What is #SixforSunday?

#SixforSunday was a little blog feature Steph @ A little but a lot started in June 2017 for herself. It’s a weekly blog post where you get to share 6 books which fill a certain prompt. Originally, #SixforSunday was a post Steph did that she never thought she would stick with! It was her place to share 6 bookish things under a given prompt. (If you want to see her first post, you can check it out here!) She started it thinking it would fizzle out and that she would run out of things to use as prompts: She never imagined that it would transform itself into something OTHER PEOPLE JOIN IN WITH every week. For further details of the rules and links to the prompts for this meme, please visit Steph’s blog here. (Don’t forget to follow and tag Steph alittlebutalot on Twitter and Instagram – @eenalol – if you join in! Also, I made this little banner for this prompt, using graphics from her blog. I hope Steph likes it!)

This week – April 11, 2021 – the topic is: Magical Books.

 So, without any further ado…

My regular readers know full well that I don’t read fantasy, and I’ve been pulling away from anything that isn’t totally literary for the past several years. However, when I did a search for the tag “magical realism” I found quite a few books on my list – in fact, a whole lot more than I expected to find. It wasn’t that hard to choose (I tried to stay away from obvious choices), and I think that these are the best of the bunch (in descending order)!

6 – The Girl on the Landing by Paul Torday. Both this book, and his novella “Theo” – which was a type of prequel to his novel Light Shining in the Forrest – have a somewhat tenuous connection to magic. Throughout this book, we’re unsure if there’s something supernatural going on, or if someone is just mentally unstable. That’s how I prefer my magic – questionable!

5 – The Kitchen Daughter by Jael McHenry. This is one of those books that I’m almost certain won’t appear on anyone’s list besides mine. That’s a real shame because I thought it was absolutely lovely, and I didn’t at all mind the slightly magical bits that came when the protagonist cooks recipes from her departed grandmother.

4 – Five Quarters of the Orange by Joanne Harris. Of the three Harris books I’ve read that take place in small French villages, this one is my favorite, and the magical elements are very subtle. The other two are Chocolat and Blackberry Wine – both of which also have some somewhat magical elements to them.

3 – The Magician’s Lie by Greer Macallister. Okay, this one has real magic in it, because it is about a woman who is a magician. That fits this bill perfectly, even though it is 100% literary fiction with no fantasy elements at all.

2 – The Puttermesser Papers by Cynthia Ozick. In this novel, Ozick has her protagonist Ruth make a GOLEM (which, according to Wikipedia is “is an animated anthropomorphic being that is created entirely from inanimate matter“). But this isn’t a male Golem, no this one is female, and just like with the original one in Jewish folklore, things get a bit out of hand! This was my introduction to Ozick, and boy, she got me HARD!

1 – The Charmed Wife by Olga Grushin! This partial re-imagining and partial modernization of the Cinderella fairy tale, which has no small amount of magic, or does it? That’s what is so special about this book – she turns a magical world into reality. Such an interesting novel, and one that I can’t get out of my head! I really must read more Grushin!

What about you? What are your six favorite magical books?

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