September 25, 2023
The latest from Young (Spells for Forgetting) is a lush if mind-boggling time-travel story set in North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains. June, a 30-something flower farmer in the present day, fears her family’s “curse” has caught up with her. She has “episodes” during which her sense of reality breaks down, and she sees a cigarette-smoking man intently watching her. One day, she comes across a red door in the middle of a field and opens it. She then finds herself transported to 1951, where she meets young farmer Eamon, who claims she’s his wife and is angry that she deserted him and their four-year-old daughter, Annie, a year earlier. The confrontation with Eamon prompts her to have flashes of memory of their marriage, and as she explores this mysterious past, she discovers that her present-day life is tangled with the 1950 disappearance of her mother and the murder of a minister. While the time-traveling plot can be unnecessarily complex and full of seemingly arbitrary rules, the relationship between June and Eamon is touching and the mystery intriguing and suspenseful. Readers will root for June as she tries to find where she belongs.