How it started
Lately, I find myself drifting. It’s a glacial drift, slow, undramatic, almost imperceptible — but still sensate and real. While there are multiple ongoing crises in the larger world, I find myself gratefully insulated enough to go on existing more or less in a similar way now as a year ago, five years ago, ten years ago. But I notice that the effort of trying to engage with the world, in all its shifting complexity, day after day, year after year, has yielded to gentle numbness settling somewhere between my inbox and my bones. As a female, mother, wife, sister, child in my late forties, I spend most of my days orbiting the usual life stuff: finding ways to combine the joys and pains of work and life, teenagers who need me desperately and then not at all, parents making the slow transition through old age and death, a body that’s subtly rewriting its rules without asking. There is so much good, but suddenly the past few years have felt muted, wrapped in cotton wool, like someone turned the volume down on the part of me that used to burn a little brighter.
And then this past winter, I rediscovered my love and obsession with reading. I’d brew a warm drink, stoke the fireplace back to life and curl up with a book. Allowing the world around me to fade, permitting a new world, born in the liminal space between my reading eye and my mind’s eye, to rise up and envelop me.
At first, my tastes were haphazard and suggestable. I’d read books by any author I’d heard of in passing, a recommendation from a friend, a local librarian, a student, a colleague. But that all changed, suddenly and decisively, after seeing a young woman tenderly cradling a thick, hardcover under her arm on the way into a yoga studio. I was so intrigued that I asked the stranger: what might be so good she couldn’t put it down even for a moment? I picked up the book that day and without warning ended up in a section of the bookshop for which I felt a vaguely shameful need to explain myself: fantasy fiction. In short order, I was hooked. I read that book in a matter of days, and its sequel immediately afterwards, leaving me at the mercy of the internet and multiple rereads while I waited impatiently for the third installment alongside a raft of rabid fans. This was my entré into the world of online book theory, and my first dive into the marvelous realm of fan fiction.
While I waited, I faced down my first book hangover. I browsed bookstore and library shelves for anything that might deliver that similar hit. I was suddenly reacquainted with the addictive pleasure of reading at a pace and volume and with a newly awakened fervor that I hadn’t experienced since childhood. I developed loves, preferences, relationships and feelings about fictional worlds, characters and their stories. Whole shelves worth of library books popped up in ever-growing stacks, on my nightstand, on my desk, on my dining table. I was reserving and dispatching any child passing by either of the two local libraries to pick up or drop off books several times a week and maxing out all four of my library cards across two countries on e-books and audio books, so I could read late into the night without keeping my husband up. The truth is that I have always been an avid reader, but these things fluctuate. I got caught up in what I could manage of cultural influence with half an eye on making dinner, or whatever else needed doing in the sparse time I had to accomplish it all.
But when the book fever took hold of me, my world opened up and shut down simultaneously. I was able to ground myself in a new place, a new view, with new problems and a new history, in a story threaded with ancient magic, strange cities, imperfect heroines who feel everything too much, who know the mission is impossible and risk everything anyway. Open a book, and suddenly I’m somewhere else. I’m somewhere that feels truer than real life.
Somewhere that reminds me I have skin and breath. That there are still things worth fighting for, falling into, becoming. That I can still be surprised. That I can still be rendered completely bereft and heartbroken by words on a page about an imaginary person created by another person I will probably never meet, and that being able to feel that deeply is indeed the point of it all.
This essay is a love letter to those stories, and their storytellers. Because in this fractured, flattened world, we need fantasy fiction more than ever. Not to escape life, but to re-enter it with our hearts open.
Reimagining Magic
Myth, Memory, and the Power Beneath the Skin
One of the most miraculous things fantasy fiction does — quietly, without asking for applause — is remind us that power doesn’t have to look like dominance. That magic isn’t always about fireballs and thrones. Sometimes, it’s hidden in bloodlines, in buried memories, in the breath between language and longing. And increasingly, it’s being rewritten by women who don’t just wield magic, they reshape what it means.
Take Tahereh Mafi’s Woven Kingdom series, a glittering, aching (and, as yet, incomplete) series rooted in Persian mythology. Her heroine, Alizeh, is a djinn hiding in plain sight, a would-be queen stitching lace in a human city that would see her executed if it knew what she was. Her magic isn’t flashy — it’s quiet, silken, simmering with centuries of suppressed history. Reading it, I felt something ancient stir. There’s power in that kind of lineage, in a story that doesn’t just cast spells but reclaims erased mythologies and insists: we were always here.
S.A. Chakraborty’s Daevabad Trilogy works a similar kind of alchemy. Her world — layered with Islamic lore, political betrayal, and magical beings who are as petty and proud as any royal court — feels like slipping into a parallel reality where everything is lush and morally messy. It’s not magic as wish-fulfillment — it’s magic as inheritance, responsibility, revolution.
Even Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea remains quietly radical. Her magic is language-based, grounded in balance and restraint, and it insists that real power isn’t about taking but about knowing: the true name of a thing, the weight of one’s choices, the price of arrogance. It’s not loud, but it changes you.
And then there’s Philip Pullman, whose daemon-infused world gave me my first real understanding of what it might mean to have a soul. His magic isn’t only in the mystical “dust” or alethiometers — it’s in the tenderness between children and their animal-selves, in the way wonder and science coexist, in the suggestion that being curious and kind holds a kind of sacred power.
All of these stories reach beneath the skin. They enchant not with spectacle, but with depth. And they remind me, gently, insistently, that magic isn’t the thing we forgot. It’s the thing that’s been waiting. It’s been within us all along.
Identity and Intimacy
Becoming More Than We Thought We Were
One of the quiet gifts of fantasy fiction, particularly the kind written by women, is that it gives space for characters to become fully, messily themselves. Not just heroic. Not just chosen. But complex, shifting, works in progress. And in a world where we’re all a little exhausted by the performance of having it together, that kind of becoming feels like a soothing balm on broken skin.
In her Woven Kingdom series, Tahereh Mafi‘s Alizeh doesn’t just live between worlds. She is a world in conflict. Djinn and human, royal and servant, visible and invisible. Her magic isn’t separate from her identity — it is her identity, and it’s dangerous. Her very existence is political. Watching her learn to hold space for all her contradictions — her grief, her hope, her tenderness — reminds me that wholeness isn’t about tidying ourselves into categories. It’s about embracing what doesn’t fit. That feels especially real when you’re a woman in midlife trying to remember who you were before you became so many other things to other people.
Sarah J. Maas’s heroines tend to glow up in more overtly dramatic fashion — wings, crowns, tattoos, mating bonds — but underneath the romance and resurrection is a deep exploration of trauma and recovery. Her characters aren’t strong because they’re fearless. They’re strong because they fall apart and rebuild, over and over, with love that’s sometimes feral and sometimes fragile. That kind of intimacy — raw, transformative, chosen — is fantasy at its most honest.
Tamsyn Muir’s Locked Tomb series throws intimacy into a blender with necromancy, body horror, and sparkling, bizarre banter. Her characters love fiercely, weirdly, and often unrequitedly. Their identities leak, blur, and reform across space and death and memory. Gender is fluid, souls are messy, and grief is its own special kind of magic. It’s beautiful chaos.
Philip Pullman’s brilliant daemons cracked something open in me years ago: the idea that our inner selves might take shape outside us—visible, vulnerable, animal—feels both impossibly strange and absolutely right. As Lyra grows up and her daemon settles, we feel that bittersweet shift: the intimacy of change, the loss that comes with becoming, the pain of betrayal. His work reminds me that identity isn’t static. It’s a conversation between who we were and who we’re brave enough to be.
What binds all these stories is the belief that transformation—real, soul-deep transformation—isn’t something that happens once with a wand or a prophecy. It happens slowly, painfully, gloriously, through relationships. Through choices. Through love.
The Magic in the Mundane
Seeing the World Again
One of the strangest things about being an adult is how easy it is to forget how to see. Not just look, but really see — the shimmer of possibility in the ordinary. Fantasy fiction doesn’t just take us to other worlds; it gives us new eyes for this one. It sneaks wonder into the cracks of our day. And honestly? That’s the kind of enchantment I need most these days.
It’s in the breath between pages, when I glance up from a novel and notice how the firelight hits the mirror just so. It’s in the way a phrase echoes in my chest like a memory I didn’t know I had. It is the sharp poignant unearthing of long-buried memories, in the presence of a character, a story, a moment so real that it leaves us wondering whether we really lived these incredible things or just read them. These stories don’t just build fantastical realms for us to visit in the confines of their pages — they tune our senses to the frequency of awe.
Philip Pullman does this masterfully. Alongside parallel universes, faeries, witches and armored bears, his magic is deeply rooted in dust motes and cloud pine branches and the quiet ache of growing up. He reminds us that even in a world of daemons and angels, the greatest wonder is found in a girl’s choice to tell the truth, to love bravely, to stay. That magic lies in not giving up.
Ursula K. Le Guin, ever the sage, gives us dragons who understand the weight of silence and spells that only work if you know the true name of things. There’s something quietly profound about the idea that to name something properly is to respect it, to see it. In a culture addicted to speed and surface, her magic is a slow, deliberate noticing, a spell for staying present.
Even Sarah J. Maas, with all her brooding bat boys and epic plot twists, slips in soft magic, the kind that lives in moments of stillness between characters, in the ritual of healing, in the deep pleasure of found family. Her worlds are full of stars and libraries and slow-blooming tenderness. They remind me that sometimes magic looks like survival, and sometimes it looks like joy.
And in The Daevabad Trilogy, S.A. Chakraborty weaves magic into cooking pots, healing salves, city streets — enchanted, yes, but also deeply familiar. She roots the extraordinary in the everyday, making even the smallest act of care feel like a form of rebellion, a spell against despair.
These stories recalibrate my sense of scale. They remind me that magic isn’t always dramatic. Sometimes, it’s just presence. Sometimes, it’s choosing to feel this moment, however small, as sacred.
Why We Need Fantasy Fiction
Now, and Always
Right now, the world feels… frayed. Not apocalyptic in a cinematic, dragon-filled kind of way, although, let’s be honest, sometimes I think that dragons might be a welcome change of pace, but frayed like an old sweater that’s been worn too thin in all the places that matter. Climate. Injustice. Conflict. Grief. Daily exhaustion. The quiet ache of scrolling past another crisis I feel helpless to fix.
And in the middle of all that, fantasy fiction has become less of a luxury and more of a life raft.
Not because it lets me escape, though escape has its place. But because it reminds me how to return. How to feel more deeply. How to hope with more teeth. These stories don’t just entertain. They tether. They invite. They insist on the possibility and the necessity of transformation. I find this especially true of the stories written by women, who carry magic like a memory, who write the world not as it is but as it could be.
Fantasy, at its best, doesn’t offer easy answers. It offers better questions. What if we weren’t numb? What if we knew our names? What if we were allowed to want more, to be more, to burn and break and remake ourselves in beauty and fury and joy?
In this moment — this messy, menopausal, midlife moment — I don’t need a sword. I don’t need a crown. I need stories that remind me I still have wonder in my blood. That I’m allowed, or even required, to change. That magic doesn’t have to look like fireworks. Sometimes, it looks like staying soft. Like loving harder. Like paying attention.
And in a world where it sometimes feels like everything is falling apart, remembering ourselves, our dreams, our magic, might be both the breath and the ballast we need to forge onward.
Laura Evensen is a full time editor and a part time reader, writer, and dreamer. After two decades in public health research exploring social determinants of health, she now lives in Oslo, Norway with her three children, two cats and one endlessly supportive Viking. She teaches movement and breath for the whole self, applies polish to other writers’ genius and is always working on a passion project of her own. She is the Deputy Editor in Chief of Human Shift. You can usually find her in a sauna, in the ocean or in front of a fire. @triveliga
