“Where does someone truly belong? Is it where you came from or where you’re going?“

Gwendolyn Kiste has been on my radar for a while now and I’m sorry to say it’s taken me this long to pick one of her novels up. Though, I’m not sure how I’ll read anything that came before “Velkwood” without the same expectation now. I read this in five hours, putting it down only once in between. What is a very accessible read, and an innovative approach to haunting, did not make it easy to swallow. I think a general truth about a ghost story is, at one point, harm happens. The harm present in this story informs the reality that some inhumanities can create ghosts of living people, the vines of violence twist around everyone close, and that healing is very rarely linear.

I would have liked to see just…more. Kiste did a great job building up the atmosphere and characters, dropped hints towards an inevitable outcome. But, there are a few main characters that I think, if fleshed out more, this would have been a slam dunk: Enid and Grace.

4/5 Hard to make a joke about a sad story but honestly… I’d live there ¯\_(ツ)_/¯