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Ooh, a storm is threatening
My very life today
If I don't get some shelter
Ooh yeah I'm gonna fade away
- from Gimme Shelter by the Rolling Stones

The 80s, late Spring. Faye Gallagher, a widowed single mother to five, has bloody well had it. Thomas and Ellen will not stop going at each other in the back seat, particularly Ellen, who, although a small 12 year-old, packs a powerful rage, and redirects that weapon at her mother, definitely playing with fire. Mom blows a final gasket and orders her out of the car, five miles from home. Faye then drives on with the rest of her brood, to their house in the Philadelphia suburbs, leaving Ellen to hoof it on her own, just as the sun is setting. This event is the spark that gets the blaze of this story going.


Una Mannion - image from her site

We see the ensuing events through the eyes of 14-year-old Libby. Each of the Gallagher kids has a particular interest. For Libby it is trees, the product of a cherished book her late father had given her for Christmas, The Field Guide to Trees of North America.

I grew up on the edge of a hiking trail surrounded by woods and it was deeply formative for me. When I started writing, I found I kept coming back to those woods and trails. For me it is the site of my first yearnings and loss, the home I can never get back to. It is also a geography that resonates with other stories. We were always conscious not just of the Revolutionary War but the Lenape stories connected to the topography. It felt like hallowed ground and we spent an inordinate amount of time in those woods. It became, for me, an imaginative landscape, a place I can still conjure, the turns of the trail, how the light falls through the canopy, the tree roots that break through the surface. - from the Blue Nib interview

Marie, almost 18, is getting ready to leave the nest, heading for school in Philly in the coming term. Dad had given her the two volume Illustrated History of Rock and Roll. Thomas is 16, highest GPA in his class, a card-carrying nerd, who never cries. He got The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Astronomy and Space. Ellen, possessor of a considerable artistic gift, got a book on Art History, and Beatrice, 7, received a book on dog breeds. It might be that she is a half-sister to the others.

Libby’s description of her world is rich with woodsy references. Her arboreal lens permeates the novel.

…as I walked toward Sage’s, I listened to the click of crickets at the wood’s edge, the slight whisper of trees, the sounds of the mountain, as if there were another frequency to hear and to be moved by. I wondered if one day I would have the same wrenching longing for this place that my father had for the sounds he’d heard growing up.

Pop was out of the picture for too much of her life, divorced from her mother, and then dead way too young, but she remembers him very fondly. He is very reminiscent of Mannion’s Da, in origin and profession.

My father, as an Irish immigrant in America, loved literature. He was a landscaper and we’d be in his truck and he’s start reciting something. He’d recite lines from The Deserted Village from Oliver Goldsmith. The Song of Wandering Aengus was also one he recited a lot. My father would have such awe of these words and the power of words to transform you emotionally but also words to transform a situation. - from the Dodging the Rain interview

Libby has a bff in Sage, who is, unsurprisingly, given her name, wise beyond her years. She is very fond of quoting the literature of her experience, Rolling Stones lyrics to, herself, transform situations, like a religious person who might be able to dredge up the exact right chapter and verse from a different source. Libby and Sage have a special hangout in the woods, The Kingdom, an off-the-path hideout where they can be their truest selves with each other.

I walked down Horseshoe Trail toward the Kingdom, a secret fort Sage and I had made several summers before. Ahead of me was the crooked tree, our marker for leaving the path to circle into the Kingdom from the back, a routine we had so that there would never be a trace of track or footfall for anyone else to find. We imagined that the crooked tree was one of the ones Indians had used as signposts along the trail to signal where there was good hunting or soft ground for shelter. It was an oak that had started to grow upright, but suddenly the trunk made a complete right angle for two or three feet and then grew straight again. Before the Kingdom ever existed, Dad showed me the tree. He said it might have been a marker, but it could also have been caused by a bigger tree falling on the oak when it was young and then over time the bigger tree rotted and fell apart. The young tree survived but was left with this strange shape.

So, is Libby the crooked tree of the title? Is Ellen? Are we all bent into odd shapes by our experiences growing up?

Mom has a tough time of it all, working as an ER receptionist, having to cope with her kids, while also wanting to get some satisfaction in a social life. The children are not always supervised and this presents some cause for concern, as, if anything bad were to happen to them while she was unavailable, her parental rights might be jeopardized. While it is clear that Faye loves her kids, she is also willing to be absent maybe more than is ok, an element of the author’s life that she has incorporated into several of her works of fiction.

I often think I write more about being a child and the absence of a mother and wanting a mother. The earth maybe in a way is mothering me. - from the Dodging the Rain interview

As the family copes with the collateral effects of Ellen’s abandonment, we follow Libby as she goes through ups and downs with her bff, has to contend with the changes in her adolescent world, tries to figure out who she is and where she fits in, gains awareness of some of the hostile actors in the world, learns to identify who to trust, and maybe channels a bit of Harriet the Spy. Pretty classic coming of age material.

It is certainly a world in which secrets, lies, and rumors abound. A nearby house is said to be occupied by a member of the Manson family. There is a very large secret in a family for whom Libby babysits. And she recalls another dark tale from an experience with another family. Many stories have attached themselves to Wilson, a motorcycle-driving young friend of Marie’s who seems too old to be hanging about with the likes of the Gallagher kids. He is the Knight errant here, or is it Knight erroneous? Or is he up to something totally not ok? Libby is highly suspicious of him. (What’s puzzling her is the nature of his game)

In short, this is a moving novel, rich with the experience of adolescence, but elevated by the use of Libby’s sylvan perspective. You will want answers to the questions that are raised, and will care about Libby, an everygirl even us guy readers can relate to. We all had uncertainties at Libby’s age, who we are, who we want to be, what is possible, how to deal with our parents, with other kids� parents, who to trust. You may not always be able to get what you want in a novel, but in A Crooked Tree, you will definitely get what you need.

Beside us, the shadows of dogwoods blurred in the dark as my mother kept driving, each tree hemmed in a halo of white where the bracts had fallen.

Review posted � 12/18/2020

Publication dates
----------USA - 1/5/2021 - Harper
----------UK � 1/21/2021 � Faber and Faber

=============================EXTRA STUFF

Links to the author’s and pages

Interviews
-----2020 - The Blue Nib Literary Magazine -
-----2017 � Dodging the Rain -
-----2017 - North West Words - - Autumn/Winter Issue 8 - page 39

Songs/Music
-----Rolling Stones -
-----Supertramp - Supertramp –plays in Jack’s Datsun as they drive to the towers
-----Xray spex - - Marie and Wilson talk about Poly Styrene
-----Rolling Stones - - re Wilson’s mother’s supply
-----Pink Floyd - - played in a dodgy person’s vehicle
-----Rolling Stones - - when Libby goes to see Sage at Sage’s house after the mall run-in with the creep
-----AC/DC - - at the towers hangout
-----Rolling Stones - - on the car radio after they all get ice cream at Guernsey Cow
-----Rolling Stones - after Libby has let slip a big secret and feels sooooo guilty

Items of Interest
-----Literary Hub -
-----Oliver Goldsmith - - Libby recalls her father quoting from this poem
-----William Butler Yeats - - ditto"