A review by mysimas
Foxlowe by Eleanor Wasserberg

dark sad tense slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

Picked this one up under the mistaken assumption it was magical realism — Goodreads and at that time Storygraph both had it tagged as such… But it’s really just the story of a girl raised in a cult and brainwashed to believe and repeat certain things. There’s nothing in the book suggesting or even implying that the girl’s world actually includes those supernatural things…

Overall a readable, if dark character exploration. Freya and all abusers like her can go burn in hell.

I see people speaking out all the time in the outside world, though not as much as you’d think. They might intervene in a shop when a kid is getting slapped around, say, or if there’s a fight on the bus. But then they can walk home, if they are lucky enough not to get bloodied up. They can go to their group, who will agree with them, who will say, Yes, you were right. But we were the home, we were the group, and there was nowhere to go if you were on the wrong side of the invisible lines, if you were pushed out of the shoal, except out in the cold and the place where there were jobs and old hated families and whatever terrible things out there had made them come to Foxlowe in the first place.
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