Not my usual cup of tea, but this Young Adult bildungsroman/fantasy/horror did keep me on the edge of my reading chair! Beyond the Trees is novel about a pair of brothers, the younger is our protagonist and narrator, around whom the novel revolves.
The novel opens with Caden and Ansel Murphy, young men surviving high school and all the angst that time and space engenders. Caden struggles to belong; Ansel does not. Living in a small town rife with prejudices of all kinds, but especially against queerness, the younger brother wrestles with identity as a gay man. Renna successfully weaves in social commentary and lessons about inclusion into the story; what is means to be a man, what manhood looks like, “should” or “could” look like, expectations and realities. Ansel embodies the idealized version of manhood, finding it easier to settle into this cultural environment. But the events of the novel reverse the brothers’ roles, and in doing so, challenge the norms of manhood.
One night, Ansel goes missing. The cause is unclear. There are rumors of paranormal phenomena. In the course of recovering Ansel, Caden finds himself in a strange place, one that seems like it could not exist, a fantasy land. As grounded in reality as the novel is, much of it takes place in this fantasy location, the narrative arc of this part of the story mimicking the classic Hero’s Journey. This is the land beyond the trees.
The story is simple, but the undercurrent of social and cultural commentary complicates it in a very appealing way. Additionally, Renna’s smooth prose, swift propulsion of the story, and fleshed-out characters renders a well-crafted novel.
This Tartan Horror/Mystery had me creeped out in the middle of the night! And yet, I couldn’t put it down, spine shivers be damned!
The novel revolves around a murder of a young girl and the mystery of her gruesome death, as seen through the eyes of the local constable who is investigating it, Angus. But this policeman is extraordinarily gifted with paranormal (in)sight, a legacy of his own haunted past. What results is a deeply engrossing whodunit woven through with Gaelic history and culture. For readers who enjoy hints of the demonic, pagan, and ancient evils, The Unforgiven Dead will have you prancing a ritual dance. For readers who love a twisted murder mystery, one in which the murderer is hidden in plain sight alá Agatha Christie, The Unforgiven Dead will absolutely make you squeal once the culprit is exposed.
But the story alone is not the novel’s only draw. The characters of this novel are deftly crafted, their dialogue mimics life, their motivations are raw and human and utterly flawed. For readers of literary fiction, the trials of Angus, Nadia, Gills, and Ashleigh will rent your heart. Their lives mimic reality and their hurts are ones we are likely to relate to, if we don’t know them well already.
The Unforgiven Dead leaves me pining for a moody, grey Scotland more than I could have imagined.
The Last Heir to Blackwood Library: A Novel by Hester Fox
If you enjoy books about books, especially of the quasi-historical/paranormal/mystery/romance variety, then The Last Heir to Blackwood Library will check all your boxes. The story revolves around Ivy Radcliffe, a young woman left devastated and alone by WWI in England. She finds herself leaving the loneliness of London for Blackwood Abbey in Yorkshire — and a seat among the gentry as Lady Hayworth.
Not only must she learn to navigate her inheritance, which includes the abbey and the eponymous library, but also her new servants, the village, neighbors, and…. herself. Ivy undergoes strange changes to herself that she cannot account for, though she is amply aware of them. The oddness and feeling of foreboding is amplified by the history of the abbey and the library.
The library becomes the focal point of all the madness and Ivy realizes she must make hard choices about what she wants from her new life and what part of herself she is willing to lose to obtain that.
The appeal of this novel is not only in the mystery of Ivy’s inheritance, built into the story arc, but Fox’s ability to inject a modern feminism into Ivy’s motivations and the old-fashioned world of the English gentry in the late Edwardian/Interwar period of the mid 1920s. The result, though somewhat anachronistic, is a very contemporary and appealing leading character and an inter-generational, inter-cultural kind of tension, the kind that pits traditionalism against modern sensibilities.
Valley of Shadows was WOW, a great slow burn paranormal mystery. The ghostly element really kept me on my toes, you never could tell which way something was going to go. I was hooked from the first page!
There are so many reasons I love this novel. First, the historical landscape had nuance and depth; the perspective decolonized the past, highlighted the transnational experience of the American-Mexican borderlands through the eyes of the Mexicans and the indigenous peoples who lived there. Ruiz did not shy away from the racial tensions, the ethnic conflicts, and the histories of colonization that were part of the fabric of life on the borderlands in the 19th century — and I deeply appreciated that. Indeed, much of the plot revolves around those very transcultural tensions. This grounded this paranormal western/mystery/horror in a historical reality that made the events all the more horrific; they were real. The violence of this time was real, not a fiction of Ruiz’s imagination.
Second, Ruiz’s use of linguistic and ethnic markers is significant. Yes, this is a novel, but it is also a work of decolonization. Ruiz disrupts the whiteness of the Western genre with Valley of Shadows. The primary protagonist is Solitario Cisneros, a Mexican man who used to be sheriff — and could still be. Onawa is a young half Mexican, half Apache woman who assists Solitario in his investigation of a series of murders. The living and the dead show up in various parts of the story, some from Solitario’s past which is never far behind him. History in this novel is very much a dynamic, fluid factor in this novel; it is almost as alive as the characters.
There is a mix of white, Mexican, mixed-race, and indigenous characters in this novel, mimicking the historical and contemporary reality of North American borderland communities; nothing is ever cut-and-dry, black or white in such places, then or now. This diversity of identities makes the characters more recognizable; their ethnic and historical diversity mimics our own multiple identities and ways of being. Race, ethnicity, class, and history shaped these characters, making them palpable, their decisions and actions authentic and borne out of subjective needs and ambitions as much as they were shaped by social and historical factors.
Third, Ruiz unfolded the story with skill. Tension and mystery were embedded in the plot, compelling me to read on, but it was the way in which Ruiz slowly unravelled the plot. At the end the reader will see that all the threads of the mystery were there, almost from the very start, waiting for us to weave them into fabric. The story revolves around a series of gruesome, brutal murders. There is very real, physical horror here; the idea that these could be done by a human being on another is scary enough — but there’s the possibility this could be something more supernatural. Which is more sinister?
Valley of Shadows is Solitario and Onawa’s adventures in this realm and the next as they speed against time to save the other potential victims, apprehend the murderer(s), and deliver justice to the victims and their surviving families.
Dr JoAnn LoSavio 