Hexes of the Deadwood Forest
About the book
Author: Agnieszka Szpila, tr. Scotia Gilroy
Publisher: Parthenon
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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My review
I have no idea how to review this book. 😅 Was it good? Please define “good”! Did I like it? I don’t even know!
They say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but I’m here to tell you that this book is exactly as absurd and outrageously sexual as the cover (maybe even more). It opens with an unlikable woman executive named Anna who gets caught on film having sex with a tree (literally) while she was sleepwalking / on sleeping pills. Her life immediately starts to unravel, and then she finds herself in a sort of break in reality where she’s cast back in time to her ancestors, who ran a cult of women called the Earthen Ones who completely rejected men and instead, as the book’s jacket copy says, “engaging in ecstatic, sensuous worship of Mother Earth.”
In case you think that’s not really what this book is going to be all about, let me be clear: this book is literally all about ecofeminist women having sex with trees in defiance of the patriarchy (oh and also the Catholic Church). So if that sounds up your alley, I recommend this book to you! But if it doesn’t sound like your kind of thing, it’s really just not going to be your kind of thing.
From a craft perspective, I think Szpila is mostly successful. The tonal choices and prose are perfectly aligned with the absurd premise, highlighting it and deepening it. I will say that the middle ~50% of the book (when we are back in the olden days with the Earthen Ones) does feel repetitive; I think there were at least two, maybe three (?) generations of women, and I couldn’t tell you whose events were whose as I write this review a month later. By the time we got back to present day with Anna, I was relieved. (I will never, ever hear the words “cleft” or “rodkin” the same way again.)
I don’t want it to sound like I didn’t like it, because that’s not true. But I can’t really say I liked it either. It was just a bonkers book. But it did feel unique and fresh and inventive, so big points for that!
Anyway, I don’t know if you should read this book, lol. Don’t ask me.
Content and trigger warnings
Sexual content (FYI this book is like 90% sexual content)
Sexual violence
Torture
Murder
