Trapped on a remote Washington island with their dreams out of reach, two sisters clash when a mysterious bear arrives swimming in the channel, forcing them to confront their conflicting desires for escape and connection.
Moody and affecting ... Riding shotgun for the next 270 sparely written pages with such a brittle protagonist proves wearying ... The suspense rises in the last third, when, eschewing the Disneyfication of fairy tales, and cleverly hewing to the darker weirdness of an actual Grimm tale... Phillips rolls out one last, haunting symbol for the bear to embody — the mysterious bonds and dangerous fissures of sisterhood. This gives the novel its slow-burning power.
May remind readers of Alice Hoffman’s fantasy-flecked novels, and Phillips sprinkles around the fairy dust liberally in some sections ... All this is spun with an ever-tightening weave of dread. Wisely, Phillips keeps her book relatively short and uses the story’s narrow focus to emphasize the sisters’ physical isolation. Even the novel’s young-adult tone, which feels cloying at first, soon reveals itself as wholly intentional, a reflection of Sam’s arrested development exacerbated by those two years of covid stasis. Impoverished, alienated and desperately lonely, she’s retreated further than she realizes into a world of fragile hope. When that shatters, as it must, the situation becomes more erratic and dangerous than you know what.
It’s Phillips’ mastery of the world she’s created that firmly roots the reader inside these characters’ psyches — and their story ... Vivid ... An intimate look at misery and what it means to feel unhinged.
