Book Review - Glendy Vanderah's Where the Forest Meets the Stars
Published by: Lake Union Publishing
Publication Date: March 1st, 2019
Format: Kindle, 304 Pages
Rating: ★★★
To Buy (different edition than one reviewed)
Joanna Teale is alive because her mother is dead. Her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer too late. But it wasn't too late for Jo. After a radical double mastectomy Jo wants her life to get back to some semblance of normality. Cancer put her life on hold so she's trying to get back to that life. And that life means grad school. Therefore she is burying herself in her graduate work in the wilds of southern Illinois studying birds. She has her routine. It's solitary but restorative to work from dawn until dusk until all you can do is collapse into bed. Or drink a nice cold beer in the backyard of her white clapboard student housing before collapsing into bed, banging on the window AC to show a little life. But her life is about to change radically once again. A young shoeless girl appears battered and bruised outside her house. The girl claims to be an alien child named Ursa, sent from the stars to witness five miracles. Obviously the kid is running away from something and has created this mythology to cope. But the more time Jo spends with Ursa the more she questions what is possible. She can't do this on her own, and there's something about the police that she just doesn't trust, so she turns to her neighbor Gabe. He runs the roadside stand selling eggs while coming to terms with his own existential problems. Gabe agrees that Ursa is special. Maybe she is some sort of extraterrestrial. They can't deny that Ursa brings a strange sort of luck with her wherever she goes. As the three unlikely souls form a ragtag family time passes and Jo realizes that it will be harder and harder to explain to the authorities why she has kept someone else's child for an entire summer. But when Ursa's real life finally catches up to her and shows Jo and Gabe the dark underbelly of human existence they will do anything to save this little girl. It might just take a miracle, but as humans who are they to judge what an alien would view as a miracle?
You know the phenomenon of the last great book you read? Where it was so amazing and transformative that anything that came after would pale in comparison Well, I had the exact opposite experience with this book. I was suffering from last shit book I read. The book I had read previously was possibly the worst book I have ever read. It was Devil House by John Darnielle if you're interested. So anything would have been better than Devil House. Anything at all. While my friends were lamenting that this book used the alien angle as a kind of bait and switch all I could say was at least there wasn't fake ye olde english. So what if this is Northern Exposure meets Law and Order: Special Victims Unit verging towards the almost completely unrealistic? It wasn't Devil House. Where the Forest Meets the Stars is competently written if completely quixotic. But for me it was a place I could escape into. I felt just like Jo, I needed a reprieve from reality, I needed to swim in the rivers, I needed to bath in the forests, I needed to purge the stank of Devil House from my being and Where the Forest Meets the Stars did that for me. But it was Jo's graduate work that intrigued me the most. Glendy Vanderah was a field biologist who got her MS in the Cerulean Warbler so the insight she brought to the character of Jo made her research spot on. And the reason I connected so strongly to this is because of one of my best friends. She's now a Biometrician for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service but every summer for more years than I can count I remember her going out into the field somewhere to do research. She'd be in Ohio in prime Mothman country studying riparian zones or just slightly north of home looking into the impact of windmills on birds. Actually I think she didn't actually get the windmill summer job, but I remember proofing her resume. As well as her paper on riparian zones. What Glendy Vanderah gave me was a glimpse into my best friend's life for all those summers she was away from me and for that I am grateful. I can see her and Jo hanging out a sharing a beer.
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