For me, Piranesi captures the shut-down nature of living with illness very well, and creates a hopefulness by giving Piranesi's prison a sense of life and beauty. That's part of how the magic interconnects with place: that the house is both a place of magic and expansiveness and a sort of prison. Clark never explains how the house functions or what it is, and yet she makes it completely believable and habitable: its physical presence is so strong that you feel you could go there. That's something I find in JSMN too: the realism of magic, and how place and physicality gives us a window into magic as well as creating that realism.