THE WINTER FOLK, a new way to magic up Appalachia

THE WINTER FOLK
JEN JULIAN
Run For It (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A woman returns to the mysterious lodge in the woods where she once worked, and to the inscrutable creature that bound her there, in this haunting Appalachian gothic horror from singular voice Jen Julian. Perfect for fans of Alix E. Harrow and T. Kingfisher.

This is the story of Moth, who earned her name working for the Winter Folk.

Every year, the Winter Folk gather at a secret lodge in the Appalachians, a place known as Deerhaven, refuge for the time-worn and weary. As a child, Moth heard warnings from her mother: They are heartless, wild creatures—and they got no concern of us. At twenty-one, Moth is a college dropout, indebted, impoverished, and desperate for better things. She falls instantly for Deerhaven’s beautiful antlered host, the mild-mannered Mr. Oslin. When he offers her a housekeeper’s contract—one wish granted for a winter of service—she signs without question.

But Deerhaven is a dangerous place. Staff must follow strict rules or else face dire consequences, and the guests can be unpredictable and savage. And yet, Moth endures, enticed by a rumor that Mr. Oslin is looking for a protégé. A singular worker who would stay with him forever and be transformed.

Decades later, Moth returns to Appalachia with her husband and teenage daughter. She can't shake the feeling that she needs to return to Deerhaven, which banished her twenty years ago. As she hunts for a way in, her haunting memories and harrowing experiences come roaring back—her friends and rivals, her growing obsession with Mr. Oslin, and her mysterious exile.

A door exists in the dark of the woods. After so long away, what has Deerhaven become?

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: In fiction, one must always have a fine balace between questions answered, questions unanswered, and unanswerable problems. Without something in the story that feels...unfinished, there's no place for the reader to put their own experiences onto the read. If there are unanswered questions, things the author sets up as needing reolution that aren't resolved, they'd best be finely calculated to invite a sequel. My ur-text for doing this balancing act well is Lord of the Rings. Yes, *I* said something noce about a story I really disliked reading. It left the Problem of Evil unresolved, as indeed is reality's unresolved Big Question; but the plot-driving questions? All resolved to varying degrees of finality. It is genius storytelling. (I still hate it, but credit where it's due.)

On the other end is A Song of Ice and Fire. I don't feel the need to elaborate. Trillions of pixels arranged in uncountable patterns are out there reflecting fans' emotional responses to an incomplete story. Fans are still spouting off about the various issues, the creator is not doing much to calm them down, so on the noise goes.

Here's a story, with a fundamentally unresolvable conflict underpinning it, resolvable conflicts skinned over it, and some left-unfinished business that invites a sequel or two, that doesn't quite scale heights of genius but does plant the author's story-flag atop a hill.

The setting is Appalachia, which is US-cultural shorthand for "the Shire," that pre- or de-industrial landscape of natural beauty, peopled by rustics, rife with quaint folk who *indulgent smile* accept magic is real. I find that more than mildly insulting acceped as a storytelling given, but it's there, it works, and it's not factually incorrect just because it's insulting. It is not used condescendingly in Author Jen Julian's hands, so I'm not bristling at her, but at the stereotyping that allows this perception to go unchallenged.

Author Julian's story of Moth's life lived in two mutually exclusive worlds, magical and mundane, is one she could not have told as well absent this stereotype. Moth will always be Moth despite being born Vera. Think a moment about the root of the name "Vera," and her destiny is unlocked. (Go read, I'm going to assume you got the point and move on.) Moth is, and isn't, Vera. Like all those who are transformed by contact with magic, the life Moth leads after her time in Deerhaven is much like the lives lead by post-Garden Adam and Eve. She knows now what it costs to See Beyond (caps very intentional for context) when Vision is...removed, denied, forbidden...after being granted. How she will always, always have Heimweh for a state of being that can only exist in a place that is inaccessible now you've left it.

Don't put too much weight on Vera's last name being "Stoker." It can best be seen as a marker of her otherness and not as an invitation to horror and bloody violence. Moth, being returned to "Vera" and mundanity, can't stop being aware of her lack, loss, denied state. It's achieved by very unshowy means, in word choices for Moth and later for Vera that convey different emotional registers. It's not something that will hit you in the face but a dawning awareness, a thing that stays just outside your field of vision until you see it then you don't unsee it as it organizes the read anew.

Vera and Moth belong to different worlds. They have some memories in common; they know a few of the same people and carry some of the same baggage from bruising, painful shifts in their life; but in the end Vera can only be Vera or Moth in those lives, in those mutually exclusive worlds.

Do you need a better explanation for the experience of growth as a person?

It's a read I can see taking on a life bigger than its basis if and when the zeitgeist aligns with it. I hope for Author Julian's sake that happens now, propelling her into prominence she has the talent to support. I seriously hope she has or acquires the skills to survive it.

POOR DEER, second novel by Claire Oshetsky of CHOUETTE fame

POOR DEER
CLAIRE OSHETSKY
Ecco(Bookshop.org link)
$16.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: A wondrous, tender novel about a young girl grappling with her role in a tragic loss—and attempting to reshape the narrative of her life—from PEN/Faulkner Award nominee Claire Oshetsky

Margaret Murphy is a weaver of fantastic tales, growing up in a world where the truth is too much for one little girl to endure. Her first memory is of the day her friend Agnes died.

No one blames Margaret. Not in so many words. Her mother insists to everyone who will listen that her daughter never even left the house that day. Left alone to make sense of tragedy, Margaret wills herself to forget these unbearable memories, replacing them with imagined stories full of faith and magic—that always end happily.

Enter Poor Deer: a strange and formidable creature who winds her way uninvited into Margaret’s made-up tales. Poor Deer will not rest until Margaret faces the truth about her past and atones for her role in Agnes’s death.

Heartrending, hopeful, and boldly imagined, Poor Deer explores the journey toward understanding the children we once were and the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of life’s most difficult moments.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: What dies when a child dies? A parent dies thousands of deaths while their child is alive: fear, worry, the desperate pride in the pain that they suffer because of the child’s process of individuation from the Terrible Twos to *shudder* adolescence, or the death of a thousand cuts as I describe it; the death of the child is, however, the absence of these once-suffered pains, now become the hideous trackless void of grief. Many, maybe most, suffering parents turn to some sort of formal ritualized observance. The difference is of kind, not sort. Whether they choose religious, or secular, fellowship they seek comfort based in groups that cater for the vast needs of those grieving. But the dead child’s peers, lacking the perspective of adults, do not have the same outlets for their intense and passionate feelings.

Margaret, after the death of her best friend and neighbor Ruby, has developed versions of many of these coping behaviors: chanting, counting, seeking and seeing omens. Her mother makes the error common to many parents of her station and low educational attainment, using threats and bullying to keep Margaret in line. The result is predictable to the reader.

Margaret uses fantasy to put her feelings into tolerable emotional perspective. Her world is made up of adults who strive...I’d say "struggle" but they would never agree to such a freighted negative term...just to make some semblance of a life. Thus they, and Margaret, are always under tremendous stresses from many angles. The usual suspect for their adult coping mechanism in this kind of toxic soup is some religious and/or spiritual system, either mainstream or off the beaten path. Margaret’s mother and aunt, with whom she lives in their childhood home, are of the very old-fashioned Old Testament christian believers ilk. Her own coping mechanism is, as expected, in alignment with that kind of belief system, though its substance is not christian looking.

Given all the above, it makes sense that Margaret makes her grief, guilt...what religious system works without guilt?...and shame into an entity that judges and abuses her. That it was Poor Deer, an animal spirit named with the often overheard characterization of Margaret that she reimagines, was inspired. Different in affect, the same in effect. All of it was hard for my similarly afflicted self to read. Did Margaret cause her best friend Ruby’s death? contribute to it? or is Margaret simply a child whose always turbulent emotional world has been completely upended by a tragedy she has no framework to process, to get any kind of handle on? Since we meet Margaret and Poor Deer, that animal spirit aforementioned, as the latter has finally bullied the former into writing a confession of her guilt...for what? I wondered what can a child really be held resonsible for?...we are never on solid narrative ground.

I contend we never get there. This is, for me as a reader, a feature not a bug.

Margaret is an unusually bright person. Her coping mechanisms all fill the places that more intelligent, more emotionally adept parent figures...no father anywhere to be seen...would have resulted in her finding a direction forward into her life, instead of circling endlessly the disfiguring self-doubt and suspicion she swims through daily. Margaret creates, or finds, or discovers Poor Deer to fulfil the role of cicerone, mentor, and conscience.

Poor Deer is a story. All of us live out stories. Margaret has built her own world of stories because she can control them, can make sense of them, can mold them into the kind of purposeful, positive paths that she has so sorely lacked. So is this a story about how awful a childhood this one girl has led? Are we expected to follow this path from tragedy to mental illness then just...go on about our day?

If you haven’t read Chouette, you might wonder. Author Claire does not Do pointless suffering. Suffering you will do. There is, in fact, a Point. That we come to the end of the story in a manner not wholly predictable is just the expected way Author Claire works. That we come to the end of Margaret’s childhood without the sense of being smothered in a bow tied around our readerly eyes as we face the firing squad of Predictability’s story soldiers is vintage Author Claire.

Does childhood end? Do we wake up one fine day all adulty and fully prepared for life? Are you kidding? Margaret doesn’t do that either, she slugs it out with demons internal and external, and Margaret...becomes Margaret. You are investing in the journey into selfhood of a person who survives her life and becomes herself. It is a journey that never, ever grows less important or less lonely. Going with Margaret, whose beginnings reminded me a great deal of my own, on her trip through the story she and Poor Deer massage into ever evolving shapes and sizes as needed, left me very rough at the end of the book.

The spots I have polished into a high gloss by reinventing the stories I needed to survive got sanded down to the original story. Like Margaret, I didn’t grow up, I grew larger by reinvention. That process, once begun in survival mode, does not...can not...end.

All five stars.

I didn't review a book today. I reviewed my Regrets.

Thank you, Valerie, for alerting me to this! Yes, I use GIFs, so sue me kiddies.

Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.

Arthur Miller (born on this date in 1915), playwright of The Crucible and ex-husband of Marilyn Monroe

That's my experience of getting old in a nutshell. I have very few Regrets. I really am sad and/or sorry about the many times I've failed to be as good a person as I can be, but Regrets are sleep-robbers...there are very few in my life. And, I realized while having a delightful and rejuvenating family visit this past weekend, I only Regret the no-right-answer, no-win things where I had to make a choice. Without a good one, there's only the one that leaves "the right regrets."

If anyone on Earth knew what that meant, it was Arthur Miller. The Crucible's entire existence is about regret...in the moment decisions are made, regrets are born. When the stakes are as high as a human life, the regrets are so much more...pervasive, comprehensive, consequential. The Crucible's fury and rage, its powerfully presented condemnation of Puritanism and mob psychology going unchecked by leadership from a moral stance, express regret with a purity seldom achievable unless the author is consumed by regret.

Miller's play was written and performed after Miller had an affair with Marilyn Monroe in 1951. It was one that didn't end, exactly, and led him to divorce his decade-plus marital partner, and the mother of his children. Not unusual stuff. Monroe was pretty and talented and exciting, his children's mother was familiar and quotidian and doubtless, by then, slightly boring to him. Happens every day in every configuration of relationship.

It's undoubted that The Crucible was created in response to Miller's rage and righteous anger at Elia Kazan's HUAC testimony. His regrets about that broken comradeship, about the awful carnage it wrought on friends of his through the dragging of bait to their doors in order to distract the packs of ravening Puritan dogs (I apologize to Canis domesticus for impugning their species-level honor with my use of this established metaphor) from Kazan's own, were undoubtedly so intense that Reverend (!) Parris and Tituba's little pas-de-deux re: whipping fairly streamed molten from his fingers. Nowhere was there a choice, a turning point, where any of them could've made the situation a win-win. There were, from the first lies and the first betrayals, no clean paths to resolution.

What I needed, as a reader and a person, was to find in Arthur Miller's indictment of moral certainty in The Crucible a preordained path to Regretland. What I needed was to be told, in the end, there's no life lived without regrets. They're central to one's identity. Caustic regrets, the softer, sneakier ones that hide in the "good" things of life—until their bitter acidic waft alerts one to the hole burned into one's soul—are, in the end, the same results via different tracks.

I can't decide if I think Miller thought he had, or had not, had the "right regrets." I can't decide that for myself! But I know this: When I take my few real, nasty, keep-me-awake Regrets out and smack 'em around, I feel...edified. Even the way I phrase my regrets tells me something important about which parts are poking me in the softnesses. (I don't think most adults have simple regrets, but I could be projecting...most of mine are as many-layered as a ten-inch hailstone.) I can and regularly do learn about myself, my failings and failures, from my Regrets. I make plans to avert, avoid, or accept as inevitable the situations that have bred the Regrets.

Growing up never ends, I guess. Long may it be so.