TL;W[on’t]R[ead the review]: It’s got river monsters, it’s got a backwoods teen witch, it’s got incandescently empowered female rage, and it’s got a sapphic love story. Yes, it’s dark and intense, but if that’s your jam, don’t hesitate to check this out.
Content warnings: murder, gaslighting, violence, kidnapping
Summary [courtesy of Goodreads]: Natasha’s sister is missing. Her car was found abandoned on the edge of a local nature preserve known as the Bend, but as the case goes cold, Natasha’s loss turns to burning anger. She’ll do anything to find answers. Della’s family has channeled magic from the Bend for generations, providing spells for the desperate. But when Natasha appears on her doorstep, Della knows it will take more than simple potions to help her. But Della has her own secrets to hide. Because Della thinks she knows the beast who’s responsible for the disappearance — her own mother, who was turned into a terrible monster by magic gone wrong. Natasha is angry. Della has little to lose. They are each other’s only hope.
[Note: This review is based on an eARC from NetGalley and HarperTeen.]
I adored Erica Waters’ first book, Ghost Wood Song, except for its ending, so I had pretty high expectations going into her follow-up. The exquisite cover didn’t do much to diminish that anticipation, and I will say that this book really did deliver. The burgeoning relationship between co-protagonists Natasha and Della, two traumatized and prickly teens, was by turns joyous and heartbreaking. And as usual, Waters’ paints an utterly lush, sweaty, Southern Gothic setting, this time in the backwoods of Tennessee. (“The forest is like a wet, green mouth, oppressively hot by ten in the morning.”)
Except, as in Ghost Wood Song, nature is alive–red in tooth and claw and bewitched by the dying power of Della’s many-times-great-grandmother. (As the tale goes, “she was drowned as a witch by a rival moonshine gang…she sang every drop of her magic into the land for her descendants before she died…[and] the Bend took her small offering and let it grow wild.”) Waters’ ability to blend the supernatural with the terrifying power of the natural is unrivaled, and getting to watch Della use her own strain of magic to grow things was a special joy.
Fascinatingly, like so many books I’ve read this past year, the true natural AND supernatural MVP of the book, the root and explanation of the magical forest and its interconnectivity, is fungal mycelium. (See Rivers Solomon’s Sorrowland, Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic, and Darcie Little Badger’s Elatsoe. In terms of a more botanical interconnectivity, you might also check out Zoraida Cordova’s The Inheritance of Orquidea Divina and Kayla Baron’s This Poison Heart.) I am very deeply digging this trend, and everyone’s doing such fascinating and diverse stuff with it, but Waters uses it here in a particularly positive and expansive way.
(Della explains to the reader, “I close my eyes and focus on the tiny threads of the fungal network that runs underground, connecting the trees and plants and everything that grows here…In the Bend, the fungal network doesn’t only convey messages and nourishment between the trees. It also carries my great-grandmother’s magic…I easily find the fine white filaments of the turkey tail’s underground mycelium and direct nourishment into them. Soon, a cold dampness spreads around my hand, and I feel the soft, familiar nudge of mushrooms.”)
But while the book does focus on the empowering terrors of the supernatural, it’s also very much a contemporary look at injustice and the different ways people (particularly women) are disempowered by social structures. This is a book, like Ghost Wood Song, centered predominantly on white, cis girls, but it’s very aware of that focus. Unlike almost all books, YA or otherwise, that center and/or are written by white people, this book makes a point to overtly identify ALL of its characters’ races as part of their introductions, even when they’re white. And–proving that it certainly can be done–the novel manages to do this effortlessly. So, white isn’t the default, although it remains the majority. That’s where co-protagonist Natasha’s best friends come into the picture. Georgia is Black, and Natasha’s sister’s bff Margo is Korean American, though I would argue that the novel takes pains to never relegate these girls to token status NOR to reduce them to their racial identities. Those are casually mentioned in the same way each girl’s sexuality is mentioned (Natasha is bi, Margo and Georgia are pan, and Della is presumably lesbian–this isn’t quite a queer-normative world, but in our main characters’ lives, it almost is). BUT race isn’t ignored or treated like a mere difference of skin tone: Georgia connects with Natasha more deeply over the central disappearance of Natasha’s sister because Georgia’s cousin herself went missing a few years prior. Except, as Georgia points out, Natasha’s pretty, white, now rich sister is much more likely to be found. (“If the police try hard for anyone, it’s girls like that.”) Georgia’s cousin never even merited an official search, and Georgia is slowly becoming galvanized in the background of this novel to take action against the scourge of violence against so many missing WOC and femmes, from MMIWG2S to Black trans women to sex trafficking victims. (“We don’t have to take this shit lying down anymore. Other people are already fighting. We can fight too. For all the girls who are missing. For Black trans women. For native and Indigenous women.”)
(As an aside, I appreciated that while Natasha struggles with class issues and familial trauma, having been raised in extreme poverty and violence, she’s reminded that her current position of privilege as an adoptee into a very wealthy family supersedes that struggle, particularly in the media’s eye.)
Georgia also has to repeatedly remind Natasha that cops aren’t necessarily trustworthy and are a particular threat if you aren’t white, rich, and pretty. (At one point, they contemplate hitching a ride from a park ranger, whom Natasha describes as “like a nature cop.” She continues, “Georgia looks even less convinced, and I realize my mistake. Cops don’t feel safe to her.”) Does this make Natasha seem like a jackass (particularly when she gets Georgia involved in a potentially dangerous and criminal proceeding at a local bar)? You bet. Could the book have done more to make Natasha fully understand the DANGER she’s putting her friend (and, hell, herself) in early on by trusting cops? Definitely. But the fact that this is in here at all, and in here repeatedly in a book centering white girls by a white author, is a strong step in the right direction (though as a white reviewer, I’m not exactly qualified to speak on whether this representation is sufficient, so take this with a grain of salt.)
Truly, the core of this book is about cis girls’ and womens’ anger, anger at a world that takes and takes and only gives back when it’s forced to, anger at patriarchal systems that haven’t changed all that much since Della’s great-great grandmother was murdered. There’s Georgia’s background anger, Della’s quieter anger, Della’s mother’s monstrous, feral rage, and then there’s the center of this angry core: Natasha’s all-consuming anger that gets developed in painstaking detail over the course of the novel and then transformed into something even stronger, venturing firmly into
SPOILER TERRITORY
So, the premise and plot synopsis of this novel suggests that Della’s mother, Ruby, who’s turned into a feral, screeching river monster and physically transforms every night, is the actual murderer of Natasha’s missing sister and a host of other girls who’ve gone missing in the woods. It certainly seems that way once her sister’s corpse is discovered, sliced up, in a place Ruby tends to visit when she escapes from the derelict building Della has attempted to imprison her in. Della ties herself in knots about the fact that she’s aiding and abetting a murderer, and the reader dreads the coming confrontation between Della and Natasha if and when the truth comes out.
BUT, of course there’s a twist (because otherwise the plot synopsis would spoil the book, which fortunately hasn’t become a full-blown trend yet like it has with movie trailers). Turns out, Ruby has been trying to SAVE these girls from an evil man (of course) who came to The Bend to prey on its magic and continue his transformation into a horrific, rotting monster. She herself transformed into this river monster when she summoned the magic of the river (and all of The Bend) to protect herself and HER sister from this interloper. But his intrusion into the land twisted its magic, so the summoning warped her, her sister was murdered anyway, and her daughter stumbled on her in her monstrous form, dragging her sister’s corpse into the water. (It’s really no wonder Della thought her mother was a murderer.)
Turns out, cop-averse Georgia was right all along, because the evil man had been moonlighting as a local park ranger this whole time–the very same park ranger who offered Natasha and her friends a ride toward the novel’s beginning. He likes killing women for the usual misogynist reasons (“you’re a weak, disgusting woman like all the rest…”), though the book takes pains to assure the reader that he’s not a rapist (“I would never. I don’t go in for that sort of thing,” instead musing evilly that ”Pain is a beautiful thing…”) I appreciate the way the novel steers away from this kind of sexual trauma, given the rest of the trauma the characters are dealing with, while still acknowledging that THAT would be the far more likely motivation and outcome.
In the end, it’s Natasha’s rage, Ruby’s strength, and the river’s power that combine to destroy the evil man. First, Natasha summons the river onto dry land to drown him: “Most of all I scream out the white-hot, searing rage that has been growing inside me for weeks.” When that’s not enough and he pulls a Michael-Myers and gets right back up, Della knows what to do next: “It’s time for Grange to die. The Bend made him, so the Bend will have to deal with him. There’s no other way. The police would never be a match for him. …in his human form, he’s a man the police trust and respect. There’s only one way to stop him. The river siren. Momma.”
And when Della asks her mother to help destroy Grange, Natasha witnesses Ruby’s response: “Ruby’s face breaks into a terrifying smile, but I’m not repulsed by it–it’s like an echo of my own heart. Like seeing my bloodlust reflected in a mirror…That’s what her grief and rage has made her: a feral thing, single-minded and deadly. I’m surprised to find I envy her.”
But, as established, Grange is a typical horror-movie monster, in that he can’t be killed so easily. Yet again, it falls to Natasha, this time summoning the full power and force of the river:
“Tapping into this magic doesn’t make me slow like Della is when she grows things–it makes me feel wild, unbridled, hovering just on the edge of chaos. Infinitely powerful…I let the river’s rage and its power take over, until my own personal grief is just a pebble tumbling in its wake, until I cannot separate myself from the river.
Until I am the river…
I am death, I am vengeance, I am the river rising up to swallow the world.”
The dead girls’ spirits, in the form of shadowy owls who’ve been pestering Della and singing murder ballads all book long, get the final word, devouring the monstrous man’s form until there’s little left.
But as Natasha gets subsumed into the river, and as the ghost birds descend (“vengeance incarnate, like the harpies from those old classics we read in school”), we’re presented with a problem. Ruby points out that Natasha is transforming like she did, and only Della can stop it. In my least favorite part of the book, Della pleads:
“‘Don’t let him take you from me too. If you let him do this, he wins…And all the rest of us lose.’ I kiss her again…Natasha looks at me fiercely, possessively. When she reaches a hand toward my face, I see it’s human again…Suddenly I’m sick of it all. Our magic. The spells we sell to angry, vengeful people. I’m sick of the darkness and the anger, sick of the desperate people at our door. I’m sick of the Bend…I kneel, pressing my hands to the wet soil of the meadow. I can feel the river’s rage, its outrage that’s so big it can’t ever be sated. It will swallow the world and still not be full. Because there is no justice for what Grange has done. There is no punishment that can undo the pain and the suffering he’s inflicted on seven women…”
I hate the rhetoric of “If you do X, he wins,” and I hate the way it’s deployed here. But I do appreciate the final pivot about punishment and justice, and how nothing could properly address the violence that one evil man has done here.
In the end, Natasha relinquishes the full power of the river’s rage (in a very Galadriel-esque scene), coming back into her humanity just as the ghost birds transform into real birds (with Ruby’s benediction, “They will have the freedom of the skies, the power of their beaks and their claws, without the burden of their human deaths.”) Grange is dead, The Bend’s twisted magic can resume its proper course, and things can end happily ever after. Or not, because this book has a realistic sense of PTSD, grief, and the wider issue of violent misogyny.
Georgia commits to making a documentary about the long-ignored epidemic of missing and murdered Black girls (the book’s final nod to the comparative LACK of justice non-white victims face), and Della and Natasha reignite their blossoming relationship in The Bend. The book ends with a re-commitment to empowered rage, despite its earlier hesitation, and it has an absolute barn-burner of a title-drop in its final lines, where Natasha says of cis men:
“But today I refuse to fear them, not a single one. They have strength and cruelty and endless complicity. They walk tall and almost always win. But not here, not on the Bend, where owls that were once girls fly free. Not here, where magic rises up to meet my will.
Here, we are witches and men are nothing.
Here, the river has teeth.”
Y’all.
HERE WE ARE WITCHES AND MEN ARE NOTHING.
HERE THE RIVER HAS TEETH.
Amen.