Word Out 2014

The Green Man by Michael Bedard

Reviewed by Edmee, age 19

“You can’t turn around in our family without running into a poet,” says O, the protagonist of Michael Bedard’s The Green Man. Bedard’s enchanting story follows fifteen-year-old O, a strong-minded and charming girl with a father obsessed with Ezra Pound and an eccentric aunt who makes her living through her secondhand bookshop called the Green Man. After Aunt Emily has a heart attack, O moves into the bookshop’s attic for the summer. There, she can keep a better eye on her nervous and sickly aunt, and in a space surrounded by words and — to O’s initial skepticism — ghosts, O begins to find her own poetic voice.

Poetry, however, seems to go hand in hand with madness. An acclaimed but impoverished poet, Emily struggles. She insists O sidestep a spot on the stairs, claiming that the dead poet Mallarmé sits there. She holds entire conversations while she sits alone in a room. She’s plagued by nightmares about children taking part in an unsettling magic show, disappearing into mirrors and being run through by swords. While O is willing to help run the shop, will she ever be able to help Emily overcome what seems to be the spell of a dream? Or is the realm of words and dreams and magic books much more than it seems?