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A review by librosycafe25
The Removed by Brandon Hobson
4.0
"In the fifteen years since their teenage son, Ray-Ray, was killed in a police shooting, the Echota family has been suspended in private grief. The mother, Maria, increasingly struggles to manage the onset of Alzheimer’s in her husband, Ernest. Their adult daughter, Sonja, leads a life of solitude, punctuated only by spells of dizzying romantic obsession. And their son, Edgar, fled home long ago, turning to drugs to mute his feelings of alienation.
With the family’s annual bonfire approaching...Maria attempts to call the family together from their physical and emotional distances once more. But as the bonfire draws near, each of them feels a strange blurring of the boundary between normal life and the spirit world. Maria and Ernest take in a foster child who seems to almost miraculously keep Ernest’s mental fog at bay. Sonja becomes dangerously fixated on a man named Vin... And in the wake of a suicide attempt, Edgar finds himself in the mysterious Darkening Land: a place between the living and the dead, where old atrocities echo."
I've rated this as 3.5 stars, but rounding up since that rating isn't available. Chapters are divided per for protagonists. The foster child is a precocious thoroughly engaging character who could have had his own book. I enjoyed the dynamics between Maria, her husband Edgar, and the foster kid. The beautiful prose of the Cherokee ancestor, Tsala was an addition that enriched the story. However, I did not feel the same way about Sonja and Edgar's storylines. I found myself wanting more about the perpetrator, the police officer than was given in one chapter.
With the family’s annual bonfire approaching...Maria attempts to call the family together from their physical and emotional distances once more. But as the bonfire draws near, each of them feels a strange blurring of the boundary between normal life and the spirit world. Maria and Ernest take in a foster child who seems to almost miraculously keep Ernest’s mental fog at bay. Sonja becomes dangerously fixated on a man named Vin... And in the wake of a suicide attempt, Edgar finds himself in the mysterious Darkening Land: a place between the living and the dead, where old atrocities echo."
I've rated this as 3.5 stars, but rounding up since that rating isn't available. Chapters are divided per for protagonists. The foster child is a precocious thoroughly engaging character who could have had his own book. I enjoyed the dynamics between Maria, her husband Edgar, and the foster kid. The beautiful prose of the Cherokee ancestor, Tsala was an addition that enriched the story. However, I did not feel the same way about Sonja and Edgar's storylines. I found myself wanting more about the perpetrator, the police officer than was given in one chapter.