‘Strange Folk’ Shows the Healing of Home https://ift.tt/LnMrNJU
Alli Dyer’s debut novel, Strange Folk, takes readers to the hills of Appalachia, where the land is steeped in magic and family histories. With compelling character development and landscapes, Strange Folk has something to offer most everyone. Particularly for fans of Mexican Gothic (2020) by Silvia Moreno-Garcia or The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina (2021) by Zoraida Córdova, Strange Folk is a fast-paced, yet atmospheric, exploration of the ways that power and trauma can travel through families.
After separating from her wealthy husband, Lee leaves California and brings her two children, Cliff and Meredith, back to her hometown of Craw Valley. Lee’s grandmother, Belva, and her mother, Redbud, still live in Craw Valley, but Lee hasn’t been home for about two decades. She even told her children that their Appalachian family members were dead. When they arrive, Cliff and Meredith are immediately drawn to Belva and her witchy ways. Both of them feel the intense connections to the land that fuels the magic within their family. But Lee’s return is tainted by compounding tragedies. Belva’s spells appear to be harming their targets, and the townsfolk who normally turn to Belva for healing become suspicious of the family.
While Belva is eager to teach Cliff and Meredith, Lee forbids it, and because Redbud appears to be struggling with addiction, Lee tries to prevent her children from meeting their grandmother. Such prohibitions are not particularly effective, though, because teenage Meredith is creative and determined. Enlisting the help of a classmate at her new school, Meredith sneaks off to learn from Redbud without realizing that Redbud’s access to the land is artificial.
Rifts in the family run deep, and resentments are inflected with the distrust and betrayal that often accompanies addiction. After Lee’s father died, her mother slipped into opioid addiction, and Lee pushed herself to study as hard as she could, to go to college, to leave Craw Valley and never return. In her new life, though, Lee began to drink, secretly, at night, alone. She continues to drink alcohol daily upon her return to Craw Valley, and it limits her ability to access the land’s magic and to see what’s really happening in her family and her community. As more and more puzzling and tragic events pile up around her, Lee finally reconciles with her mother and her home so that she can confront the real source of the harm being done.
The limited third person narrator alternates between Lee and Meredith, allowing readers to see mother and daughter from one another’s perspectives. The two are very close, but when Meredith realizes that Lee has been lying to her about their family history, she feels betrayed. Both characters must learn to see each other more complexly. In a story about forgiveness and family, Dyer also conveys the difficulty of learning to love a place that you’ve had to leave behind. Lee must confront the pain of having grown up without the care that she craved while also recognizing that the land is not to blame. By seeing her home and her family through the eyes of her children, Lee is able to recast her own relationships to this place and these people.
Of Lee, the narrator says, “Her addiction story extended beyond the boundaries of her own experience and radiated out around her in the community and behind her for generations, like the healing and magic that was also part of her blood.” This view of addiction as not only individual but also communal is a crucial point of understanding the devastation of the ongoing opioid crisis, and though the problem is not unique to Appalachia, its effects have been especially dramatic in the region. Strange Folk is not about opiates in a specific, direct way, instead, it accounts for the ways that families can harm one another through misunderstanding and emotional neglect.
Though there are many deep wounds and resentments, Lee’s family did not set out to do harm, and as the novel progresses and they face challenges together, they find ways to mitigate ongoing harm in their community. The novel features magic and mystery, with some dark themes, but, in the end, the characters use their magic to heal, to effect positive change, or to protect themselves and their community. In depicting these efforts, Strange Folk suggests that aligning ourselves with our homeplaces may be a valuable way to move forward.
FICTION Strange Folk
By Alli Dyer
Atria Books
Published August 6, 2024
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