Crooked River by Valerie Geary
My rating: 3/5 cats
this is a coming-of-age family story/mystery novel with ghosts and family seeeeecrets.
and for some reason, i am having a really hard time writing a review for it. i have been sitting on it for months, trying to come up with something useful to say, and coming up empty every time.
it’s about a fifteen-year-old girl named sam and her younger sister ollie who go stay with their estranged(ish) father after the death of their mother. bear, their father, lives off the grid in a teepee in the middle of a meadow, where he raises bees.
bees???
bees.
shortly after the girls arrive, the body of a woman is found floating in the crooked river, and bear becomes an easy suspect for the crime, given his proximity, eccentricities, and some physical and anecdotal evidence. sam and ollie both know that their father is innocent; sam because of her confidence in her father’s goodheartedness, and ollie because the ghosties tell her so. ollie has not spoken since her mother’s death, but she has always seen spirits, or “the shimmering,” and although she can’t say what she knows, she and her sister become baby-sleuths, trying to clear their father’s name and also uncover the truth about why he left them to go live in his isolated teepee to begin with.
it is more successful as a family story than as a mystery. the girls themselves are sweet and determined, and brimming with the confidence of youth, despite their unusual and potentially scarring upbringing. the discoveries they make about their father’s past are interesting and fairly unexpected, although the resulting abandonment of his family seems perhaps a little extreme.
the process of the amateur murder investigation is fun and engaging, but its resolution is a little weak. while, technically, it is fair play because it incorporates things that happened previously in the text, it also suffers from a View Spoiler »
so if you go into this expecting to get more of a light-paranormal family drama than a gripping mystery thriller, you should find it satisfying, if a little uneven in its execution.
but beware the bees…
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