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Mar. 22nd, 2021 10:23 pmWhile I'm telling you guys in a wildly biased fashion about fantastic books written by my friends, let me take another minute to talk about The Valley and the Flood, Rebecca Mahoney's gorgeous speculative YA debut about mourning, PTSD, and befriending the eerie supernatural horrors who live next door.
Rose Colter, the protagonist of The Valley and the Flood, is running away from a visit gone south when the book begins -- specifically, a visit with her dead best friend's mother -- when she hears a broadcast over her car radio that shouldn't exist. Subsequently, she finds herself stuck in the small, obscurely haunted town of Lotus Valley with several immediate problems:
- her car is broken down and will take several days to fix
- she's being followed by an invisible Something that's Very Old and Very Stressed
- the town's third-best prophet has predicted that Rose's arrival (or, more specifically, the arrival of the Something that she brings with her) will trigger the desert town's destruction by flood, which means that most of the locals are not particularly thrilled to see her ... and if anyone is happy about her arrival, that might, broadly speaking, be even more concerning
The beauty of this book lies in its balance, the way the explicitly supernatural landscape of the town and the personal landscape of Rose's grief and trauma lay alongside and overlap each other: the magic is not all metaphor and Rose's PTSD is an inextricable part of her before she ever encounters the particular desert weirdness of Lotus Valley. The tension of the story comes from the push-and-pull between the external and internal forces and the gravity they exert on each other, and it's really gorgeously done, eerie and wistful and warm and hopeful tones all braided together.
It's also a really lovely portrait of a community, moreso than I'd even expected -- from reading the synopsis and hearing Becky do readings from the beginning, I'd expected it to be mostly Rose's journey alone, but the book relies on Rose's newfound connections to the denizens of Lotus Valley (human and cryptid alike) as well as the connections she brings with her: her family, her therapist, her memories.
...can I give one more shout-out to the local cryptids, by the way? The local cryptids of Lotus Valley ("the neighbors," as they call them) are extremely good, and also very responsible about showing up for town meetings.
Rose Colter, the protagonist of The Valley and the Flood, is running away from a visit gone south when the book begins -- specifically, a visit with her dead best friend's mother -- when she hears a broadcast over her car radio that shouldn't exist. Subsequently, she finds herself stuck in the small, obscurely haunted town of Lotus Valley with several immediate problems:
- her car is broken down and will take several days to fix
- she's being followed by an invisible Something that's Very Old and Very Stressed
- the town's third-best prophet has predicted that Rose's arrival (or, more specifically, the arrival of the Something that she brings with her) will trigger the desert town's destruction by flood, which means that most of the locals are not particularly thrilled to see her ... and if anyone is happy about her arrival, that might, broadly speaking, be even more concerning
The beauty of this book lies in its balance, the way the explicitly supernatural landscape of the town and the personal landscape of Rose's grief and trauma lay alongside and overlap each other: the magic is not all metaphor and Rose's PTSD is an inextricable part of her before she ever encounters the particular desert weirdness of Lotus Valley. The tension of the story comes from the push-and-pull between the external and internal forces and the gravity they exert on each other, and it's really gorgeously done, eerie and wistful and warm and hopeful tones all braided together.
It's also a really lovely portrait of a community, moreso than I'd even expected -- from reading the synopsis and hearing Becky do readings from the beginning, I'd expected it to be mostly Rose's journey alone, but the book relies on Rose's newfound connections to the denizens of Lotus Valley (human and cryptid alike) as well as the connections she brings with her: her family, her therapist, her memories.
...can I give one more shout-out to the local cryptids, by the way? The local cryptids of Lotus Valley ("the neighbors," as they call them) are extremely good, and also very responsible about showing up for town meetings.
