Glendy Vanderah

Where the Forest Meets the Stars is a first novel by Glendy Vanderah, and it's really good.

I've been having trouble for days finding anything readable in the house. I think I've been indoors for too long - it's not just been the social distancing, but the long months of nervous breakdown and my own bout of coronavirus and the seemingly endless process of recovery. My usual gusto for reading has been knocked out of me, but luckily today I found this lovely book, and with a background of classical music, I spent many relaxing and peaceful hours engaged with the incredibly realistic characters in the novel, and with a quirky and unusual plot line that's unlike anything I've read before.

Jo is a PhD student, spending the summer in southern Illinois studying the nesting success rates of indigo buntings, when Ursa stumbles into her life. Ursa is a little girl, dressed in pyjamas, barefoot, hungry, and bruised. Unwilling to share the truth about her problems here on Earth, Ursa tells Jo that she is an alien from the pinwheel galaxy in the constellation of Ursa Major, here to view five miracles before returning to her home planet. Jo's attempts to hand over the case and the girl to the police, or to get her into foster care simply do not work, and Jo becomes more and more attached to Ursa. Jo also becomes very attached indeed to her neighbour, the handsome if unstable Gabriel.

The story flows beautiful, although I will say that the last hundred pages of the novel were not as smooth as the first two hundred. I don't think it's a coincidence that the first part of the novel was set in a rural area among birds - the author herself has ornithological credentials and she's clearly more at home writing about what she loves. When the setting moves to an urban area - a large hospital in St. Louis - the writing is choppier. But this is a first novel! Obviously there won't be the absolute spit-and-polish of a more seasoned writer, and I did love the story.

This is the sort of book that sweeps you away and makes hours pass unbidden, and I hope Glendy Vanderah writes more books for me to disappear into.

Listened to while reading:
Tchaikovsky - Violin Concerto in D Major, soloist - Jascha Heifetz
Handel - Water Music
J.S. Bach - (Best of )Anna Magdalena's Notebook… (altro)

3.75 stars

Jo is a Ph.D.(?) student studying bird nests and is renting a place beside a forested area. When a little girl with bruises appears in her yard and refuses to go home, or even tell Jo her name or where she belongs, the girl says she came from the stars, from another planet. She eventually gives her name as Ursa Major. Whenever Jo tries to call the police to help get the girl home, the girl runs away. Ursa manages to wrap her finger around Jo (and their neighbour, the “Egg Man” Gabe), as Jo and Gabe try to figure out how to figure out where she came from and get her home again.

I loved the bird information in the book. And the astronomy info. I guess most of that was nearer the beginning of the book. (There was also plenty of Shakespeare mentioned.) I wasn’t sure what I’d think about this child from the stars, or another planet, thinking there might be some magical realism in the book (not my thing), but I ended up really liking it. I also quite liked Jo and Gabe’s relationship, and Jo’s best friend, Tabby, was fun, too. I took a ¼ star off for the far too unrealistic, happy, everything-tied-up-with-a-ribbon ending.… (altro)

From the first crack of the book, I got exactly what I’ve come to expect (and relish) from a Glendy Vanderah novel: inky musical notes beautifully rising from that first page.

✨ “She held the soil to her nose, inhaling deeply, eyes closed in pleasure. ‘It’s the smell of eternity. There are bits of stars in this soil…’. Yes, I smelled the stars. I felt like I was whirling in a swirl of stars in a soil-black universe” (1-2).

This redemptive read opens with two sleeping souls who ebb and flow between the light and darkness, shamefully stuck in the black mire of deep-buried secrets. Vaughn, a famous and somewhat aloof author battling writer’s block, lives in the lights of NYC, while Riley, a 21-year-old biology student burying a tragic past, lives in the darkness of a rural Wisconsin farm. These two are pulled together by the tides of the moon or fate or some other force beyond their control, connecting them through a shared grief. Caged in isolation together by fear and guilt and shame, Riley and Vaughn fight the many monsters of their pasts that seem rise in the absence of moonlight. To fight these monsters, the medicine comes in the form of an amalgamation: a mixture of art and science and music and beauty and, most of all, magic—all things together in perfect harmony.

WHY YOU SHOULD READ
… (altro)