The Counter Clockwise Heart starts with some of the best 8 pages in mglit

The Counter Clockwise Heart feels like that classic fairy tale that you were never told. It’s a remarkable book that could’ve been three times as long, but in doing so would’ve been half as interesting. The first chapter in The Counter Clockwise Heart is one of the best introductions we’ve read this year. In those eight pages it perfectly sets up the world of the book’s inhabitants. It does so in a way that alludes to great danger and flashes back to times of unimaginable peril. The Counter Clockwise Heart manages to do all of this in a constant, taut manner in a way that will pay reading dividends to those who are looking for a breath of mglit fresh air.

 In the first chapter, we’re introduced to the small mountain community of Rheinvelt. The villagers wake up one morning to find that the statue that was built in the city center has been destroyed. Moreover, a massive Onyx Maiden statue appeared overnight and is molded in an aggressive stance. It’s a battle royal that happened one night, mere feet away from where people live, involving stone statues that nobody saw. The village has always existed in a state of fear, due to the neighboring areas, and this just threw things into another state of weirdness.

To make things even worse, when the Onyx Maiden appeared all of the crops in the area started decreasing. They weren’t producing enough food, the cows were making less milk and the storms that appeared in the region were more destructive. It was a coincidence that people couldn’t reconcile and surely thought that they were being punished.

But then, six months after the Onyx Maiden arrived, a young 11-year-old boy came into the village. Guntram was a poor, common boy whose parents barely noticed that he had left home. He walked into town, was intoxicated by the Maiden, sat down beside the statue, and started talking to it. Onyx Maiden didn’t speak back, because it’s a statue, but the townsfolk were bemused at the fact that Guntram would spend 12 hours every day baring his innermost thoughts to something that could be cursing the region.

To the surprise of everyone in the area, things started getting better. The crops started yielding more food and the weather got better, and just like they blamed the Onyx Maiden for the bad, they credited Guntram for the good. The empresses noticed that he was doing great things, so she gave him the title of Margrave, which also merited a spot on her court. The court had lots to attend to because there are malevolent forces in the woods that have been threatening the village, and those entities started making more noise.

The previous four paragraphs summarize the first chapter, which constitutes the first eight pages of The Counter Clockwise Heart. That chapter provides enough details to hook any reader, especially those upper elementary ages. It’s mglit that reaches well past those ages, all the way to any reader who is simply looking for a book that’s patiently telling its big story. Occasionally the book will allude to things that, at the time, you won’t know about the characters.

It could be a throwaway comment, but more often than not it makes you question what you think is true about the characters that you’re reading about, but more about that later. See, it’s comments like that one, that could be an aside one, that makes you pay attention or could be a false flag to the character’s true intentions. If anything, the start of The Counter Clockwise Heart brims with so much curious energy and middle-Earthy-type Easter eggs that the rest of the book has to measure up to that level. For the most part it does match the brilliance of the first eight pages. The ending was resolved a little too simply for all of the potential conflict that it presented in the setup, but that’s only because it was established so eloquently. It’s a great example of mglit that presents known situations but lays them out in such an alien manner that they’re unique and operate in a fresh, upside-down.

The Counter Clockwise Heart is by Brian Farrey and is available on Algonquin Young Readers, an imprint of Workman Publishing.

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