S. F. Prescott

A compelling voice!

Abby Geni is the author of The Wildlands, The Lightkeepers, The Last Animal, and The Body Farm, which will be published May 7, 2024. Her books have been translated into seven languages and have won the Barnes & Noble Discover Award and the Chicago Review of Books Awards, among other honors. Her short stories have won the Glimmer Train Fiction Open and the Chautauqua Contest. Geni is a faculty member at StoryStudio Chicago and frequently serves as Visiting Associate Professor of Fiction at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

This is the first novel by Abby Geni that I’ve read and it won’t be the last. After reading the premise I knew I had to pick this one up. The author’s voice immediately drew me in, hooking me in the opening scene. Compared to other books in the genre, it includes an angle of Viking folklore I haven’t read much about, and enjoyed how it was incorporated into her family history and her childhood experiences. The life Liv and her brother, Finn, endured under their father, Ulf, felt claustrophobic and weird, but I’m always drawn into an isolated setting. It’s one of my favorite literary tools for tension and suspense and Geni executed it perfectly. The detail around them being homeschooled, and taught to read Swedish and Viking literature was also interesting. And the eventual realization of what their father was capable of was after the FBI raid was disturbing, followed by their placement in the foster system.

The story gripped me throughout, but the pace was a little inconsistent. I prefer a steady escalation and I found some of the chapters very fast paced while others were much slower, especially when describing the Viking folklore. I loved that Liv and her brother became beekeepers to live a more peaceful existence after everything they endured. Overall, this was psychologically gripping, and the flashbacks of their childhood were vivid and brutal. If you like stories about crime, trauma, and survival pick this up.

Synopsis:

As an adult, Liv leads a quiet life, tending to the beekeeping business that supports her and her brother. But when a dead body is discovered in her town, she is forced to grapple with a legacy of violence from when she was small.

As a child, she shared a home in rural Iowa with her brother Finn and their father Ulf. Swedish-born Ulf, a direct descendant of the infamous Erik the Red, raises his children as if they are Vikings. They are homeschooled, speak only Swedish, learn swordplay and archery, celebrate the Norse holidays, and worship the old gods with blood sacrifices.

But when Liv is fourteen, her family’s sanctum is broken apart by an FBI raid. Separated from their father, Liv and Finn must learn to adapt to normal life.

Now, twenty years later, Liv and Finn have changed their last names and moved to Haven, Michigan. Through her work as a beekeeper, Liv meets Penny, a secretive, unusual, beguiling woman. Just as her life is beginning to open up in new ways, Liv notices a strange and upsetting pattern in the area around Haven: men are disappearing. As she tallies up the missing, she senses disturbing similarities to her own father’s crimes.

While she’s thrown back into the uncertainty she felt after Ulf’s arrest, Liv, struggling to hold on to what she knows to be true, must decide how to proceed: whether to involve Finn and Penny in her suspicions, leave the whole matter alone, or take action to solve—and stop—the same kind of violence she always hoped to escape.