Snapdragon: The Book I Made My Entire Personality For 2 Years Straight

 Snapdragon by Kat Leyh was one of the many books I was gifted by my elementary school in fourth grade following quarantine, and functioned as their desperate attempt to get their students to read literally anything. I actually didn’t get around to reading it until that summer, as most of the books in the pile I was given looked extremely boring (at the time I was a “I wanna move to Japan!” child and refused to read anything that wasn’t manga) thus I never really went through it. However, while I was cleaning my room that day and finally looked at the book, I remember thinking that the cover was pretty enough for the book to maybe be interesting. Out of boredom, I opened up the graphic novel, and it only took a dozen pages or so for me to be fully absorbed into the story.

    Snapdragon, as the name suggests, follows a middle school girl named Snapdragon– labeled as the “weird” kid by all of her classmates except her best friend. She is often teased for not being girly enough, and due to a mixture of her unhealthy home life and the resulting anger issues she garnered from being around such, often gets in trouble at school to the point of despising even going. However, her life takes a turn when she finds an old, abandoned cabin while trekking through the woods, rumored to be the home of a disgusting witch. She ignores the cabin for many days, not enjoying the idea of entertaining her weird girl reputation any further than she has already, but curiosity eventually gets the best of her and she tries to open the door of the old cabin.

To her surprise, the “abandoned” cabin was actually in excellent condition, and the evil witch that lived inside of it was actually a very kind woman that loved nature and taxidermy. Despite being spooked at first, she invites Snapdragon into her home, where they discuss both of their reputations of being oddities and they make a connection through being able to relate to each other. The woman eventually begins to teach Snapdragon about taxidermy, and although it was ordinary at first– as ordinary as either of the two could get– the more Snapdragon learned about the woman, the closer she came to realizing that the strange accusations against the woman were not just accusations: she was, in fact, a real witch.

I think a lot of my enjoyment of this book at the time came from the fact that I saw myself in Snapdragon a lot; I was a weird, tomboy kid who would scare random people on the playground with plastic lizards. It was uncommon at my school until new directors took over that year for there to be very many mentions of nonconformity in any sense of the word, especially in the library’s books, so I was never really able to gain a connection to any of the characters until that point. The book also doesn’t shy away from the fact that many of its themes are allegories to gender identity– having multiple characters clearly written to be genderqueer– which was also something that I was struggling with around that time. The book was not only my first exposure to the concept of being transgender, but it was my first exposure to queer women as well (shoutout to Drama by Raina Telgemeier) and made me feel a little less alone in the previously very conservative environment. 

It was safe to say that after being impacted by the book so heavily, I didn’t shut up about it for a very long time. Like many of the books I have written blogs about so far, it was one of the foundation points for my love of writing and inspired a lot of stories that I wrote in the following years. Although it may have been a little cheesy rereading it now, it's a very heartfelt book with a lot of love poured into it by the author, and I think if I hadn’t read the book when I did, I would be a very different person today. All in all, Snapdragon is a wonderful book that every weirdo ten-year-old should read at some point.

–Livy