How Does It Feel?

Callie’s fascination with mycology and luna moths serves as a motif throughout the novel. Obviously, the mushrooms and moths are natural links to the supernatural world: The mushrooms form a fairy ring that creates a portal between the realm of human and the realm of Fae; the moths are drawn to the mushrooms for sustenance. This sustenance is both literal, as the moths find food and drink in these areas, and supernatural: The eerie, endangered, nocturnal moths serve as representatives of the Unseelie Fae, according to Prince Mendax. They live (and hunt) in the darkness, as do the Unseelie Fae; their powers of attraction derive from both their beauty and their uncanniness. As such, they quite appropriately represent the Unseelie faction of fairies.

The mushrooms, too, are magical in their own way. Callie does not find it difficult to believe that “Crazy Earl” might know where to find a patch of toxic mushrooms, for example: “They were poisonous mushrooms that, if eaten in small enough quantities, might not kill you but made you act out of sorts […] like Crazy Earl” (5). The mushrooms link the natural world to the supernatural world, acting as mind-expanding agents of possibility, linking