Who Holds the Key to Your Heart?

While it’s action-packed, The Alchemy of Stone is most prop­erly under­stood as a char­ac­ter study. Mourn­ful and roman­tic, Mat­tie is the mechan­i­cal, wind-up doll so many gothy teenage girls imag­ine them­selves to be. And her vul­ner­a­bil­ity haunts many adult women too: We may not have whale­bone corsets embed­ded in our skin, but we all strug­gle to be per­ceived as some­thing more than pretty lit­tle tools. It’s that strug­gle that makes Mat­tie such a vivid, mem­o­rable, and ulti­mately human character.