It would be lovely to have a fine art edition of The Reader, bound in leather and fitted with its golden clasps-a fully realized map drawn in ink and gold, pages interleaved with the feathers and notes that Sefia uses to mark the infinite pages of her own strange book. There is beautiful map of the world and images of the symbol that is engraved upon the book itself. Each of the five kingdoms of Kelanna has its own finely drawn medallion. There are manipulations of the text in the primary narrative too, words blacked out, pages smeared by inky fingers-evidence that the book you hold has been in the hands of other readers before you. Sefia reads the unusual book she carries, and its magical story-within-a-story is set off in framed and shaded pages. There are secret messages hidden in the page numbers (and other places). To the observant, the words “Look Closer” appear as an acrostic within the opening poem.
The experience of The Reader is not limited to the evocative words of the story alone. Traci Chee's The Reader is a book to hold in your hands. Chee is a self-proclaimed lover of book arts and paper crafts, so it comes as no surprise that the power of a beautifully crafted book plays a central role in her novel. When she opens it there are words written on pages inside. In their ruined home she stumbles upon a secret compartment in which she finds a strange rectangular object. When she is nine, Sefia returns home one day to find her father brutally murdered. Her mother dies mysteriously when Sefia is six.
Sefia's mother taught her the basics of reading when she was too young to understand the strange shapes and sounds of letters as anything more than a game. She never saw other children or even other adults, with the exception of her Aunt Nin, a woman with a singular talent for picking locks. When she was little, Sefia's parents were secretive, living apart from others on a lonely hilltop shrouded in mist. Sefia, the young protagonist, lives in the land of Kelanna where people have never seen a book and don’t know what reading is.
At its core Traci Chee's enchanting debut novel is a book about the magical act of reading.
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