The Bootlace Magician

Cassie Beasley's The Bootlace Magician is a circus fantasy for 9 year olds about a boy who ties his memories into knots.

What happens

Micah Tuttle has lived at Circus Mirandus for three months. He has just turned eleven. His guardian is the Lightbender, an illusionist who has been practising for a very long time.

Everyone here can do something. Firesleight sends fire racing over the tent roofs at night. Porter opens doors to anywhere in the world. The manager keeps a tiger called Bibi who can vanish where she stands.

Micah can tie knots. Put your fingers on one and his memories come through the leather.

He wants badly to belong. That ache drives everything here.

One night he ties a knot full of his grandfather and drops it into the aquarium in the menagerie, hoping the big silver fish will finally be his friend. The fish eats it. Then it shoots out of the tank as if it has been fired from a cannon.

It turns out the fish is not a fish. It is an Idea, born too early at the bottom of the sea, still waiting for the one person who will understand it.

The prologue that tells you this is glorious. An Idea decides a fish is a wonderful thing to be, gives itself fins and a silver tail, and wriggles into a boy's boot to hitch a lift to shore.

It is warm and a bit sad at once. Micah keeps offering to help and there is always a magician who can do the job quicker and better. Anyone who has been the youngest person in a room full of experts will recognise that squirm.

There is plenty of silliness alongside it. His letters from home arrive by parrot, and the parrot uses his toothbrush on her toenails.

Some of it is heavy and worth saying plainly. Micah lost his grandfather before this book opens and still has nightmares about it. His grandmother, Victoria Starling, once drove her flock of magical birds mad so that they fought each other and fell out of the sky. He never met her and feels guilty about the birds anyway.

None of that is described in gory detail. A child who worries about animals will still notice it.

What to read next

This is the second book about the circus and it does not start you from scratch, so if it is all new, go to where Circus Mirandus began. A boy stuck with a starchy great-aunt finds out that his grandfather's stories about an invisible tiger and a man who bends light were all true.