Why didn’t any of the girls get their periods in The Hunger Games? If this question ever crossed your mind, or you aren’t a fan of how the realities of life as a female- or femme-presenting person tend to be brushed under the rug in most novels—for children or adults—A Dark and Starless Forest was written for you.
Written by Sarah Hollowell, A Dark and Starless Forest is an urban fantasy that tells the story of Derry, a teenage Alchemist—code for “witch” in their world, which is ours with a few magical people scattered here and there and generally persecuted a la X-Men—and the eight unrelated siblings (seven sisters and nonbinary sibling Violet) that make up her found family. When eldest sister Jane goes missing and only Derry can hear her voice begging to be found, the siblings must defy their overcautious caretaker Frank, i.e. this book’s Professor X, and venture into the titular woods to find her. The journey to do so will take them out of the woods and into a world populated by spirits and sorcery—a place where they just might belong.
Traditional writing wisdom tends towards the aphorism that good writing is life with the boring bits taken out. This advice usually means readers don’t see the ‘um’s and ‘uh’s,’ the stuttering and pit stops. Sarah Hollowell incorporates them without the word boring appearing anywhere in the reader’s mind. Irene, as a young trans woman, takes hormone blockers, and comes from a family who could accept a transgender daughter but not a magical one. The siblings’ struggles with anxiety and depression are deftly woven into their various supernatural powers, which range from Derry’s abilities to grow flowers from the world around her, including her own skin, to Irene’s telepathy, to the invisible poltergeist that follows the intractable Winnie around. In addition to the LGBTQ+ characters—including Brooke, who is Deaf and sapphic, alongside Violet and Irene—A Dark and Starless Forest features Black and Mexican-American characters as well as fat characters, including the protagonist herself.
Hollowell’s story is not strictly about any one of these markers of identity, but they inform and imbue their characters’ lives with realism in a way wholly without judgement. In a literary landscape that is moving at a snail’s pace away from using marginalized characters’ identities as constant sources of trauma and conflict, many young readers who see themselves in the nine siblings will be able to breathe a sigh of relief. Derry and co.’s troubles come not from what they look like, but rather the magic they can perform—and the authority figures in their lives who seek to tamp down their power. It is in that last bit that Hollowell’s writing strays from subtlety. Her introduction of the main cast is a touch The Baby-Sitters Club, and the foreshadowing she invokes will be heavy-handed for older readers from the start.
Yet, in a world where critics may condone seeing a Deaf character, a fat character, a same-sex attracted character, and a Latina character in books, but balk at seeing all those traits exist in one person, citing, of all things, lack of realism, heavy-handedness may be exactly what we need. For the 8-13 age range, A Dark and Starless Forest may be the first book they encounter that welcomes people of color, people with disabilities, and the LGBTQ+ community into the world of magic. It is the Hogwarts letter half the population never got to receive until now.