Tahereh Mafi mostly writes fantasy for young adults, although I adore her middle grade books Furthermore and Whichwood, and her realistic fiction novel An Emotion of Great Delight. She’s written the Shatter Me and the This Woven Kingdom series, her writing is saturated with emotion, due in part to her wielding of pacing.
When you read a book with predictable writing, your brain doesn’t have to do nearly as much work to understand what’s going on. You read with less active scrutiny, allowing your memory to fill in the structure of scenes that you’ve read, if not in that very book, in books like it. Authors read each other’s work and imitate it to define their genres and build their stories off a point of familiarity. If you write, you probably notice yourself imitating your favorite authors all the time. It would be impossible to write without accidentally imitating, because all writing is communication and all communication is two-way; everything you say comes from a place of everything anyone has ever said to you. But straying from the most common conventions can make a book more interesting. When sentences are unusual, but not convoluted, you have to pay attention. When the author does something as simple as using an uncommon word for a common one, the reader feels the impact of the word. One thing Mafi does is to use more formal words for casual ones--wishes instead of wants, sought instead of tried. She also breaks ideas into more words, using “all the things” for “everything” or expanding contractions. As well as creating engagement, these words also flush out her sentences and create a more measured rhythm.
But even in her faster-paced books, with more conventional phrasing, Mafi maintains a certain vividness to her characters. Many authors contrast sentences of various lengths to emphasize one point or another, to draw the reader in here and let them zone out there, to punctuate or to skim. What Mafi does is break away from her full, flushed-out sentences to a single line all in its own paragraph to make full use of sentence length in “dramatic paragraph breaks.” It is oodles of fun.
Because the new paragraph is so short, and bracketed by a, in comparison, dense wall of text, the line stands out all the more. In Mafi’s writing, the line is often a simple revelation or description of characters, so these breaks suffuse her writing with a hundred little character-pictures; a full beat of happiness, sadness, wonder, contradiction, peculiarity. Her books are character-focused, speaking themes of loneliness and the hope found in companionship, so the vivid thoughts and images provided by the dramatic paragraph breaks bring out the emotion inherent to her stories.
Tahereh Mafi’s books are thoughtful and heartfelt, and I heartily recommend Furthermore in particular to any lovers of fantasy. It is rich in color and magic, a cheerful peculiarity, and friendship.