Black Woods Blue Sky by Eowyn Ivey (botanical illustrations by Ruth Hulbert) is a 306 page novel published in 2025 by Random House.
Genre:
Magical Realism, Literary Fiction
Opening Line:
Birdie knew her mistakes as soon as she cracked open her eyes.
Synopsis:
An unforgettable dark fairy tale that asks, Can love save us from ourselves?
Birdie’s keeping it together; of course she is. So she’s a little hungover sometimes, and she has to bring her daughter, Emaleen, to her job waiting tables at an Alaskan roadside lodge, but she’s getting by as a single mother in a tough town. Still, Birdie can remember happier times from her youth, when she was free in the wilds of nature.
Arthur Neilsen, a soft-spoken and scarred recluse who appears in town only at the change of seasons, brings Emaleen back to safety when she gets lost in the woods. Most people avoid him, but to Birdie he represents everything she’s ever longed for. She finds herself falling for Arthur and the land he knows so well. Against the warnings of those who care about them, Birdie and Emaleen move to his isolated cabin in the mountains on the far side of the Wolverine River.
It’s just the three of them in the vast black woods, far from roads, telephones, electricity, and outside contact, but Birdie believes she has come prepared. At first, it’s idyllic, but soon Birdie discovers that Arthur is something much more mysterious and dangerous than she could have imagined, and that like the Alaska wilderness, a fairy tale can be as dark as it is beautiful.
My Thoughts:
Oh, my heart! I loved this!
This story is saturated with love for the beauty and harshness of the Alaskan wilderness. It’s about 26 year old Birdie and her 6 year old daughter Emaleen scraping by at the Wolverine Lodge, where Birdie works as a server (and sometimes parties too much). Their paths cross with that of Arthur, an odd local man who only makes occasional appearances in town, as he lives up in the mountains on the other side of the river. In Arthur, Birdie sees the kind of life she wants – one closer to nature, away from societal pressures and vices. She and her daughter move out to his rustic cabin with him. But there’s something strange about Arthur…
It wasn’t the manic, head-spinning high she’d always chased. Instead, it was like she’s been kept in small box without any holes to let in the light or air, but now she’d climbed out and could fill her lungs with the fresh mountain breeze.
I liked all of the characters, even if they frustrated me at times. They are certainly not perfect. Birdie loves her daughter fiercely, but doesn’t always prioritize the right things.
Her mom knew how to do lots of things. She knew how to find blueberries and catch fish and shoot a gun, but Emaleen was worried that she didn’t know how to keep them safe.
The “dark fairytale” part of this story I think hammers home the idea that you can’t ask anyone, man or beast, to be better than their nature – you can’t even ask it of yourself.
“Peculiar how similar they are, the stories about bears. All down through the ages…Berserkers and shape-shifters. Wild sows taking in abandoned human babies and raising them as their own. Women falling in love with boars. Girls being abducted by bears and giving birth to their children in mountain caves. Russia, Europe, North America, Japan…Again and again. Did you know, there was a whole lines of Danes who believed they were the descendants of bears?”
“Have you ever seen one skinned out before?”
“What? Oh…a bear? Yeah, years ago. A black bear. When I was a kid. Grandpa Hank shot it on the homestead.”
“You remember what it looked like?”
“Like a person.”
“Exactly. The hands, the feet, the muscles in the legs and chest, you peel back that hide and it could be your brother under it all.
It was tempting, then, to draw a direct line from us to them, to forget the unfathomable void between a man’s moral judgment and a bear’s wild mind.
I spent most of this book liking it well enough, but the last 25% or so broke my heart in the way that some of my favorites do. A beautiful story!
It was bewildering, how closely grief ran alongside joy.
(Hot take version: if you like books about the beauty of Alaska but Kristin Hannah’s writing makes your eyes roll out of your head, and you wouldn’t mind a story that features women making stupid decisions in regards to bears but couldn’t stand the characters in Julia Phillips’ Bear, try this book instead!)
