Review by Booklist Review
In this sophomore effort (after Every Bone a Prayer, 2020), the like-ours-but-strange world is rural Kentucky, complete with the very real challenges that face many--poverty, addiction, mental illness, parental abandonment. But in this world, some residents are given an escape hatch in the form of a door, visible only to them, leading to somewhere unknown that you can never return from. Many take their doors; some turn away from them. When Maren's door appears, she's near her lowest point, but she knows that to leave, as her mother did when she was a child, would be to leave behind many who rely on her, especially her granny, who's in need of more and more care. Care that costs money. Maren finds herself selling old prescription drugs to stay afloat, a plan that quickly spirals out of her control. And all the while her door is there, waiting, tempting. Bloom does a very deft job of world building and creating characters the reader becomes invested in. Blooms is establishing herself as a purveyor of mountain magical realism.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Bloom's mild sophomore effort (after Every Bone a Prayer) explores the perils of mental illness and addiction in rural Blackdamp County, Ky., via the magical realist story of Maren Walker, who is grieving the death of her mother while caring for her ailing Granny. As the bills pile up, Maren resorts to selling Granny's pain pills, placing her on police radar and bringing up memories of her mother's addictions. A strange little door follows Maren, a known phenomenon in town that occurs when someone might need a way out--"The doors found the hurt, the lonely, the poorest, and the most desperate"--and the only fantastical element found in the novel. With the cops on her trail, Maren is tempted to make a break for it, but her mentally unwell friend, Julie, and Maren's on-again, off-again love interest, Carver (who is also Julie's older brother and has a troubled past), won't let her go that easily. The author tackles hard subjects, but only skates along the surface with easy fixes to big conflicts and characters who are flawed but underdeveloped, and the dense dialogue rarely feels like natural conversation. This falls short of the author's promising debut. Agent: Alexandra Levick, Writers House. (Feb.)
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