Heather O’Neill (Julie Artacho.)

Fourteen-year-old Sofia Bottom has found herself alone due to the war that has come to her homeland. Elysia, a small European country, was once a vibrant, sensual, otherworldly place – where the arts flourished and intellect was valued. Now everything Sofia knew is under threat, and her mother Clara, once “at the very centre of the art world,” sends her daughter away on a train to the countryside with a treasured manuscript hidden in the girl’s suitcase. The hope is that Sofia will keep both herself and the book safe from the invading enemy – her mother insists the fate of the country is on the young girl’s shoulders.

“You know how valuable this is,” her mother tells her. “It is my life. It is our lives.”

From this point, Heather O’Neill’s The Capital of Dreams unfolds like a fairy tale – magical and brutal, haunting and searing – that transports the reader to an extraordinary place that is also rooted in the very real consequences of conflict. “War doesn’t lie,” but instead puts humanity’s true nature on display, showcasing what people value and what they do not, and how willing they are to help and harm each other.

In the book’s early pages Sofia is convinced that her mother loves writing more than her, that “the Simone de Beauvoir of Elysia” wishes she had never become a mother at all. “Women never really actually liked being mothers,” Sofia believes. “They only liked the idea of motherhood beforehand.”

Despite this resentment, Sofia’s critique is also steeped in admiration, and when she loses her mother’s memoir in a moment of violent chaos, she is compelled to journey through the woods to the mythical Black Market in the hopes of retrieving it. A talking goose becomes her strange travelling companion, and the pair encounter a diverse cast of characters, never sure if they are meeting friend or foe. (“But it was always dangerous to be a girl, walking anywhere in the world.”)

Sofia’s dynamic with her mother – and the very idea of motherhood itself – is consistently interrogated, and the novel deftly skips back and forth through time to portray Clara’s character and story alongside Sofia’s current displacement. O’Neill’s grounded yet dreamy approach is a perfect fit for this kind of unspooling, revealing broader truths as an increasingly complex mother-daughter relationship is brought into sharp focus.

The Capital of Dreams is a deeply imaginative coming-of-age tale, one that sees Sofia – on the precipice of adulthood – enduring hard lessons in human cruelty, and seeing first-hand the limited options available to young women. (“Is that the only thing you can do as a girl? Offer up your body?”) Sofia’s mother, however flawed and derided, exists in direct rebellion to these witnessed limitations, and that recognition partially absolves Clara of the enduring sin of not embracing the role of mother.

Against the harsh backdrop of war, O’Neill elegantly tackles intimate, complex questions about maternal devotion, freedom, individuality, creativity, and sexuality. There is an assertion that Sofia is no longer a child when she finally emerges from the woods, and after witnessing varied models of womanhood, she must decide what kind of woman she will become.