The Electric Kingdom by David Arnold

Author:David Arnold [Arnold, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780593202227
Google: 3nYTEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Penguin Young Readers Group
Published: 2021-02-09T00:00:00+00:00

NICO

Ethologies

When Nico was old enough to read on her own, when she’d grown too gangly to climb into her father’s lap for a story, she took to sitting on the couch across the library, and even though they no longer read the same book at the same time, they read in the same room together, which was better than not.

“What?” she’d asked once, looking up from her book. She was halfway through her third reread of His Dark Materials, while her father was well into East of Eden.

“Hmm?” he said.

“You said . . . something about a wolf.”

“Oh. Sorry. Didn’t mean to say it out loud.”

“Are there wolves in that one?” she asked.

He closed the book, held the spot with his thumb, and she saw that spark that always came when he’d found just the right words to explain a big thought. “Daemons . . .” He pointed to the book in her hands. “Patronuses . . .” He pointed to the well-read collection of Harry Potter on the bookshelf. “It says a lot about a human character, which animal they get paired with. Take Voldemort, for example. The guy’s a snake.”

“Well, technically, one-eighth, if you—”

“I mean, he has the qualities of a snake. He sort of looks like one, talks like one, thinks like one. I find certain characters in other books have animal-like tendencies too. Maybe not explicit. But they’re there.”

Nico considered how many daemons and Patronuses in some way resembled their respective characters. And while she’d conducted a few real-world applications from the Harry Potter universe (her favorite being what she called “unforgivable cursing,” in which she created new curse words using Hogwarts terminology), she’d never thought to assign a Patronus or a daemon to characters from other books.

“Anyway.” Her father leaned back, reopened the book where his thumb had been. “One of the characters in this book is very much a wolf.”

“How can you tell?”

“You see it in the eyes, usually.”

“It’s a book, though.”

“What,” her dad said, smiling at the page. “You don’t see eyes in a book?”

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