Where the Forest Meets the Stars

Elements of magic permeate reality throughout Where the Forest Meets the Stars in young Ursa’s worldview. After the “bad men” killed her mother, she needed to create a reality she could control and dealt with her difficult situation by running from the authorities to seek a new home. Upon meeting Jo in the woods, she says she’s an alien and slowly reveals an intricate backstory to support her claim. Jo knows the girl is making it up but also realizes she’s highly intelligent and her strange beliefs are grounded in science: She knows astronomy, reads Jo’s ornithology text, takes an interest in Jo’s fieldwork, and reads sophisticated works like War and Peace and Shakespeare’s plays.

This imposition of supernatural elements on reality is typical of magical realism, a popular genre in literature and other arts that has its roots in 1920s Germany, 1940s Central America, and 1950s Latin America. It’s often used allegorically, unearthing magic in the everyday and celebrating the potential for transcendence amid the ordinary. Magical realism integrates mystical or fantastical elements into a realistic setting or worldview to explore or critique societal, cultural, political, or other aspects of human life from a different perspective. In literature, elements of magical realism don’t significantly alter a story’s logic, but they do add another dimension that gently pushes the boundaries of the possible. A classic example of magical realism is Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.

The genre’s name has spurred controversy because although it’s an oxymoron (a term containing two traditionally opposing ideas), in practice, magical realism typically seeks to fuse magic and reality—or to portray a perspective in which magic informs reality. In Where the Forest Meets the Stars, this dynamic plays out through Ursa’s faith in her magical powers and their influence on reality. For example, she declares Jo and Gabe’s emerging love her fourth miracle and claims her powers made it happen. When Jo tells Ursa she wants to adopt her, Ursa says this is her fifth miracle but adds that if she returns to her home planet, Jo must not be sad. At the hospital, after Jo convinces Ursa to tell the social workers about her mother’s death, Ursa still insists she’s from another planet and that the woman the bad men killed was the mother of the human Ursa, whom the same men strangled—and whose body she (the alien Ursa) now inhabits. Ursa’s magical worldview helps her cope with aspects of her reality she finds troubling. Children who experience severe trauma often exhibit such behavior because society’s practical boundaries haven’t yet imposed limits on their imagination: Their creativity is unhindered, and they perceive reality as magical.

The forest setting of the novel further blurs the line between fantasy and reality. In Where the Forest Meets the Stars, the forest surrounding Jo’s cottage is a real, earthly setting, which contrasts with the supernatural, ethereal nature of the stars. However, in folklore and mythology, forests often function as liminal spaces outside human dominion—places of enchantment or supernatural forces, where the rules of reason no longer apply. When Ursa concocts a play based on the Shakespearean characters Juliet and Hamlet, she describes how they “meet in a magic forest before all the bad things happen, and that changes their fates. It’s a comedy, and everyone is happy at the end” (111). The forest therefore helps inspire Ursa to rewrite the tragic destinies of Juliet and Hamlet. In so doing, her character works in the same literary traditions as Shakespeare himself, who often used a forest setting in his comedies—for example, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and As You Like It—to help make the impossible possible.

Ursa refers to Summers Creek, where Jo does her fieldwork, as “like a magic forest” (124). The forest is a space that feels insulated from reality; its natural beauty enables Ursa to escape her past and the horrific loss of her family. Within its cover, without intrusive reminders of her traumatic experiences, Ursa is free to create a new, happier narrative with Jo and Gabe—a reality that magical powers define.