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Summary
Summary
Twins Mae and Rossa's summer away from home becomes life altering when they discover a house full of witches, experience devastating first love, and face a dark power beyond any imagining.
Sarah Maria Griffin's haunting and literary sophomore novel explores the balance between love and fear, weakness and power, and the lengths one will go to claim one's freedom. For fans of Libba Bray's The Diviners and Maggie Stiefvater's All the Crooked Saints.
When the women from the house at the end of the lane went missing, none of the townspeople knew what happened. A tragedy, they called it. Only twins Mae and Rossa know the truth about that fateful summer.
Only they know about the owl in the wall, the uncanny cat, the insidious creatures that devour love and fear. Only they know the trials of loving someone who longs for power, for freedom, for magic. Only they know what brought everything tumbling down around them. And they'll never, ever breathe a word.
With an unusual structure spanning five summers, intriguing characters, and a dark mystery, this uncommon novel will appeal to readers of Rin Chupeco's The Bone Witch and Madeleine Roux's House of Furies.Reviews (3)
Horn Book Review
When fourteen-year-old Mae and her twin brother Rossa are sent to their great-aunt Ritas for the summer, they encounter a supernatural danger. Ritas teenage ward Bevan is in thrall to a mysterious owl-like creature known as Sweet James that lives in the wallpaper and demands pieces of the twins before it will let Bevan through into a tantalizing warren of hidden rooms. Mae falls hopelessly in love with the elegant, older (female) Bevan, not knowing the danger. Meanwhile, Ritas talking cat Bobby cozies up to Mae with an agenda of his own. In a story spanning two summers over three years (plus vignettes from the times between), told in alternating third- and second-person chapters, the narrative thread is diffuse at times, but the ongoing sense of menace never is. Bits of text that lookbut dont actlike footnotes offer snippets about the past mystery and current whereabouts of Ritas missing childhood friend Audrey, whose story holds the key to the origins of Bobby the cat and Sweet James. Making use of horror tropes such as insects; the occult; the gruesome evocation of teeth, hair, and blood; and shades of emotional abuse, Griffin combines the distasteful aspects and ordinary grubbiness of the human conditiondivorcing parents and awkward teenage sexual awakeningwith shadowy, unsettling hungers, mystical protective rituals, and unseen threats. anita l. burkam March/April 2019 p 82(c) Copyright 2019. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
A teacher could get an entire unit on grammar and sentence construction out of this horror novel.Some sections of the book are written in the second person ("Your scream is caught in your throat as you stare"), others have eccentric capitalization ("there are children in the house and i am hungry"), and many pages include footnotes that argue with the main text and deflate the characters' illusions about life. When a character is told, "You will forgive your parents," the footnote reads, "Almost." Arrested Development fans may be reminded of Ron Howard's dry, matter-of-fact narration. Some readers will find all the different speech patterns distracting, and the storyabout love and rivalry in a family of magiciansis puzzling enough as it is. In one chapter, a supernatural being tries to bring a young witch under his thrall by showing her all the wonders he can offer. He guides her into a secret chamber where she seesa room filled with moths. Many people will find entomology less than tempting. There are too many sorcerers' voices in the book, and the stakes of their battles are too abstract. (The characters are white but often queer.) Some passages are also overwritten. "Love is the realest thing" almost demands a comment from Ron Howard.Ardent grammar students may enjoy parsing the language. Other people may suspect the author is having more fun than they are. (Fiction. 14-19) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Griffin (Spare and Found Parts, 2016) spins a surreal and haunting tale in her account of twins Mae and Rossa Frost, who at the story's outset are found by the side of the road covered in ash and traumatized to silence. Told over a series of summers, the twins' story begins three years prior when, at the age of 14, they spend the summer with their Great Aunt Rita; her cat, Bobby; and her mesmerizing boarder, Bevan. Mae's first taste of the bizarre lurking in Rita's home occurs when Bobby speaks to her, a shock that leads Rita to reveal that she is, in fact, a witch and Bevan, her apprentice. Meanwhile, unsettling events manifest in Bevan's chapters, uniquely narrated in the second person. It is here that readers first encounter Sweet James, an owl-shaped being whom Bevan can summon and who feeds on people's pain. As Sweet James' power over Bevan grows, Bevan is nearly lost to his insatiable demands. Short chapters follow the events of this first summer, jumping in time to fill in Rita's backstory and return all the players to the house, three years older but not necessarily wiser. Family problems and adolescent trials tether the narrative to reality, while heightening the otherworldly threats surrounding its characters. Griffin's hallucinatory novel creeps under the skin, unnerving readers while urging them onward.--Julia Smith Copyright 2019 Booklist
