First Impressions Review: Other Words for Smoke, by Sarah Maria Griffin

 


            This book pulls the difficult trick of starting at the end without, somehow, giving too much away beyond the fact that teenage twins Mae and Rossa survived some kind of fire-related disaster, and that two (or possibly three) other people went missing:

“While the papers flooded with tributes, it seemed to Mae that nobody remembered that Bevan and Rita had kept themselves to themselves…Rita was kind and Bevan was beautiful – this is what remained. This and the smell. They talked about it for years…Great billows of it carried on the wind down over the village and the motorway: smoke, sweet and dark.”

            Mae and her twin brother first visit the house on Iona Crescent inhabited by their great-aunt Rita, when they are fourteen – dumped there by parents trying to deal with their failing marriage. Mae is enchanted by Rita’s pretty teenage neighbor Bevan (who she develops her first serious crush on) and by the fact that the two appear to be witches: They read tarot cards – a skill they are willing to teach her – and Rita’s unsettlingly large cat can talk. However, darker things appear to be afoot. In Bevan’s second person perspective:

“You pluck out a slender wand of bone…then place it against the wall like a painter with a brush full of crimson. You press, and the surface gives way like wet sand. It eats the bone and his voice says, more.”

            There’s an older storyline that matter here, too, one that involves the old Magdalene Laundry that looms over the town, and Rita’s two girlhood friends – one of whom she loved more than she was meant to. I’m not sure if I can fully explain the themes of this book, but desire - for love, for knowledge, for a special destiny - and loss both loom large over everything:

“It happened in the middle of the afternoon, in the sun drench of the early summertime, long after the worst had happened. Just at the beginning of the continuing lives of those who had lost their friend…The world split, a hairline crack in reality that shone like iridescence and madness.”

            I bought this thinking to test it out as a potential gift for my niece, a fellow fan of the queer and witchy. While not a perfect book (I can’t quite figure out when in the timeline Rita found time to go learn yoga in San Francisco, for instance), it was the blend of spooky and unsettling - but not too much so for a young teen reader – that I was looking for. There is a moral greyness to the magic-users/magical creatures in this book that I wasn’t expecting, but did find interesting.

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