Black Woods, Blue Sky by Eowyn Ivey

306 pages, Hardcover

Published: February 4, 2025 by Random House

Magical realism/own

I seriously remember writing a review for this one yesterday, but I guess not.

Oh it made me cry at the end, it was just so, I can not say because spoilers. I did not believe I would but that last page. Ack bittersweet.

It is a slow book, but not in a bad way. It is set in Alaska and the pace is just slower. You just live. Her prose is so good and she sets this melancholy mood, and the the need to run away.

The book is about Birdie who lives with her young daughter Emaleen, and Birdie has this urge for more. So she meets a man called Arthur and goes to live with him in the wilderness. In a cabin not fit to live in. Far away from civilization in bear country. But there is freedom there and she craves it.

This is magical realism and she weaves it so well. I believe that would be true.

Oh and the name, seriously how did I not spot it before the end! Makes so much sense.

Well written, and good.

An unforgettable dark fairy tale that asks, Can love save us from ourselves?

Birdie’s keeping it together; of course she is. So she’s a little hungover sometimes, and she has to bring her daughter, Emaleen, to her job waiting tables at an Alaskan roadside lodge, but she’s getting by as a single mother in a tough town. Still, Birdie can remember happier times from her youth, when she was free in the wilds of nature.

Arthur Neilsen, a soft-spoken and scarred recluse who appears in town only at the change of seasons, brings Emaleen back to safety when she gets lost in the woods. Most people avoid him, but to Birdie he represents everything she’s ever longed for. She finds herself falling for Arthur and the land he knows so well. Against the warnings of those who care about them, Birdie and Emaleen move to his isolated cabin in the mountains on the far side of the Wolverine River.

It’s just the three of them in the vast black woods, far from roads, telephones, electricity, and outside contact, but Birdie believes she has come prepared. At first, it’s idyllic, but soon Birdie discovers that Arthur is something much more mysterious and dangerous than she could have imagined, and that like the Alaska wilderness, a fairy tale can be as dark as it is beautiful.