When I was little, summer meant one thing: travel. Whether we were packing our car for a road trip through the Appalachian Mountains or buckling in for a long-haul flight to Kolkata, my family was lucky enough to spend our summers adventuring. And that meant I got to take my reading to the most wonderful settings. There’s nothing more magical than reading about Ents amidst giant sequoias or about art crimes in the City of Lights.

Since I’ve fully moved to the adult world, however, summers have generally been more prosaic. I’ve been so swept in work and learning how to adult that I’ve just missed out on those extended summer travels. But this year, my husband and I decided it was time to break that pattern, and I was lucky enough to spend the last few weeks traveling through Madrid, Barcelona and Nice. And of course, that meant I had to bring some location-inspired reading…

While I had expected that the reads would add entertainment to my travels, I was surprised at how enriching they were. And I feel it’s impossible to write about these reads without writing about the locations I was in – so my next few posts will be a bit more of a travelogue than usual. We’ll start off in Madrid, with the very recent release from Leigh Bardugo, The Familiar…

Gender, power, and magic

The Familiar follows a conversa servant through the streets of Renaissance-era Madrid. Luzia Cotado spends her entire life hiding her “truest” self – her family’s faith, her magical powers. Her magic comes out in tiny little milagritos, well-hidden, just enough to keep going through the day. Yet one day, her mistress discovers her power, and soon enough she’s competing in a magical tournament on a national scale. She’s tutored in her powers by Santangel, a mysterious being with conflicting motives, and sponsored by an ambitious noble. And as her powers and fame grow, so does the scrutiny on her activities and background – and the attendant risk.

Luzia’s story is dark and twisty and secretive. As a conversa, or a member of a family that converted to Catholicism, Luzia actively performs her Christianity for others. And as a servant, she has little power to affect change or even control over her life; instead she chooses from the paths on offer. Even as she gains magical strength, she finds that the choices might be different, but her influence remains the same – zero. Luzia and her magical counterparts are simply pawns in a vast power struggle.

Bardugo spends the novel exploring and contrasting different forms of ambition. Luzia’s ambitions – relatively undirected growth at all costs. Santangel’s ambitions of freedom, contrasted with his growing affections for Luzia. The ambitions of Luzia’s sponsors, and how they reflect on each characters’ morals; and Luzia’s aunt, her sponsor’s mistress, who strives for personal comfort and safety. Bardugo intersects these ambitions with gender and class roles of the time, and layers on elements of religious restriction that make things more challenging. The result is a maze of challenges that seem impossible to untangle or de-escalate.

A tale of two Madrids

Bardugo’s Madrid reflects this emotional complexity. Luzia’s city is composed of shadowy corners and twisty streets; danger lurks at every turn. Her internal narrative amplifies the darkness, as she carefully controls her behavior in every waking moment.

It’s a big contrast to the Madrid I found when I visited. As an example, Luzia lives near and prays at the church of San Ginés, one of the oldest churches in the city. Ask for “San Ginés” today, however, and you’ll likely be directed to the nearby churrería, famous for its fried dough and rich chocolate drinks. The church, almost next door, is almost neglected by visitors, though it looms large and dark in our protagonist’s narration. Madrid today focuses on celebrating its positive cultural heritage; but there’s little references to the darker eras of the Inquisition and beyond.

Reading The Familiar in Madrid, then, unlocked a historical layer of the city I may not have engaged with otherwise. As I roamed the cobblestone paths to San Ginés, I found myself thinking about the conversos who may have walked the same streets, trying to balance the preservation of Ladino and their refranes while avoiding suspicion. The story made me think more critically about the exhibits in the Prado celebrating women in art – valuable, certainly, but focused only on the most elite. My history classes had mostly overlooked what life might have been like post-Inquisition for those still under suspicion; Bardugo’s writing, read in Madrid, brought it back to life.

What Luzia knows

I loved the richness of the historical detail in The Familiar. The unique focus combined with a compelling protagonist made for a true page-turner. That detailed world fell a little more flat when it shifted perspectives away from Luzia to, for example, Santangel. Santangel focuses almost entirely on either himself or Luzia, and his chapters lose the richness and the depth of Luzia’s world. Personally, I found both his backstory and his character arc much less compelling than that of his student and potential love interest.

The book is richest early on, when Luzia’s voice permeates the novel and describes richly the world she’s familiar with. When Luzia starts to move in more political circles, however, it loses some of that richness, that texture, that pathos. Luzia does not understand those around her; she’s navigating blind, and as a result so are we. The result is that the second half of the novel is full of supposed surprises, but not well-earned ones. Bardugo instead focuses on spectacular elements – the burgeoning romance between Luzia and Santangel; the magical events in the torneo – but they feel less grounded than the first piece of the book. The writing does, eventually, settle back into that historical setting – but a little too late to revert to the immersion from the first half.

Literature as a travel lens

I found myself surprised by how much reading The Familiar enriched my travel experience. Given the fantasy premise, I was expecting entertaining writing, perhaps to recognize a few place-names. Instead, I found a rich historical layer to the city that I would otherwise never had considered.

Still, Bardugo writes about Madrid as an outsider, and with a character with a relatively limited geographical perspective. As my travels took me to Barcelona, I got the chance to read one of the best-selling novels of all time, by a Barcelona native – The Shadow of the Wind. That experience comes under the lens next…

Until then – stay cozy, and stay curious!

This will count for my “abrupt ending” read for my 52 book Club Challenge for the year!