July 2007

A Dream of Drowned Hollow By Lee Barwood
Double Dragon Publishing (2006), ISBN 1-55404-320-4
Reviewed by Paula Chaffee Scardamalia

Paula Chaffee Scardamalia is an author, speaker, coach and weaver. Her new book, Weaving a Woman's Life: Spiritual Lessons from the Loom was released in April. She also writes book reviews for Foreword Magazine. A dream inspired her to write her fantasy novel, The Shadow Weaver, loosely structured on the fairy tale Sleeping Beauty.

There's old places in the world, where dreams was born and died ages before sleep and waking came to the parts of the earth we think about now as ancient. There's high places in the world, where magic lifts up its heart to the moon under a night sky close enough to touch.

The Ozarks is one of those places and in A Dream of Drowned Hollow, the author, Lee Barwood, uses this place of ancient mountains and old forests to create her unique contemporary tale of myth and magic. Here the age-old battle of good and evil takes place with the necessary elements of love and betrayal, plus the added twist of ghosts and nature spirits, set within the story of an ecological battle between a nature-fearing developer and those whose family roots are literally sunk deep into Ozark soil.

April Rue attends college, paying for her first year's tuition with the scrimped savings her father left her after his unexpected death. Constantly worried about how she is going to continue and even earn a living after her degree, April Rue encounters a professional photographer who is shooting the campus grounds for a book. He gratefully accepts April Rue's offer to show him the best sites and in return teaches April Rue the basics of using a camera, gifting her with one of his old ones weeks later.

With it, April Rue discovers she not only has a good eye for the beauty of nature around her and an ability to earn an income with it but she has a "gift"—she can see and photograph things most people can't, the ghosts of the past and the future.

Using this special gift, April Rue is compelled one day to take a series of photos around the area of her grandmother's home in Blackburn County. What she sees frightens her and her grandmother so badly that the grandmother suffers a heart attack. The frightening images not only reveal the truth behind numerous unexplainable accidents, suicides, and disappearances in the area, but also show the future destruction and flooding of Blackburn County and the death of those she knows and loves.

Unaware that developer and boss Trevor Dalton is lying to him about his commitment to ecological concerns, Owen is the one who unwittingly called Dalton's attention to Blackburn County as the site for a possible resort. But when he sees the photographs April Rue has taken that show the violent and lethal means Dalton has used to buy up property in the area, Owen vows to stand by April Rue and do what he can to help right the wrongs done to the land and its people.

With Owen's help, April Rue uses her unusual gift to restore the natural balance to her community in a final scene that can have even nature lovers looking at trees, rivers, and caves with more than just a little respect.

This book won Andre Norton's Gryphon Award and, in the last two-thirds of the book, I can understand why. As someone who lives in the country and has heard the buzz of a chainsaw cutting trees, seen the charm of dirt roads paved over, and had peaceful solitude broken by the sounds of ATVs, April Rue's frustration and horror at the devastation to nature, and her commitment to make a change even at the expense of her own life are completely sympathetic. But if I hadn't been committed to reading the book, I might not have read the more important scenes because the first third of the book moves too slowly, weighed down by a lot of back story. Too, the point of view often shifted jerkily back and forth from a storytelling style, omniscient point of view to more intimate points of view within characters.

Nevertheless, the characters and the story are original, the setting creates a strong sense of place, and the theme of respect for and preservation of the environment is an important one.

It would be lovely if all of our ecological concerns could end as happily as those in A Dream of Drowned Hollow. But then, maybe the ghosts of the land are just biding their time.