Review by Booklist Review
Sam returns to her family's cabin in the Northwoods of Wisconsin with a plan to restore it to sell. Her father built the cabin himself but hasn't been back since Sam's mother disappeared in the woods years before. Sam tells herself she'll stay for a few weeks before returning to New York and her boyfriend, Stephen, but the woods draw her in, and time slips away. Several nights, Sam wakes up deep in the woods, unsure of how she got there. A doe speaks to her as it eats corn in her yard. Though she's been sober for ten months, Sam starts drinking again. Her grandmother and mother both struggled with alcoholism, and Sam feels the pull within herself towards oblivion. In her first novel, Faliveno's prose shines as Sam deals with solitude and isolation, desire and fear. Her body strengthened by the work on the house, Sam's gender feels increasingly fluid. Hemlock is a propulsive, atmospheric story of ghosts, monsters, and transformation, with a sharp eye for gender dynamics and the queer experience in rural places. This tension-filled exploration of an inescapable haunting is a nuanced story of addiction and inheritance.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this moody debut novel from essayist Faliveno (Tomboyland), a disillusioned woman returns from New York City to rural Wisconsin. Exhausted by the hustle, Sam leaves behind her boyfriend, her Brooklyn apartment, and her job as a magazine editor for Hemlock, her family's dilapidated cabin, to fix it up so her father can sell it. While there alone, Sam reflects on her family's history of alcoholism and her mother's disappearance into the nearby woods during a mental breakdown a few years earlier. Sam herself struggles with alcohol and succumbs to the temptation after almost a year without drinking. She then starts to sense a malevolent presence in the cabin, has conversations with a doe, and wakes up in the woods on a few occasions after blackouts. She also stops trying to appear feminine, embraces her androgynous nature, and flirts with a local girl named Gina. Faliveno keeps the reader guessing as to whether supernatural forces or Sam's drinking are responsible for the sinister goings-on, and she delivers an ending that's both satisfying and open to interpretation. There's much to enjoy in this gothic family drama. Agent: Marya Spence, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (Jan.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A New Yorker heads to the Northwoods of Wisconsin to renovate her parents' cabin after her mother's mysterious disappearance. Sam, who's 38, grew up in Wisconsin and often spent time with her parents at Hemlock, a cabin in the Northwoods that her father had built himself with an eye toward retiring there. But those plans were derailed first by the mental decline of Sam's alcoholic mother and then, more recently, by her disappearance, when she took off into the woods and never returned. To spare her father, Sam offers to make repairs and ready the cabin for sale. Leaving her male partner behind in Brooklyn--Sam is androgynous and has dated both men and women--she arrives in Wisconsin to the same sense of not fitting in that she's carried since her tomboy childhood there. This time, the sense of otherness is amplified by some strange experiences: First, a doe Sam feeds begins speaking to her. Then, though she's been sober for nearly a year, Sam begins drinking again and finds herself routinely waking up in the woods in the mornings with no memory of how she got there. And then there's her body, undergoing some…unusual transformations. Now that she's returned home, is Sam becoming someone--or something--new? Or merely what she's been deep down all along? Faliveno plays with some fun gothic tropes--the isolated setting, a mind fraying--and it's especially satisfying to see these transposed onto the Upper Midwest, which is captured here in both its beauty and ugliness. The novel doesn't have the taut pacing one might expect of a story that should be suffused with dread and suspense, though, and the connections between its themes--grief, addiction, class, sexuality--and its eerie plot elements never quite become clear. A debut novel that can't quite tame its wild and promising elements. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
