One of the things I appreciate about Garth Nix’s writing of Lirael: he takes what in any other book, could easily become a “not-like-other-girls” type of cliche, tropey YA character and does it right. Lirael has nothing in common with the other Clayr girls her age, and because of this she is isolated and left out of their friendships. She grows up emotionally isolated, never has any friends of her own, but she never once sees the others as any kind of ~bitchy~ or superficial. She resents them somewhat, yes, but she never feels anger at them, there’s never anything in her POV like the ~omg the popular girls are sooo dumb~ that you get in a lot of other stories, to lesser or greater extents. She wishes with all her heart that she could be like them, because of her upbringing and the inadequacy it has made her feel. (And actually that really contributes to the tragedy of Lirael’s character, because she is so good at other stuff apart from having the Sight but she just doesn’t even have the concept that her talents are as valuable as theirs, or that she as a person is valuable. It hurts me, but I love the way she’s written. My poor child.)
But anyway, what I mean to say is that she is isolated not because the other girls are mean teen-movie-popular-cheerleader-clique types (because they’re very much not that - in fact all the Clayr we meet are portrayed as pretty much decent people individually, and it’s the society they live in and the expectations and traditions and values it holds as a structure in general that is what does Lirael harm, more than any individual, which I think is a very real and mature message) but at the same time, she drifts away from them, due simply to them not knowing how to relate to them, and Lirael not knowing how to relate back.
The sad thing is that no one person in the Clayr’s Glacier is really to blame for the isolation and sadness Lirael suffered as a child. She slipped through the cracks, essentially - the Clayr have a very rigid social structure and very fixed expectations, with very little leeway. The course of life of a Clayr involves getting the Sight, and everything in that society pretty much revolves around it. So when someone doesn’t, none of them really know what to do because it wasn’t really a thing that happened. So I think people - even well meaning people - would have drifted away from her, would have stopped including her (it says she was more included and actually had friends as a young child, but even then she was probably seen as different because she looked so un-Clayr-like, physically).
And the result of this is basically that Lirael is incredibly affection-starved, without even realising how affection-starved she is. When the other librarians give her a birthday present for example, she tears up and is unable to speak. Even despite people reaching out to her, she finds it hard to relate to them. And they don’t try that hard, and the same thing starts to happen, partly also because she’s never been shown enough affection to really know what to do with it. And there’s still the fact that they’re ~proper Clayr~ as she sees it, and she’s not. The sorts of harmful ideas she was brought up with, once internalised, don’t go away quickly, and Garth Nix never hesitates in showing that realistically.
And this happens in real life, sadly. All the time. People are often not bullied and beaten down (or, in Lirael’s case, driven very nearly to suicide) but the actions of one big bad mean person (well sometimes they are but) but more often by a long, endless string of microaggressions, of people giving them the silent treatment, of turning their backs, again not necessarily through malicious intent but rather because that person is different and they don’t know how to treat them. And the person its directed at can suffer just as much as if they had been bullied in the way that YA literature more often shows. And honestly I think that’s a realistic sort of everyday tragedy that’s so important to portray in a fantasy novel and not forget about, and I’m so glad Garth Nix handled Lirael’s unhappy childhood so well.
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