Without help or medication, without any other humans, Vern gives birth to her two boys Howling and Feral, and the little family proceeds to somehow live in the forest, always in hiding, constantly vigilant. She’s also super pregnant and about to give birth to twins. She’s running from some unnamed fiend that we will learn about later. The book begins with Vern, a young girl (although it took me forever to figure out just how young), who is running through the forest.
But if I’ve come to learn something about Solomon as an author, it’s that they don’t shy away from difficult themes but rather face them head on, exploring them and turning them into fantastic stories. There is violence, body horror, religious fanaticism, and all sorts of other things that make me queasy. Out of the books I’ve read by them, this was by far the most uncomfortable. There’s something about Rivers Solomon’s writing that just grabs me. Finding the truth will mean uncovering the secrets of the compound she fled but also the violent history in America that produced it. To understand her metamorphosis and to protect her small family, Vern has to face the past, and more troublingly, the future – outside the woods. Forced to fight back against the community that refuses to let her go, she unleashes incredible brutality far beyond what a person should be capable of, her body wracked by inexplicable and uncanny changes. There, she gives birth to twins, and plans to raise them far from the influence of the outside world.īut even in the forest, Vern is a hunted woman.
Vern – seven months pregnant and desperate to escape the strict religious compound where she was raised – flees for the shelter of the woods. Opening line: The child gushed out from twixt Vern’s legs ragged and smelling of salt. Solomon is a brilliant voice in SFF and I can’t wait to see whatever they come up with next. I have come to absolutely love Rivers Solomon’s writing, whether it’s about a neuroatypical woman on a generation ship, mermaid-like creatures with the weight of history on their shoulders, or this creepy, haunting science fiction tale about a young mother searching for freedom.
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