Mar 31

Mar 31 Black Woods Blue Sky

About the book

Author: Eowyn Ivey
Publisher: Random House

More info:
The StoryGraph | Goodreads
Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the review.

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Bookshop.org (print or ebook) | Libro.fm (audio)

My Review

I’m a sucker for literary fiction with speculative elements, so when I heard about Black Woods Blue Sky, which blends the dreaminess and darkness of fairy tales with the beauty and danger of the Alaskan wilderness, I knew it was going to be exactly my kind of book. And I was not wrong!

The book is about single mom Birdie and her six-year-old daughter, Emaleen. Birdie is doing the best she can to juggle taking care of Emaleen, keeping her bartending job at their small-town Alaskan lodge, and finding snatches of joy. Then she gets to know Arthur, a quiet, somewhat strange man, and they eventually leave that struggle behind to move to his off-the-grid cabin in the mountains. But love is not always enough to outweigh the harsh realities of nature.

Black Woods Blue Sky obviously has a Beauty and the Beast flavor, but ultimately it comes away with entirely different themes and an entirely different purpose, so I wouldn’t quite call it a retelling. Still, the storytelling is excellent, and I found it to be rich, atmospheric, and engrossing. Emaleen (a small child) is written so vividly and believably, which is hard to pull off in first person, and Birdy comes alive under Ivey’s pen as well. I was a little bit jarred by the shift the book takes in the last third (it definitely wasn’t what I expected, structurally), but by the end I understood why it was necessary. Finally, I listened to long swaths of it on audio, and I thought it worked well that way.

Ultimately, this was what I wanted Bear by Julia Phillips to be. It will be haunting my thoughts for a good, long time.