This terrifying twisted tale, set at a fancy boarding school in Virginia, USA, will keep you reading until the bitter end. Why? Because, well, you just have to know what’s really going on. Are these macabre monsters real? And if so, how will they be contained?
CG Drews has a talent for creating gruesome Young Adult stories. After reading Hazelthorn (2025) I was left wanting, so dug into this one (2024). The writing isn’t quite as lyrical but it’s still a strange, melancholy love song wrapped up in vines, thorns, flowers, blood, ink, and assorted greenery that invades the bodies of her adolescent victim. Drews must be a gardener or the child of one.
Andrew is a fragile, sensitive boy who writes dark fairy tales. Thomas—the wild, fierce boy Andrew loves—draws vile monsters, the creatures from Andrew’s stories. Dove, a studious young woman with her whole life mapped out, is Andrew’s twin sister. These three have been inseparable since Dove and Andrew arrived from Australia when they were twelve to study at Wickwood Academy. But this year, their graduating year, things are different.
Dove is keeping her distance. She’s preparing for a world beyond Wickwood, while Andrew seems to be fading into the forest. Feeling stuffed full of moss, he can’t eat. Thomas’s abusive parents were brutally murdered and everyone whispers that he killed them. When the boys venture into the off-bounds wild wood, they discover monsters everywhere—monsters created in Andrew’s imagination and brought to life by Thomas’ drawings. Feeling responsible, they take it upon themselves to keep the secret, destroy Thomas’s sketches, and kill the monsters. They must keep them from getting into the school.Â
Even as I turn the last page I’m left wondering. What really happened? The thing is: we see the story through Andrew’s eyes and he’s an unreliable narrator struggling with first love and his identity. Though he’s in love with Thomas, Andrew thinks he might be asexual. Yet he yearns for his first kiss. From Thomas. Only Thomas. And as the story progresses, Andrew hears other things from other people—things he doesn’t want to hear from people who don’t believe in the monsters, compassionate adults who want to send him home to recover.Â
It’s complex, twisted, and tragic. Note that the book comes with content warnings: “blood/gore, body horror, panic attacks, grief, eating disorder, bullying, and self-harm.”
The book itself—I read the hardcover— is an artistic creation with an entire page of editors and creative designers behind it, and obviously buckets of money. I love this trend to create pretty keepsake books. Full page sketches of Thomas’ monsters inspire chills. Yet the fairytale that weaves through the book—pale text embedded on a dark grey page—is printed in a font so fine and fancy, these old eyes can’t read it. Perhaps I missed something there. Artsy, but ineffective. This is a good reminder to always choose a legible font. Note: It’s easier to read in a digital image than on paper.
Psychological horror. A twisted love story. A feast of friendship and fidelity.
“His breathing evened out, but he made no move to get up. Andrew didn’t care, not while they still touched. He craved Thomas’s affection, with an intensity that left him dizzy. If he never had more, he had this.
It was almost worth being ripped apart by monsters” (109).
Some time in your life you must have been hugged by a poem written by Mary Oliver.
Upstream was published in 2016, not long before her death on January 17, 2019. It is both a memoir and an homage to her chosen town: Provincetown, Massachusetts. She moved there with her lifelong partner and soul mate Molly Malone Cook in the mid 1960s, and these essays celebrate fifty years of life lived in this artist haven at the northern tip of Cape Cod.Â
Provincetown resembles a crab’s claw on a map. It’s a long hooked peninsula, the historic scene of the Mayflower landing in 1620. Named Cape Cod by an English explorer in 1602, who appreciated the cod haul, it remained a fishing/whaling town for centuries. It is the ancestral territory of the Nauset People, who I’m sure had their own name for this place. The Nauset are an Algonquian-speaking People, who “sold” the pilgrims the land where they established Plymouth for “2 brass kettles, 6 coats, 12 hoes, 12 axes, 12 knives, and a box.”
But I digress.
I’m sure Oliver must have kept annotated journals as she writes:
“I saw wood ducks here for the first time in 1977” and “In 1985, a shoveler spent a spring morning on Blackwater Pond. Once, in late March 1991, a single hooded merganser appeared on Oak-Head Pond” (15).Â
The beauty of Provincetown is that the historic town stretches along a curved beach fronted by ocean and backed by a wildlife sanctuary. Blackwater Pond is there along the Beech Forest Trail. Idyllic. Paradisiacal. The town swells each summer with tourists. I can see why they chose this haven known for its artists and gays. This is a place worthy of a visit.
Why is Provincetown so Gay? explains the history and its liberal beginnings way back in 1899. A train connected it to Greenwich Village, NY, so many forward-thinkers found easy access to this out-of-the-way spot of beauty and freedom.
“Over the next two decades, Provincetown welcomed not only thousands of artists, but also writers, actors and left-wing political radicals who brought new ideas on gender and racial equality, artistic expression and sexuality.”
Oliver rises at 5am to greet the sun and go rambling through the wildlife sanctuary with her dogs. She writes as she walks. Nature is as much her muse as poets past. In particular, she loves Emerson, Shelley, young Wordsworth, Blake, and Basho. She writes of Emerson:Â
“The writing is a pleasure to the ear, and thus a tonic to the heart, at the same time that it strikes the mind” (73).
The same can be said for her own work. Indeed, she writes in the Romantic Nature Tradition. Oliver is, at once, passionate and observant in her relationship with the land; her prose streaked with lines so vivid I must pause to savour them and capture them in my journal.Â
She includes brief bits in Section Three on Emerson, Poe, Whitman, and Wordsworth, perhaps gleaned from her talks, as she travelled to lecture, though I think she would have just as soon stayed at home.
Oliver sees herself as one of Nature, both prey and predator. She harvests honey locust blossoms and once digs deep into a turtle’s sandy nest to steal half of her eggs (13/27). She takes them home to pierce and drain, scramble their big yellow yolks, and devour.Â
This I find horrific. It hurts my heart. I remember pregnant turtles crawling out of Bill Brown’s quarry pond north of Ajax, Ontario, and crossing Concession 5 on their way to nesting. I’d stop the car and help them cross. I can’t imagine digging up a turtle’s eggs to devour unless I was starving on some deserted island somewhere.Â
“Each of the turtles is a female, and gravid, and is looking for a place to dig her nest; each of the mosquitoes is a female also who cannot, without one blood meal, lay her own fertile eggs upon the surface of some quiet pond” (52).
This is her point. The mosquitoes bite the turtles in the circle of Nature and she takes from the turtle, including herself in the web. She is as much a predator as the fox and the red-tailed hawk she surprises one day ripping into a pheasant. She considers stealing that too, but decides against it.
“I am no fool, no sentimentalist. I know that appetite is one of the gods, with a rough and savage face, but a god all the same” (56).
I fear I am a sentimentalist, driven by feelings—though I’ve considered how culling the local Canada Geese flock might feed the homeless. They, the geese—not the homeless—leave such delectable hor d’oeuvres for my lab.
Oliver’s essays make me homesick for the East where I grew up. I recall the painted turtles, blue herons, hawks, and pumpkin-coloured Baltimore orioles, their nests streaming like long silk stockings; crimson cardinals against white snow, and canary-yellow finches … the great grey owl who soared over our bog, vampiric through the shadows.Â
I think I must nestle into my winter quilt and read more of Mary Oliver. There is much here to learn.
Explore the maze of local vendors as you shop for the holidays. I’ll be signing books over the whole weekend. This market is a Lower Mainland Legend! Read more here.
It’s always exciting to see how many published authors live in the neighbourhood (Port Coquitlam – Coquitlam – Port Moody. The Port Moody Library celebrates these authors by including their books in their White Pines Collection. Each year, they hold a wonderful gala to introduce the authors and their books to the community. Here’s a photo of all the authors who we celebrated last year!
This year they accepted the last two print books in my Hollystone Series, and I received this invitation. Everyone is welcome to attend. You can find more information at this library link. Hope to see you there!
