Reviews tagging 'Physical abuse'

Hawk Mountain by Conner Habib

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readundancies's review

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challenging dark emotional tense medium-paced

4.75

I have read exactly one other book that put me in such a tailspin of emotions that Hawk Mountain has left me in. And by tailspin of emotions, I mean specifically those of the uncomfortable kind. The kind that sit heavy at the back of your throat and bleed down your esophagus only to emulsify in your stomach due to the acidity. The kind that are distressing and concerning and make you physically ill because the contents just infect you. The kind that you don’t ever forget. 

And this story? This story was all of that. It was dark and isolating and desolate and I really was unnerved by the chilling tone of it all. This was something that I was greatly anticipating and is definitely one of my favourite releases of this year. 

So much so that since the copy I initially read was from the library, I had to go above and beyond and make a detour on my way home from some errands today just so I could stop by the bookstore and pick up a physical copy of my own. 

For a debut novel, Conner Habib excels at spinning a narrative that is tormentingly cyclical. This was a story where history repeated itself in the most bizarrely destructive and yet beautiful ways; through bullying and gaslighting and child abuse, we as readers get to experience a character in Todd who is both victim and villain. The themes and discourse surrounding sexual identity, parenting, obsession and manipulation were threaded so naturally between Jack and Todd’s shared past in high school and their reunion years later in the present timeline. And I genuinely couldn’t get enough of it. There’s something so fulfilling to me about a tale that focuses on vicious circles; where the tragic nature of comedy is twisted so that a main character can’t help but try to break out of a cycle of struggle, consequences be damned, but all their efforts are futile and they find themselves right back were they started at the beginning. With a different author, I think this story had the potential to become trite where it was grim and exaggerated where it was tense, but Habib managed to create this undercurrent of unease that I couldn’t ignore. I had to pace myself with the first part of this novel because the content became heavy very quickly for me. And yet once the major plot twist came into play, I could not get through the rest of the story fast enough. I was hooked. 

And the prose itself was just haunting. Todd was not particularly likeable, but his introspective nature and his traumatic experience in high school set him up to be such a fascinating character. He was incredibly flawed and broken and the worst parts of himself rose to the surface when presented with Jack, the face of his childhood trauma. He was also completely at odds with his sexual identity and some internalized homophobia and it was never explicitly addressed by the end of the story, but all of that was just another strength to me because the story was never supposed to amount to any sort of resolution. And it never does. 

Instead, the ending dives into it’s title and absolutely knocks it out of the park because the parallels! It’s taken me a couple of days for it to really sink in but the more I think about it, the more I appreciate the ending and how the pace of this novel was constructed. The full circle moment of what happened on Hawk Mountain and the climax of Jack and Todd’s reunion twenty or so odd years later was just so well executed. 

This was by no means a fun read, and definitely has content that will be triggering to many people, especially since there is a fair amount of gore. This is literary noir with a side of horror and a sprinkling of thriller and suspense. It’s got an almost constant psychological manipulation at play and this sense of isolation in both the setting and in Todd that I just couldn’t shake. 

And what slightly blows my mind is that I know it in my core that in another universe, this was a romance about first love instead. 

Now I don’t think I personally needed Livia’s perspective or Anthony’s to be honest, no matter how brief his was. But I cannot express how much this story has stayed with me and impacted my mood upon finishing it. It’s put me straight into a book hangover and despite me being in a reading funk now, I do not regret it one bit. 

So if you’re in the mood for a book that will haunt you long after you finish lingering within it’s pages, do not hesitate to pick this one up. It was darkly disturbing and I mean that as a genuine compliment because it fucked me up good. I will definitely be on the lookout for whatever Conner Habib comes out with next. 
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