Where the Forest Meets the Stars

by Glendy Vanderah

 

 

My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

 

As always, words fail when you most want to say the right thing… I’ve decided language isn’t as advanced as we think it is. We’re still apes trying to express our thoughts with grunts while most of what we want to communicate stays locked in our brains.

 

He was teaching her how to play poker, and they were using oyster crackers as betting chips. “First guns, now gambling,” Jo said. “You’re a bad influence.” “Not for long,” he said. “We can’t stop eating our money.”

 

“And I know what you’ve been through—how it could have …influenced what you did.” Why did everyone think that? She kept her mouth shut, but she wanted to say that she wouldn’t have done anything different if she still had her mother and her breasts and her ovaries. She would love Ursa just as much.

 

Did she tell you she once snuck a lamb into the hospital? … She knows I love the baby farm animals she works with, so she packs the lamb in her car with its milk, drives up to Chicago, and sneaks it into my room two days after my breasts were removed. She takes this tiny lamb out of a shoulder bag, lays it on my bed, and hands me the bottle. There, she says, who needs tits anyway? There are other ways to give milk.

 

Before his life fell apart, he’d wanted to be an astrophysicist. He named his daughter Ursa for the Big Bear in the sky, and he’d taught her the names of stars and constellations. When Ursa was afraid of the dark, he would open her window a crack and tell her good magic that fell out of the stars was coming in her window. He said the magic would always keep her safe. After he died, Ursa opened her window wide every night, trying to let in lots of good magic.

 

 My Review:

 

This captivating book bewitched and enthralled me. I delighted in the unexpected and stealthy hits of clever wit and levity that was surprisingly tucked into the most unexpected places. I gleefully endured the prickling and tauntingly enticing mystery that relentlessly beckoned to me to continue reading and ignore anything and everything beyond the screen of my Kindle.

 

Ms. Vanderah’s writing was alchemy and I was ensorcelled. I was repeatedly taken with the layered depth of the fascinating and quirky characters as well as the thoughtful creativity of the storylines, which were complex and beautifully textured with cleverly amusing and cringe-worthy details.

 

I waffled in my theories of whether the girl’s fantastical explanations and alien assertions could be true as she was oddly intelligent and insightful, and far more advanced than many adults in her ability to absorb knowledge or sketch, yet she was a small child with an estimated age of nine. My curiosity was as unabating as Ursa’s quarks.   I reveled in this stunning and cunningly crafted tale from beginning to end and was absolutely staggered once aware it was the author’s debut. Glendy Vanderah is definitely one to watch. A Five-Star rating is not enough by half.