49 pages • 1 hour read
Bookshops & Bonedust
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Symbols & Motifs
Frames, Windows, and Mirrors
Frames, windows, and mirrors highlight the importance of one’s point of view. At various times throughout the novel, the characters each acknowledge the importance and limitations of perspective. Maylee puts it in these terms when she explains her attraction to Viv: “I love what I do, love it every day, but none of us sees more than a tiny piece of all the world, like we’re lookin’ out a little-bitty window” (130). For Maylee, Viv’s arrival has offered a perspective shift—she revisits memories of when she was a mercenary and looks to the world beyond Murk.
Viv emphasizes the importance of objectivity. Fern is frustrated by her inability to see what needs to be done to the bookstore, but Viv tells her that maybe she needs someone from the outside, like Viv, to help her “reframe it.” Fern also understands the power of perspective, particularly in the context of literature. When Fern and Viv discuss Heart’s Blade, Viv wonders how the characters can do nothing but fight and then flip to a romantic relationship. Fern points out that their initial antagonism doesn’t exactly turn into something else so much as shift in meaning. As she observes: “The framing changed everything […] Like one of those trick drawings that become something else when you turn them upside down” (69).
Fern evokes the concept of perspective and framing when she brings up mirrors. She sees a book as a sort of mirror that offers a connection between readers: “Every book is a little mirror, and sometimes you look into it and see someone else looking back” (243). Connection is found in the idea that “someone sees the same thing you see. […] When you know that at least right then, you’re really not alone. Somebody feels exactly what you do” (243). For Fern, this shift in perspective makes reading, a solitary activity, into something that links people.
Books
In Bookshops & Bonedust, books are a symbol of power—the power of community, the power of self-discovery, and the power of knowledge. Fern’s bookstore is at the center of Viv’s found family in Murk, and Fern’s book recommendations lead to greater introspection among the characters. The bookstore is also the setting for the final confrontation with Varine, in which the power of Viv’s community defeats her.
The novel focuses on Books as a Means of Self-Discovery for several characters, including Viv, Pitts, Gallina, and even Satchel. Fern’s recommendations help them to see parts of themselves they didn’t know existed. When Maylee asks how Fern knows which book to give a customer, she says: “Every book is a little mirror, and sometimes you look into it and see someone else looking back” (243).
In the novel, books are windows into knowledge and possibility. Varine’s book, for instance, contains a vast collection accessed through its pages, which Fern refers to as “portals.” The use of the word “portal” implies that books are an escape, something that Viv discovers: “[D]espite the uncomfortable chair and the ache in her leg and the backwater in which she’d been abandoned, she was absorbed. She was transported. She was elsewhere” (28).
Frozen Blood
Viv comes to recognize the scent of frozen blood—“cold and dry and coppery” as a sign that one of Varine’s agents is in the vicinity (99). When she follows the man in gray from Fern’s bookshop, she is angry and battle-ready, feeling the threat against her community. She fully understands the danger when the “smell assault[s] her—cold and wrong and so familiar” (95). When Viv links the scent with the memory of battling Varine’s wights, she understands it to be a warning.
Each time Viv catches this scent, Travis Baldree alerts the reader to Varine’s presence, increasing the tension and the sense that Varine and Viv’s work as a mercenary are infiltrating Murk and threatening her friends and community: “[S]he could smell it. In her hands, that blood-in-snow scent wafted up from the leather. An involuntary shiver scurried up her arms” (194). Notably, Viv uses the absence of this scent as a sign that Satchel can be trusted. Although she is suspicious of him as a former servant of Varine’s, she notes, “this creature […] didn’t smell the same. The room was filled with the scent of lightning strikes and burnt dust, but that cold odor of winter blood was nowhere to be found” (162).
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