Borderline (The Arcadia Project) Hardcover – March 1, 2016
by Mishell
Baker (Author)Borderline’s main
character Millicent Roper is bisexual, in her mid-20s, living with BPD, has
prosthetic legs after a failed suicide attempt, and is a filmmaker.Millie has been in a psychiatric
center outside Los Angeles for six months, ever since she leapt off her
prestigious film school’s roof and ended a promising career. While there she’s
approached by an organization called The Arcadia Project, which is supposedly
in the business of enabling creative people living with mental illness to find
employment in film and television.It seems too good to be true — and
is, as in truth The Arcadia Project manages the presence of fairies in our
world, facilitating their relationships with humans and policing their comings
and goings according to complicated protocols. When a highly regarded fairy
nobleman goes missing, Millie quickly gets in over her head, trying to manage
her physical and mental conditions while serving as an amateur detective and
not blowing her shot at working in Hollywood.I adored Millie. Brash, angry, incisively
self-aware, she’s the kind of furiously intelligent protagonist I love to read.
Her first-person narration walks an amazing line between conveying her
personality and explaining the way BPD interacts with it, while never actually
making it or her disability the focus of the plot or giving the book an
After-School Special feel. In fact, in stark contrast to the troubling tendency
in fantasy to represent mental illness as magical, Millie is anathema to
fairies: As a consequence of her suicide attempt, her body is full of steel,
such that she can disrupt most magic with a touch. – Amal El-Mohtar
Mooncustafer 