Oh my gosh, this novella is INTENSE. If you like gritty, feminist retellings of fairy tales then be sure to try Flyaway, a loose retelling of several fairy tales set in Australia. To tell you which fairy tale is the central story is a spoiler but it’s the best kind – a mystery resolution that you don’t see coming but that, once revealed, leaves you saying, “Oh, of COURSE.” It’s not a romance, and there is gore.

Most of the story is narrated by Bettina, a nineteen year old girl who lives with her mother in a tiny Australian village. Her father and two brothers are missing. Her mother, Nerida, sleeps a great deal: “She wilted like a garden in the heat of the day.” Nerida places a great deal of responsibility on Bettina, not only to do things like run earrings but also to be perfectly ladylike in appearance, speech, and deportment at all times. Bettina’s mother claims that they don’t miss the father and the brothers, that Bettina does not miss contact with the rest of the world, that, in fact, “We are content.”

This hypnotic state of being changes when Bettina gets a mysterious letter. In trying to discover who sent the letter, Bettina finds herself allied with two old friends, Trish and Gary, who help her solve the mystery of her brothers, her father, and herself. Interwoven with Bettina’s story are stories from other narrators about shapeshifters, tricksters, and wishes in bottles, a piper who charms away invasive vines, and all the mystery of the wild land around the village. It’s a short book rich in campfire tales (some literally told around a campfire).

Readers should know that this book includes gore and gaslighting and a pervasive atmosphere of mystery and dread. There is child in peril stuff but no sexual assault.

I adored this novella. ADORED it. I love the imagery, the atmosphere, the incredible tactile quality of the world as described, the structure, and the reveal of what is happening with Bettina and her family. This is some of the best prose I’ve ever read in terms of description. Just look at this, and tell me you don’t feel these descriptions of trees right on your skin and in your eyes, like just reading it makes you squint a little:

Bottle and box, paper and iron, thorned and blossomed under the unutterable light (the sky as blue as breath, as enamel, or beaten like copper, everything beneath it turned to metal, or else translucent). Trees like lanterns, like candles, ghosts and bones.

A little later, the “trees bled resin like rubies” and I can actually smell that. Every word and detail in the book, from Bettina’s tidy short-sleeved cardigan that she wears over her sundress, to the way glass bottles “clatter” and roll on the floor when the bottom of the box they were in breaks, to (and as an arachnophobe I could have lived without this) the description of “fine-limbed spiders” that live in an old mailbox – everything is just right, revealing character of people and place and appealing to every sense.

There’s one thing about this story that isn’t perfect, and that is the abruptness with which it comes to a halt. Even if this book is meant to be the first in a series, the ending is awfully sudden. There’s no closure or long-range resolution. It just…stops. The mystery is resolved but the story still ends on a cliffhanger with everybody’s emotional arc left raw and unresolved.

I call this a feminist story because so much of it involves people who are destroyed or silenced by patriarchal systems of capitalism, colonialism, and marriage – that is to say, by greed or by possessiveness. There is a villainous character whose desire to control and silence is driven by her own experience of being controlled and silenced. Her acts of physical and emotional violence stem from the fact that her very existence is the result of a violent, or at least controlling, act on the part of another. It’s a powerful look at a set of beings who defy control but at a terrible cost.

Since the ending is so abrupt, you might wonder why I’m giving this book an A-. Well, the ending might be growing on me…after all, what happens at the end of a story but the start of another story? And what happens after a dramatic event but the immediate realization that we still have all our daily tasks to get through?

Also, I cannot emphasize enough how intense and immersive this book is. I recommend it for people who enjoy lush, descriptive writing and who revel in books with a strong sense of place. I also recommend it for fairy tale and folklore fans. I fervently hope that there is a sequel soon!