5/5 stars — devastatingly authentic emotions and a twisty, dark plot

I listened to The Devouring Gray as an audiobook, and I stopped an hour from the end and went back to the beginning because I usually listen to books while doing chores and I felt this story deserved my full attention. On second listen, knowing the basic blocks of the plot, I was able to fully appreciate the emotional nuance that informed each character's decisions. And WOW, there were a lot of emotional nuances!

For a genre like fantasy (particularly YA fantasy, for obvious reasons) that's infamous for main characters with dead parents, I've read remarkably little discussion of the grief that comes with the loss of a close family member. The Devouring Gray is centered on thoughtful examinations of several characters' grief, not just over deceased family members (although the was plenty of that) but over losing friends, relationships, and limbs. And just as in real life, Christine Lynn Herman's characters meet those changes with responses across the emotional spectrum.

I admired and enjoyed many aspects of this book, and they all tied back into the visceral presence of emotion. Herman writes snappy dialogue and juggles the spoken and unspoken parts of a conversation masterfully. Her imagined town of Four Paths is full of secrets; everyone is hiding something, and both the act of hiding and the secrets themselves have the power to cut in multiple directions. This is small-town American gothic at its best: everyone knows everyone, but they don't know as much about their neighbors as they think. Of course, there's the biggest not-secret of all: the Gray itself, a magically created parallel world that contains a monster bent on freedom.

As an older reader of YA, I was particularly happy to read adult characters who weren't flat. Too often, adults in YA and MG are obstacles rather than people, and while there's a place for that, I don't have to look very far back to remember feeling like life would be over after my teens because all the adults I read about were boring at best and dangerously oblivious at worst. Herman's adults have all the same shades of morality as her POV-character teens, and their backstories reveal that they faced the same decisions and difficulties as the protagonists.

It's also rare to read about queer adults outside books specifically about and for queer adults, but it turns out Juniper Saunders and Augusta Hawthorne were in a relationship as teens, which means both of them are presumably attracted to multiple genders since they later married men.

Long story short, starting the audiobook over was the right choice, and it won't be the last time I read this wonderful book! I recommend it to readers who enjoy dark fantasy in general, and specifically to fans of Sawkill Girls and The Hazel Wood. The concept of the Gray reminded me a bit of the Grey Land from Peadar Ó Guilín's The Call, so if you liked that series, you should check this book out too!