Daughters of the Wild

July 27, 2020
In Burian’s darkly atmospheric adult debut (after the YA novel Welcome to the Slipstream), two foster siblings confront a supernatural power. Joanie, 19, returns to live with her abusive foster parents, Sil and Letta, and her five foster siblings in 1998 West Virginia after a brief marriage at 16 to Josiah, who died suddenly in mysterious circumstances. Joanie has given birth to a baby boy, never named in the text, and is desperate not to reveal his existence to Josiah’s mother, a powerful woman known as Mother Joseph, out of fear she will claim him. Mother Joseph holds the foster family—and much of the surrounding area—in thrall with a mysterious and intoxicating vine, which Joanie and her foster sisters are duty-bound to tend, in arcane rituals bound up in menstrual cycles. When the baby disappears, Joanie’s foster brother Cello vows to help find him, while pursuing his own dreams of escaping the family and going to college. Flashbacks to Joanie’s brief but unsettling tenure at Mother Joseph’s are interspersed with Joanie and Cello’s narratives, which become intertwined. Physical and psychological abuse, addiction, isolation, and abandonment all play out against a backdrop of overgrowth and decay as Burian makes the characters’ desperation and claustrophobia deeply palpable through vibrant prose. This is worth a look.

Starred review from September 1, 2020
Joanie, Cello, and their foster siblings live on an isolated farm in rural West Virginia. Their existence revolves around the Joseph family, who have worked to cultivate a magical plant called the Vine since the late 1800s. The Vine can heal illness, make people stronger, and even communicate telepathically with the women who work with it. Joanie, who has a deep connection with the plant, has just returned home from an arranged marriage with a Joseph brother. After her husband's death, she was sent back to her foster family and the Joseph cousins who oversee them. Joanie came back pregnant with a son, and Cello formed a deep bond with him. But then Joanie's baby disappears, and they diverge onto different paths: Joanie searching through the Vine, and Cello searching by interacting with the outside world for the first time. This is a powerful and exquisite novel, rooted in the mystical Vine, which guides everything the characters do. Some are twisted by its influence, while others use it for good. Magical realism at its finest.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)