My fiction group most recently read Scribe. The novel takes place in an unexplained war-torn landscape in the Blue Ridge Mountains. The main character, an unnamed woman, has somehow manage to eke out an isolated existence in her decaying family homestead, supporting herself by providing writing services to the “Uninvited” refugees who mass on the borders of her property. Then one day she is visited by a stranger named Hendricks, who not only wants her to write his story, but also to leave the safety of her home to deliver it. As the narrative progresses, the uncanny becomes increasingly fantastic. We see our narrator possessed by her dead sister, hallucinate the evil intentions of her neighbors, and get visited by a spirit child guide. What seems to start out as historical fiction slides into fantasy with elements of magic and mysticism.

There are moments of great poetry in the writing but I felt an underlying disorientation in the placelessness and timelessness of the narrative. What has created this post-apocalyptic future/past that has so devastated culture and society? How do the magical elements of the story play into the underlying pre-story? These questions left me (and my reading mates) feeling a little genre confused. So even though we all described “settling into” the reading of this novel and accepting the journey it wove, we were left with many questions.