A Crooked Tree.
Una Mannion.
Faber. 2021. 323 pp.
ISBN 978 0 571 35796 3.
"Out. Get out." My mom said it with her voice low, which let us know she meant it. Ellen reached across Thomas, opened the back door and started to climb out.
"You can't leave her here," Marie said. "It's getting dark. I'm going with her." She started to gather her school bag from the floor of the front.
"You'll do no such thing."
"Wait," said Thomas. He looked stricken, blaming himself for the teasing. Ellen was standing on the gravel verge in her school pinafore, tennis shirt and knee socks. Marie was opening her door when my mother threw the car into gear and accelerated forward.
Libby, who tells this story, is 15, and she describes the events leading up to her sister's ejection from the family car with typical sisterly irritation. Thomas (17) and Ellen (12) have been bickering in the car as their mother drives all five children home from school on the last day of term. Ellen is upset because her mother will not consider allowing her to attend an art summer camp during the holidays. Her mother thinks it "promotional blackmail, sending home brochures in school bags," and this infuriates her. Ellen's art work, however, is exceptional, and later Libby finds a note in Ellen's art folder: "A beautiful and expressionistic portfolio," Ellen's art teacher had written, and she had included a special reference to help Ellen with an application for the Art Academy's summer camp.
We get to know Libby, her family, and her friends well as she tells this story, and she is an interesting story-teller. Her love of the countryside, her awareness of the natural world around her, and especially her passion for trees, is as much part of her character as her love and concern for her brother and sisters. Her teenage half-awareness of the difficulties between her parents is evident, as is her love of her father, who had moved away from the family and who had died just a year before this story begins. "I don't know if I spent so much time with trees because I loved them or because of how much he loved me loving them."
Libby remembers how, when she was "about six," her father had sat her on the washing machine to scrub her feet and told her...
"There's copperheads in those woods Libby—you have to wear sneakers. You can't keep going around barefoot."
Jagged scabs scored my shins from climbing trees and crawling under laurel and rhododendron thickets.
He took my hand and pulled my fingers across the ridge of a particularly bumpy scab.
"See that? You're already turning into a tree. Your legs are becoming bark."
Libby's oldest sister, Marie (18), in spite of having "Hair on one side dyed black and spiked out like Siouxie Sioux's," and wearing Goth clothes, is the sensible one of the family, and the one all the others turn to whenever there are problems, rather than to their mother who always seems to be shut in her bedroom and cross. When Ellen turns up, dirty, blood-smeared and distressed at the house where Libby is babysitting, and is scared to go home because she thinks her mother will be angry with her, it is Marie who arranges for her own friend, Wilson, to pick her up in his father's car; Marie who thinks of the need for "antibiotics and Valium'; and Marie who helps to smuggle her into back into their own house.
Libby dislikes Wilson intensely and can't understand why Marie would want him as a friend. And it is Wilson, and his reaction when he finds out what happened to Ellen, who causes all the subsequent problems and puts the family in real danger.
Una Mannion keeps uncertainty and tension high throughout the book, but she also manages to make Libby a very believable and likable teenager. Libby's life is an essential part of her story, and we come to know about her friendship with Sage, whose family are far better off than her own; her concern for Thomas, who has become withdrawn since their father died; her feelings when Marie moves out to live and work independently; and her difficult relationship with her mother, whose "secret" boyfriend is probably the father of her youngest sibling but is never seen by the other children. There are teenage parties in the hills with kegs and pot; illicit night-time pool-bombing parties at the Mountain Swim Club; there is Jack, who may or may not like her; and there is the secret "Kingdom," a fort she and Sage have created, marked by a crooked tree they imagined "was one the Indians had used as signposts along trails to signal where there was good hunting or soft ground for shelter."
The Kingdom was an enclosure about four feet above the trail and set back in a natural ring formed by a stand of red oak and thick mountain laurel. Inside, deep green moss provided a natural carpet. Sage and I had dug a deep trench to bury a large suitcase filled with supplies: flashlights, batteries, canned food, sleeping bags and pillows—our own nuclear bunker.
The Kingdom comes to play an important part in the story later, when Ellen is kidnapped from the Sun Bowl Fourth of July Firework night. And when Libby borrows the Marksman air gun Marie had kept hidden in her closet, and creeps up as Wilson and Thomas fight with an armed giant of a man, the tension is almost unbearable.
Una Mannion has won several awards for her writing, but this is her first novel. It is set in rural Philadelphia, where she was born (she now lives in Ireland), and partly it reflects her childhood memories of woods and trails. Mostly, however, it is a gripping and beautifully imagined tale capturing Libby's relationship with her siblings and the way they co-operate in the dangerous situations following Ellen's traumatic experience after being ordered out of the car.
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