climate apocalypse that’s coming much sooner than most of us think.

It surprised me that after reading this novel, I came away more hopeful than I’d been before.

At first glance, Valley of Shadows is a straight-genre horror novel, with a gruesome whodunnit at its center.

We’re given a noble but flawed Mexican American hero, Solitario, searching for a band of ritualistic murderers, who, by the novel’s midpoint, have already slaughtered a dozen men, women, and children.

This leaves Solitario, like the reader, desperate to keep them from killing again, but clueless about who they are and how they select their victims. This mystery remains unsolved until a shocking perpetrator and motive emerge on the novel’s final pages.

An essential thread in Ruiz’s riveting story is its otherworldly cast of characters, including a parade of personable ghosts, two living bruja (Mexican witches), and both the mythology and practical applications of Aztec and Apache mystical traditions.

Readers will recognize these flourishes as directly traceable to the fantastical, politically charged magic realism style developed by masters of this genre, namely Gabriel García Márquez in One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Here, Ruiz uses his magic and myth to provide laser-like historical context on a very current place of conflict. The shifting Rio Grande border and the hateful and violent history of relations between Anglos, Mexicans, and Native peoples living there, with echoes in today’s more generic anti-Mexican prejudices.

Occasionally, Ruiz’s supernatural interventions thwart the evildoers in his story. More often, they carry the emotional wounds of his characters caused by these open and submerged hostilities. I highly recommend Valley of the Shadows for fans and newcomers to both horror and magic realism, and for anyone who wants to better understand what’s going on at our southern border.

This novel’s protagonist, Pepper Rafferty was raised by two Lesbian mothers, who found her as a newborn on the doorstep of their vet practice.

But at 36, Pepper is still trying to find her footing in the world and understand things about herself, like her habit of imagining she’s living in different worlds, based on different choices she might have made.
Without being shown exactly why, the reader soon grasps that this has something to do with the fact that her birth mother is Ula Frost - a very famous portrait painter about whom fantastic claims are being made.

These come primarily from the models in her portraits, these are her clients, who say that her painting them brought forth their mirror selves from other universes, often with disastrous consequences. Outrageous as this claim seems, many in the art world believe it, and Ula's paintings sell for millions of dollars. 

This tease of Aimee Pokwatka's multiverse premise, along with her very relatable troubled mother-daughter relationship theme, grabbed me from the start and held my attention throughout her novel, even though it doesn't play a large or tangible part in the plot until three-quarters of the way in. 

At that point, Pepper is on a worldwide search for her birth mother and the answer to this mystery. I loved how the author pulled me into Pepper's reality, including the battle she’s waging between her head and heart, her skepticism about the expanded realities she stumbles into, all pulled forward by her very basic desire to meet her biological mother in the flesh. 

What’s the hard-to-say point of the magic in Self Portrait with Nothing? To me it allows both mother and daughter to more deeply mine and reveal complex emotions, shining a light on what it takes to be a ‘good mother’ and how art and motherhood conflict, increasing the stakes for all concerned.

I highly recommend this novel for anyone who gravitates to mother-daughter stories and/or readers who like to play with 'what if's' in fiction and/or life.

The Snow Child depicts a maybe real, maybe imaginary little girl bringing joy to a childless, homesteading couple in 1920s Alaska.

In this bestselling debut novel, released in 2016, a couple that yearns for a child of their own is visited by a nymph who appears and disappears in the snow drifts on their homestead. In her novel, Eowyn Ivy manages to sustain the reader’s belief that this girl could in fact be real, without directly saying one way or the other. 
Why do this in an essentially realist portrayal of hardscrabble life in rural Alaska? Again, I see it as a way to get past the character’s rational mind and open both the character and readers’ hearts to the ineffable.

Here, Mabel, the main character says it better. “You did not have to understand miracles to believe in them, and in fact, Mabel had come to suspect the opposite. To believe, perhaps you had to cease looking for explanations and instead hold the little thing in your hands as long as you were able before it slipped away.”

She goes on to compare it to the mystery of how a fetus forms in the womb, and how the hexagonal miracle of snowflakes fall from the clouds. Read The Snow Child for its authentic portrayal of a less familiar real time and place and it’s beautiful use of magic.

On a remote island in the Pacific Northwest, a Hello Kitty lunchbox washes up on a beach.

Tucked inside is the diary of a sixteen-year-old Japanese girl. Ruth, the auto-fictional protagonist of this novel, is a writer who finds the lunchbox and suspects it’s debris from Japan’s 2011 tsunami. Thus ensues a dual storyline in which each of these characters seeks out the other and, in the process, reckons with family, fate, and ancestral heritage.

I chose this National Book Award finalist from 2014 for its subtle use of the two main characters liminal realities to wrestle with the possibility of how two people living at a vast distance apart and even in different times might be connected to each other.

As a writer I was blown away by this passage which comes late in the novel. “[Ruth] thought back to the mystery of the missing words. Had she somehow found them and brought them back? It wasn’t as crazy as it sounded. Sometimes when she was writing, she would lose herself in a story so completely that the next morning, when she opened the document, she would find herself staring at paragraphs that she could swear she’d never seen before, scenes she had no recollection of writing…”

A perfect rendition of writing at its most magical.