Review: Quintessence

Quintessence by Jess Redman.
Square Fish, Farrar Straus Giroux, Macmillan, New York, originally published 2020, my edition 2021.
MG fantasy, 362 pages + excerpt.
Lexile: 720L .
AR Level: 5.1 (worth 10.0 points) .

Alma Lucas was devastated when her family left their hometown of Old Haven for Four Points. Never hugely popular, she had been content with knowing kids at school, spending time with her family, and exploring the natural world around – but with her older brother away at college, her parents busy keeping their new law firm afloat, and a new town she can’t find her bearings in, Alma is wrapped up in anxiety and having frequent panic attacks. Then the mysterious Shopkeeper gives her a quintescope and tells her to save the Starling.

Quintessence by Jess Redman.

This is on the longer end for MG, although fantasy does tend to run long, but the space is generally well used to unspool the various mysteries and slowly coax Alma into confiding in others and accepting help for her situation.

The kids get into a significant amount of trouble, mostly revolving around sneaking out late at night to ramble around town on star-related activities. It probably bears mentioning to urban or suburban kids that roaming the streets after dark has a different level of risk for them. Four Points, however, is the sort of sleepy town where traffic doesn’t happen in the middle of the night, and the town is small enough to be entirely traversed by kids on their bikes.

There are natural barriers to each side of the town – a rocky, cave-filled area near the First Point, the mountainous region near Second Point Peak, Third Point Farm behind Alma’s house, and the wooded Preserve surrounding Fourth Point Spring. I don’t condone kids secretly leaving their house in the middle of the night, but there’s also less danger doing so in a small country town.

The inclusion of side characters of color felt a bit twee at times. Both were eventually developed enough to satisfy me, but it was a long road going there and I worried Redman was just doing the obligatory ‘my Black friend’ bit. Compare her secondary characters to Mary in Secrets of Valhalla, who is complex and interesting from the start, with her own arc and development within the story. Even though she’s not the main focus, she’s as thoroughly developed as any other major secondary character in that novel.

Quintessence talks pretty openly about the panic attacks, but doesn’t name the anxiety or situational depression. In some ways that makes sense – after all, she doesn’t get diagnosed within the novel, and spends most of her time trying to hide the symptoms and avoid treatment at first.

There are two story aspects I was watching carefully for here. One was whether the secret panic attacks would be revealed to Alma’s adults. While middle school students often feel like they have to cure themselves and think they should carry the burden alone, it’s irresponsible to constantly depict such happening in literature for that age group. And Redman doesn’t do so – she instead shows Alma learning to confide in others and reach out for help. Both her peers and various grown-ups provide that help, even if her parents are at first unwittingly adding pressure.

The second aspect is specific to the fantasy genre – I was waiting to see if the magic ‘cured’ her. A whole lot has been written about the problematic aspects of magical cures in fantasy, enough that any modern writer should know better than to use that device. Thankfully, Redman again steered clear of a major pitfall – her magical antics certainly help Alma, but they in no way cure her, and it’s clear at the end that she still has a lot of work to continue so that she can live her best life.

It wasn’t until nearly finishing this review that I learned the author is herself a therapist, which might help explain both why her portrayal is so true to life, and why she included Alma using common therapeutic techniques for anxiety management.

Content warnings include panic attacks (although not explicitly called such within the novel for some reason), anxiety and depression, negative thought spirals, falling from a great height, burns, parental separation, moving, heights, bullying and also perceived bullying.

Overall, I liked this. It wasn’t perfect, but combining mental health disability with fantasy within a MG novel is very tricky, and Redman got that right.