Review: 'The Wilderwomen' weaves fantasy and realism with humor and a twist of mystery
The haunting second novel by Ruth Emmie Lang, who lives outside Cleveland and wrote the Ohioana Book Award finalist “Beasts of Extraordinary Circumstance,” lightly blends fantasy into the emotionally rich story of two sisters searching for the unstable mother who abandoned them.
Zadie Wilder is 18 and her half-sister Finn 13 when their mother Nora leaves their San Antonio home without explanation. With the fathers of both girls long gone, Zadie is left on her own and Finn is taken in by a foster family.
Five years later, Zadie has just broken up with her boyfriend and discovered that she is pregnant, and Finn is graduating from high school. Zadie has plans to take her down to Galveston for a week at the beach, but Finn has other ideas. She wants to search for their mother.
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Both are better equipped for this search than the average young adult. Like their mother, both have had psychic abilities since childhood. Zadie has flashes of premonition, though “like an outdoor cat, her premonitions came and went as they pleased.”
Finn is able to sense the memories of others left behind in a place, not usually “complete memories, just sensory fragments: the sound of a doorbell, the drag of water running through hair, the sour scent of newly laid mulch.” If she concentrates, she can sometimes tell who the memories belong to. And if she concentrates too hard, she sometimes get caught up in them to the point where she loses consciousness of where she actually is, putting herself in danger.
Zadie reluctantly goes along with the plan to use their abilities to look for their mom, though she'd rather be camped out on the beach reading romance novels.
Following an uncertain and constantly shifting path, they make their way to a hidden trailer park near Sedona, where they meet the members of a community equipped with various psychic powers, including one who can hear and transcribe the songs of stars, and where they acquire a painted stone that hints at where their mother might have gone after leaving the camp.
Then they journey onward to a dormant volcano, a farm in Washington and the shores of the Pacific Ocean.
Those willing to take a leap of faith can take the experience of the young women literally; the more skeptical can consider the psychic abilities as metaphors for the way memories, hopes and fear affect us all.
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The road trip provides a solid structure for the novel, both heightening the already complicated relationship between the two sisters and allowing for the introduction of new characters and places that aid or impede their quest and up the suspense.
Chapters reflecting on Nora's experiences during the year before her disappearance round her out as a character and fill in gaps in the reader's knowledge.
Lang delicately balances mythic material and psychological realism, lightened with touches of humor, as the novel twists towards an ending both surprising and satisfying.
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: The Wilderwomen blends fantasy, reality in tale of two sisters
