Ink Blood Sister Scribe

“Esther’s stepmother, Cecily, had given her this novel when she was eighteen, the day before she’d left home forever, and at the time Esther had needed the translation. Spanish should have been her first language, but Isabel had died when Esther was too young for language, and so it was only her mother’s tongue. But it was the Spanish title she’d gotten tattooed across her collarbones several months later: ‘la ruta nos aportó’ on the right, ‘otro paso natural’ on the left. A palindrome and thus readable in the mirror.”

The use of the expression “mother tongue” alongside “mother’s tongue” creates a tone of dark comedy, which characterizes Esther as prone to distancing herself from the pain of the past. The image of Esther’s tattoo foreshadows the bodily connection to books that develops throughout the novel: Scribes use their blood for ink, and Richard’s immortality spell is bound using human materials.

“Abe had looked up from the fire he’d only just managed to put out, one of the ruined books cradled in his hands like a broken bird. […] Joanna zeroed in on the blackened edges of the book’s pages, the curled and blistered leather cover, the melting glue of the spine. […] Her eyes moved to her father’s face, bleak with a devastation she felt in her bones. When she looked back at her mother, Cecily had tears running down her cheeks. She had already known it wasn’t a question which parent Joanna would choose.”

The simile of the book as a broken bird emphasizes the intimate connection Abe and Joanna feel toward magical books. The quick shift from a detail of Abe’s face to Joanna’s feelings provides a visceral sense of their connection. The author likens the material damage to the books with bodily damage, anthropomorphizing them further.

“Esther cleared her throat self-consciously and read. ‘After the mirror you gave me broke, Doña Marcela demanded it be covered. No one knows how the glass first shattered but she’s convinced that looking in a broken mirror brings bad luck. How horrified she’d be if she knew that last night I lost control and uncovered it. […] Looking at it, I felt the same shiver I’d felt that day in the pavilion—it was as if you were gazing at me through the glass. And when I touched it, I swear it trembled and gave way beneath my fingers like the surface of a lake.’”

The inclusion of a passage from the Gil novel creates a self-aware sense of the book as a book. Several metafictional references throughout the text increase the reader’s awareness of the fact that they are reading a book about books. In this passage, the use of first person and second person—which contrast’s Ink Blood Sister Scribe’s third-person perspective—implicates the reader more closely in the text itself. That the passage concerns mirror magic, which is used throughout Ink Blood Sister Scribe, further tethers the Gil novel to the plotline.