‘The Mad Sisters of Esi' Review: On the Island of Dreams
The book crafts a dreamlike geography on top of our conventional universe: There is an ever-changing island that constantly reinvents its features (it might also be a planet), an archive of collective memory made from song and a vortex only children can enter and leave safely. Despite the hallucinatory pileup of magical creations, the story is grounded in the emotions surrounding a real relationship between two very different sisters.
While Laleh is content with her life inside the infinite whale, Myung wants to find out where they came from—and who this all-powerful Wisa is. Most of all, she longs to be among other people. She escapes the whale and becomes a sailor on the black sea, tracking down stories about Wisa until she finally arrives at an island of well-meaning ghosts and one woman, all of whom might be her relatives.
There she learns about the original sisters: Wisa, who made the whale, and Magali, who made the cosmic archive of memory. Yet the magic in the village where Wisa and Magali grew up was more gentle and subtle than elsewhere; with patience one could talk to birds and learn from the trees about the great alchemists, those who lived ages before and crafted many wonders unthinkable now. The alchemists were also the ones who may have broken time for the island, causing a week of madness the inhabitants must endure every century.
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