There is no doubt that you can clearly see 'the seeds of the writer she would become' (as how The New Yorker writer, Katy Waldman, put it in her review) with this story Sylvia Plath wrote in her early 20s.
*
Plath spares adjectives incessantly and elevates the power of her writing with dark metaphors spectacularly. Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom is a type of story that can be compared like a vivid nightmare creeping in, then leaving you with a glimmer of hope in the end. The hope in which we can take control of our lives instead of always going with the flow. Such an innocent and invaluable way of perceiving this world that Plath was tragically and gradually losing in her later years.
*
Admittedly, this is the first book of Sylvia Plath that I've had a chance to read. Besides Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath is another writer that I've been so haunted because of their personal life. It's something both melancholic and admiring about people who fight with mental illness and leave others amazed by their soul-stirring works.
*
"The passengers are so blasé, so apathetic that they don't even care about where they are going. They won't care until the time comes, in the ninth kingdom."
-
"The trip is long down the tunnel, and the climate changes gradually. The hurt is not intense when one is hardened to the cold."
-
"The frozen surface caught the light from the car and glittered as if full of cold silver needles."
-
"Outside the picture window the orange sun was sinking in the gray west."
-
"Mary felt herself sinking, drowned in shame. The shuttle of the train wheels struck doom into her brain. Guilt, the train wheels clucked like round black birds, and guilt, and guilt, and guilt.”