Reviews with content warning for Forced institutionalization - A Dark and Starless Forest

Reviews tagging 'Forced institutionalization'

A Dark and Starless Forest by Sarah Hollowell

2 reviews

se_wigget's review against another edition

adventurous challenging dark emotional hopeful mysterious reflective tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

TW: child abuse, abandonment, gaslighting, manipulation, Stockholm Syndrome, torture, death, murder, gun violence, self-entitled arrogant white male, power-tripping control freak psychopath who needs to be chopped up into bloody little bits

I decided to read a lot of queer fiction this year. Goals.

I cannot express enough my appreciation for the queer rep (including ace), fat girl rep, and disability rep in this book. Love it.

SPOILERS:

I figured out early in the book that Fuckface—I mean Frank—is a manipulative control freak. Early in the book, I thought he might be a narcissist with BPD, but eventually he proved to be a psychopath.

Stockholm Syndrome also comes to mind—each girl has some level of it. Elle is a flying monkey with the greatest level of Stockholm Syndrome.

"Timeout" kept having sinister overtones even before the reader see what it means—I kept suspecting it wasn't just sitting quietly in a corner. Sure enough, it's torture.

This book evokes the self-entitlement of power-tripping men who use the talents of women and get credit for them... and who abuse the women in their lives. That reminds me of the history books Women of Ideas by Dale Spender and Pre-Raphaelite Girl Gang by Kirsty Stonell Walker. Abusers, predators, who not only oppress and stunt women’s talent but also take credit for it.

So... this is definitely a high stakes kind of dark fantasy novel. Very dark. Starting a bit before page 300, there’s an infuriating and horrifying scene I found difficult to get through. I ended up skimming forward. Might want to read the sequel to the cozy fantasy Legends & Lattes next, because GRRRRR.

Page 7: Flower magic and a tiny poltergeist. 🌺👻

Page 336: YES, RECLAIM THE WORD “WITCHES”!

Also, my phone is a piece of trash that kept refusing to paste this review into StoryGraphy & Goodreads. Over and over again. I had to turn on my laptop... just to post one book review.

Content Warnings

queenmackenzie's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

As soon as I saw this cover I knew I had to read this book! It’s not often you see plus-size women in fantasy (though it’s a bit more prevalent in YA than adult) and it’s even rarer for them to be on the cover! Apart from that, though, the premise gripped me, and I was not disappointed. A Dark and Starless Forest is a thrilling and dark tale, told from the point of view of Derry, a young girl living with seven other girls and one non-binary person ranging between nineteen and eight, all taken in by a man named Frank after their families couldn’t handle their magic abilities. The setting is our world, modern America, which initially surprised me since I had expected this to be set in a fantasy land, but I enjoyed the way Sarah Hollowell played with real history and culture and applied magic to it.

Frank has labelled his magic girls ‘alchemists’ because of the way the title of witch has led to death and persecution, yet Derry and her siblings are always looking for another word that will mean more to them, and there’s a really sweet habit Derry has of acknowledging when a word she’s used in her narration is a particularly strong one, showing the way she has scoured the dictionary over the years. The siblings are isolated both geographically – surrounded by a magic forest that keeps them in and others out – as well as mentally, with Frank keeping them away from the internet, newspapers, and any media not selected by him. Though he is strict, he has always protected his charges and warned them of the dangers of the outside world, so Derry swallows her frequent anger towards him until the night her sister Jane goes missing.

Derry and Jane had been to the forest before, and from Derry’s thoughts we know something terrible happened, something they have kept from the rest of the siblings, and Derry’s guilt spirals further as she realised this might have led Jane and then others to vanish between the trees. As the family begins to fray and Frank becomes more and more on edge, Hollowell does an excellent job of building tension and creating some very chilling scenes (for me anyway, but I don’t read much dark stuff so I’m sure some won’t find it chilling at all).

I won’t talk more about the plot, so you can enjoy that ride for yourself, but I do want to talk about some of the other things that stayed with me about this book. As I said at the start, having a fat protagonist is so important, and Derry talks both of feeling as if her body is too much at times, like when the bathtub is too small, and when she takes up space and feels powerful. There is quite a lot of other representation too; three of the siblings are African American, one is a Native American who is also deaf, one is a trans girl and one is non-binary. Having a deaf character means that a lot of the conversations between the siblings are done in ASL, and having Violet, the non-binary sibling, arriving at the house a little later than some means they have knowledge of terminology to define themselves, and they help others with finding their own labels, such as aromantic, or bisexual. I liked that the author included such things, and did it in a very natural way.

Overall, this is a story that will stay with me, and I think that it does something new and exciting with both YA and fantasy tropes. As far as I’m aware it’s a standalone, and it does have a satisfying conclusion, but I’ll definitely be keeping an eye out for future works by Sarah Hollowell because she certainly knows how to tell a story!

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