Published on September 4th, 2018 by Algonquin Young Readers
Genres: Paranormal
Format: ARC
Source: Publisher
Pages: 304
Goodreads
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Bina has never forgotten the time she and her mother ran away from home. Her mother promised they would hitchhike to the city to escape Bina’s cruel father and start over. But before they could even leave town, Bina had a new stepfather and two new stepsisters, and a humming sense of betrayal pulling apart the bond with her mother—a bond Bina thought was unbreakable.Nova Ren Suma has long been an auto-buy author for me. I've even listed her as my favorite author quite a few times. Ever since I read Imaginary Girls one million years ago, I've been hooked on her storytelling and her words, buying a loving all of her work available to me. Coming off the high of The Walls Around Us meant I was desperate for more of her writing. This book couldn't get to me quickly enough.
Eight years later, after too many lies and with trouble on her heels, Bina finds herself on the side of the road again, the city of her dreams calling for her. She has an old suitcase, a fresh black eye, and a room waiting for her at Catherine House, a young women’s residence in Greenwich Village with a tragic history, a vow of confidentiality, and dark, magical secrets. There, Bina is drawn to her enigmatic downstairs neighbor Monet, a girl who is equal parts intriguing and dangerous. As Bina’s lease begins to run out, and nightmare and memory get tangled, she will be forced to face the terrible truth of why she’s come to Catherine House and what it will take for her to leave...
I'm sad to say that even though I did like this, I didn't love it. I don't know if it was me or if it's the book, but there's definitely a spark missing here.
I really loved the first half, though. Suma's words are simply beautiful; she has a style all her own that honestly makes me jealous as an aspiring writer. I love how she is able to create this intricate world and family dynamic in such a short period of time. One great strength of this book is the complicated relationship between Bina and her mother. It's not a relationship I'd like to have with my own daughter, but it is one that feels authentic and realistic and messy in a real-world sort of way. Bina half worships and half hates her mother, and her mother is her own messy entity with secrets and a veneer not easily cracked. Learning about Dawn through Bina was painful but thought-provoking and made me reflect on my own experiences with learning that my parents were humans who made mistakes.
Suma knows how to write girls. She makes her characters fallible and messy and sometimes irrational and always angry. If you look across her body of work I don't think you'd find anyone who has better tapped into the teenage girl psyche. Bina and Monet's rocky, cat-and-mouse relationship is the perfect example. This entire boarding house is the perfect example. The world of this book and everyone in it felt so real. Especially in the first half of the book, it was hard to remember that this wasn't someone's memoir.
However, the second half just did not live up to all the first half promised. The middle certainly dragged. The biggest downfall for me was that there were so many secrets, so many things not coming together or making sense. The characters were treating Bina weirdly. There were so many questions. By a certain point in a book, you expect these questions to be answered. You should start putting the pieces together yourself, maybe just a little bit before the main character does. But these things never came together! I kept expecting Bina to just force their hands, to make them explain to her. I expected her to finally break open the brick wall and find those answers herself if the others weren't willing to give them to her. But pages just kept going by with Bina not pressing for answers, not doing anything at all. It was frustrating and for the first time ever, made me not want to pick up a Nova Ren Suma book. It was depressing.
Now, Suma's books have interesting endings. They're often a little open-ended, hard to pin down, slipping out of your grasp at the last second. They take me a moment to digest and understand. I expect that now, after reading all of her YA titles. But this? This was just downright confusing. I mean, understand (mostly?) what happened. But I don't understand the significance of a few things. I especially don't understand the specifics of how a lot of the details actually worked. We only figure out what went down at like 95% of the way through the book. I need a clearer explanation or someone to hold my hand and walk me through it.
I think that maybe a lot of this was on me. I had high expectations. The Walls Around Us was an absolute masterpiece, but more than that, all of Suma's books feel like they were written specifically with me in mind. They're exactly what I love: an authentic story about a girl so real you feel like you know her, with some paranormal/magical bits swirled in, a mystery to solve, and gorgeous writing. And a lot of that was delivered in A Room Away From the Wolves. But there was a missing piece for me, a clearer, more definitive answer that I'm looking for; a sharper connection to the characters; a compulsion to keep reading. That said, I still highly recommend Wolves of course, because I feel like someone smarter than me would understand it, and all of her previous books were amazing, this just wasn't my favorite.
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