Magic spectacles and a bookish girl discovering family secrets combine to make one of my very favorite books of the year so far. 

Speculation
by Nisi Shawl

Tu Books, 2023

ISBN 978-1620149591

Read from a library copy.
Ebook available through Libby.

Ten-year-old Winna is a bookworm who staunchly believes in magic – she just knows that if she keeps looking and believing, she’ll stumble on something magical, just like the children in her favorite books by Edward Eager.  She could especially use some magic right now, as her mother has been in the hospital for two weeks.  She and her younger sister, Tupelo, are staying with their grandparents in rural Michigan until she’s better. 

When Tupelo sits on Winna’s glasses and breaks them, Grandpa Carl goes up to the attic and brings down an old pair of glasses that her clever great-aunt Estelle, who died too young, made as a child herself.  Putting them on sends rainbow shimmers around the edges of the world, leading Winna to wonder out loud if the glasses are magic.  And then: they are.

“Looking back, Winna realized that this was when the adventure began…. Wondering out loud if magic had come at last into her life. That was when she was caught up in Speculation.”

Speculation by Nisi Shawl, p 10

This sets the story up to feel very much like a classic Edward Eager story – the bookish kid, the dull summer, the determination that there will be magic.  It took me a few chapters to realize that it’s also set in the 1960s.  This brings it closer in time to the settings of books like Half Magic, but more importantly, brings Winna closer in time to her ancestors who lived to see the end of their enslavement – her grandparents’ grandparents.  The magic spectacles allow her to befriend the ghost of a girl just a little older than she is, but as she can’t hear them, it’s her grandfather’s stories that help her understand what she’s trying to tell her.  The ghost Winna befriends is.  Eventually, Winna is able to figure out that her great-great (or so) grandmother Winona made a vow as she was escaping to the North. This has turned into a family curse, and Winna is sure that breaking this curse is the only thing that will save her mother.  

Winna’s journey to solve the curse in the pre-internet era requires not just careful figuring out what exactly the magic of the spectacles is, but also old-fashioned research and partnering with unexpected people like her annoying cousin and her white schoolteacher from Kalamazoo.   Like Ophie’s Ghosts, it brings out some serious themes along with the fun magical adventure, but its length, the balance of fun to danger, and the contrariness of the magic (and the relatives!) make this appropriate for younger kids as well.  Winna’s also been sheltered enough to be shocked by the injustice of racism when she experiences it – framing it as supremely unfair in a way that will resonate with just about any kid I’ve ever met.   

This book made me so very happy!  The characters, the classic tone, the sensitive dealings with important topics and of course the actual magic made this just the kind of book I want to pass out to lots and lots of kids.  Also, did you see that gorgeous cover?