The Yellow Wood
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- $3.99
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- $3.99
Publisher Description
Alexander waits in his yellow-gray house in a yellow wood for his namesake daughter, the one who “of all my children ... has always stirred me most, with love, with rage and fear, with envy and disappointment.” He has summoned her. She is his prodigal child, and she is his scion, and it’s time.
Alexandra left as soon as she turned eighteen, the only way she could keep from being swallowed up by her father, her only chance of having a life of her own. Alexandra grew up with her father’s voice in her head, his will on her in one form or another. Now, though she vowed she never would, she is going back. Because his voice came into her head, ordering her home.
The longer Alexandra stays with her father in her childhood home, the stronger her suspicions that his control over her is more insidious than she knew. Her siblings are all oddly under his control, exactly what he made them, and she discovers evidence of what he has planned for her.
“She fled to live her own life,” Alexander observes. “As if there ever were such a thing.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bram Stoker and World Fantasy Award winner Tem (1949 2015) enters some disturbing psychological territory with this contemporary story of five siblings struggling to cope with the talents imposed on them by their father. Alexandra Kove was always expected to be more than any of her siblings but, fed up with her father's interference in her life, left their family home in the yellow woods. Returning after 30 years, she attempts to separate who she is from the person her father tried to create. She starts to suspect her father's influence over her family might go further than a lifelong contest of wills as she uncovers evidence of his unconventional parenting methods. Tem balances her insightful depictions of people made deeply neurotic by an overbearing parent with the creeping presence of the uncanny, suggesting there is more to the Kove family's obsessions than childhood trauma. The book beautifully exploits the fine line between merely weird and genuinely unnatural. Alexandra is "Daddy's little girl, wizard's familiar," and Tem invites readers to consider the nature of a father's power over his children when those two relationships can be conflated. The result is smart, creepy, and painfully insightful about the purpose and effects of parenting.
