What a lovely thing to say, about any book, or any creation, or any person. I’ve thought about it a lot over the years. I’ve thought about hope as a seed that grows in every person. I’ve thought about how sometimes, a certain experience can nourish hope so well that it grows. 

I’m sure that this statement was true for this person at the time, but I’m not 100% positive that books can give hope. That makes it sound like you’re handing a flashlight to someone in the dark. 

Instead, the books can activate hope by embodying hope’s process. The book can remind you that you’re already holding a flashlight, and even though you can’t see the button that turns it on, you can feel for it and find it and then use your own agency to choose to turn it on. 

With that distinction on mind, I want to point this out: those same hope-activating books don’t avoid death or the grief of those left behind. 

This was on purpose.

It reflects how fairy tales are written, and it also reflects how I understand life. 

Martha Beck once explained that if asked the question, “What is the opposite of death?” most people will answer: “Life.” This is misleading. The opposite of death is actually birth—both are one-time events that bookend the span of a single life. 

As Beck says, “Life has no opposite.” 

When death touches a family or a community, the living experience their own kind of death. Their life as they knew it is as gone as the person they’ve lost. At that point, even the living have to be reborn into life. 

Sometimes, that rebirth is complete, and the return to life is also complete.

Sometimes, that rebirth doesn’t quite finish, and problems ensue. 

We see this a lot in The Ever Afters. Think of the major players that Rory meets throughout OGAI. How many of them have experienced great loss? As the narrator, Rory may not yet know it, but by the end of the series, she starts to see how the grief of these individuals has impacted every single thing they did, whether they were completely reborn into life or got stuck somewhere along the way.

Consider Chase and Hansel--and the way they were shaped by their grief but ultimately were reborn into life. 

Now consider the Director and the Snow Queen—and the way they spent the rest of their lives trying to avoid re-experiencing the grief they’d experienced. 

Hope doesn’t exclude death, but like a shining thread, it walks you through grief—and other bleak territory—towards a complete rebirth.