Rhiannon

There are monsters in the world and the Keating family has seen them with their own eyes.

Right from the opening pages, this relentlessly traumatic story lets you know it’s not going to pull any punches. The fallout from this horrific nightmare follows the four young Keating children, both literally and figuratively, as we pick up four years after the nightmare began.

They’ve never known why they were targeted by the monster, but they want to find answers – and hopefully some peace. When the family is presented with an opportunity to exorcise the monsters from their past, they are unaware it will come at a very high cost.

This is ostensibly a horror novel about a disintegrating family as they navigate the aftermath of one horrific loss after another while collectively questioning their very minds and memories. Their individual struggles in how they deal with PTSD and each other is what I found most interesting and eminently relatable. This family is messy – how they deal (or don’t) with each other and their father, how their anxieties have come to define them individually, and how they struggle to break from those chains to find a happier existence, is what this story is all about. And it’s absolutely heartbreaking.

There are no happy endings here. Greenwood’s stories are always ultimately emotional horror and this is no exception.

And that monster… maybe it has a family too…

After escaping their collapsing world’s ecology by taking a one-way trip through a gate, a group of colonists land on a world that is occupied by a singular and peculiar planet encompassing ‘Root’. The new arrivals find a strange equilibrium by learning to harvest this disturbingly somewhat sentient entity for sustenance. A whole religion and symbiosis erupt around it and fifty years after colonizing, the (particularly gruesome) Miracle happens and things take a turn for the horrifically surreal.

The imaginative, if desolate, world was unique and interesting – I loved the description of this strange environment. A great concept for an alien planet. The writing is often poetic and frequently challenging, as there are several POVs going on and it’s not always readily apparent whose you’re reading when you start a new chapter, which some readers may find confusing or off-putting.

Thematically I do wish there had been more development around motherhood, humanity’s hubris, and arrogance regarding the environment. It’s a shorter novella that I think could do with a bit of expansion to really explore not just the themes, but more of the characters themselves.

An intriguing and thought provoking story.

My thanks to NetGalley and Stelliform Press for the ARC. I am leaving this review voluntarily and all opinions are my own.

Releases 30 July 2026

Now, I’m not the target audience here. But it was absolutely insisted by a 12-year-old relative that I unconditionally HAD to read this book, and she promptly lent me her copy, along with its sequel. It’s been a long while since I’ve visited a book (that would be way back when Potter first arrived) that goes for the ‘tween’ demographic. That term was nowhere near in use when I actually fit that age category. And honestly, I was reading some pretty advanced books for my age (Dune, The Silmarillion, Thomas Covenant, and a bunch of wildly inappropriate horror by 12), so it probably wouldn’t have mattered much to me at the time, regardless.

Anyway. I digress.

Turns out my cynical, sardonic soul can still be charmed by childhood adventures. And this book was an absolute delight of surprisingly sophisticated, but not excessively so, writing. The turns of phrase and humour made me giggle. The imagination was excellent and I really appreciated the author’s use of a mix of mythical creatures in a hidden archipelago of islands on earth. The illustrations were positively enticing. This is the kind of thing that would have sent me spinning off to a library to research every creature and critter she mentions to find out its history and that would have led me to reading mythology, etc. Which is kinda what happened when I became obsessed with Harryhousen movies as a child. The book is strongly reminiscent of Earthsea and Potter and a smidge of Lewis and Pullman thrown in as well.

I rather enjoyed this sweet journey into childhood. It was a marvelous and memorable adventure and I guess I will have to listen to more 12-year-olds’ book recs!