"The Girl With Glass Feet" by Ali Shaw

Love can be as fragile as a glass heart. Ali Shaw’s magical-realism infused novel, The Girl with Glass Feet: A Novel , is set on a strange archipelago, St. Hauda’s Land, and follows an unusual couple. 

Midas Crook is a distant man and photographer who sees the world through his camera; so much so that it’s like an appendage of his body.   He meets Ida Maclaird, a girl with a very strange ailment.  Ida’s feet have turned into glass, and she fears that the rest of her body will gradually be transformed.  She has returned to the islands to look for a man named Henry who may or may not have an answer to her problem.

Ida isn’t the only one becoming something else in the novel.  Midas also changes, but because of his love for the girl.  “He could barely believe he had lived so long without wanting to touch.  Photography had made him forget the necessity of this feeling.”

St. Hauda’s Land is often portrayed as a stark, color-deprived place.  Much of Shaw’s imagery describes the shadows and white dullness of things.  Ida’s “skin and blond hair were such pale shades they looked monochrome.”  Shaw is clearly interested in the use of landscape and the transforming power of light.  “But light was magic, making the dull earth vivid.”

There’s certainly magic to be found in the novel, but no real explanation for why or when it started.  Ida’s glass transformation is one that others on the island have experienced, but there’s no backstory for where the ailment came from. It could be, as one of the characters says, a product of the land itself.  “I think places take hold of us and we become mere parts of the landscape, taking on its quirks and follies.”

The land is a strange one, for sure.  There’s an animal that turns every creature white when they look into it’s eyes.  There are moth-winged bulls, tiny cattle the size of insects with wings on their backs.  But the strangest thing of all is the love that develops between socially awkward Midas and Ida, a woman who desperately wants his affection.  When it happens (and come on, is it really a spoiler that the two get together?) on this land of peculiar occurrences, their love is the most magical of all. 

“She had felt a collision with him and known that she had wanted this her whole life: to crash for just one moment into another person at such a velocity as to fuse with him.”

The Girl with Glass Feet: A Novel  is about overcoming one’s fears and childhood inhibitions.  It’s also a reminder of how strong love can be even at its most delicate moments.