Title: A Room Away from the Wolves [on Amazon | on Goodreads]
Series: None
Author: Nova Ren Suma [Site | Goodreads]
Genres: Contemporary with a Twist, Afterlife, Thriller/Mystery
Year: 2018
Age: 14+
Stars: 4.5/5
Pros: Quiet but mesmerising story that will both tug at your heart and make you wonder. Exquisite prose.
Cons: Full of mysteries that mostly remain unexplained (though this is part of the book's charm). There's at least one detail that doesn't fit the overall scheme.
WARNING! Domestic violence (off-page). Physical bullying. Touches upon suicidal thoughts, underage drinking and drugs.
Will appeal to: Those who appreciate an eerie, bittersweet tale with more questions than answers.
Blurb: Bina has never forgotten the time she and her mother ran away from home. Her mother promised they would hitchhike to the city to escape Bina’s cruel father and start over. But before they could even leave town, Bina had a new stepfather and two new stepsisters, and a humming sense of betrayal pulling apart the bond with her mother. Eight years later, Bina finds herself on the side of the road again. She has an old suitcase, a fresh black eye, and a room waiting for her at Catherine House, a young women’s residence in Greenwich Village with dark, magical secrets. As Bina’s lease begins to run out, and nightmare and memory get tangled, she will be forced to face the terrible truth of why she’s come to Catherine House and what it will cost for her to leave... (Amazon excerpt)
Review: Nova Ren Suma is not only a master at writing magical realism, but also at populating her books with girls you won't forget - imperfect, often openly flawed girls you can't but love and feel like protecting, because they're victims as well. This is the story of one of them.
LIES IN SLOW MOTION
This is one of those quiet books where not much happens, but what does slowly enthralls you, only to ultimately punch you in the gut. At its center, an ordinary girl who made some ordinary mistakes and paid too high a price, a magical mansion (with a resident ghost) that is both asylum and prison, and a supporting cast of young women full of secrets and quirks. Oh, and New York of course - not in its glamorous incarnation, but at its most intimate. Despite us landing in the middle of a magical realism scene in the very first, chronologically displaced chapter, when we go back at the start of Bina's journey, it's a slow progression of hints and half reveals, filtered by someone who is, for all purposes, an unreliable narrator - and very much in denial. But here's the thing - the truth is slippery here, and the reader, too, ends up pretending not to see (or getting too mesmerised by Suma's story and writing to be able to). There's enough of a contemporary setting and enough interactions out of Catherine's House to prevent not only Bina, but even us, to get the right perspective about what's going on. I chalk it up to the mansion creating its own reality bubble, inside which (and, it turns out, it's a big "inside") the magical and the mundane can coexist, and a truce - if fragile and showing its weak spots if you know how to look - can be maintained. [...]
