by Sarah Beth Durst ★★★★☆
Elisa has been on the move her entire life. And if she told you why, you'd never believe her.
The Warbler, the oddly-named latest offering from Sarah Beth Durst, follows a twentysomething-year-old woman named Elisa Ellert as she works her way down her list of towns with anomalies, hoping to find a clue about a curse that has haunted her family for generations. As Elisa tells us early on, staying in a place too long will cause the women in her family to permanently transform into a tree:
"I was five or six when she first told me about the family curse. It hits the women in our family, my mom said, and it's simply this: we always have to leave. If we stay anywhere too long...if we even begin to consider a place our home...then our skin will harden to bark, our blood will turn to sap, and we will never be able to leave."
Oh, those Ellert women...always looking to "leave", one way or another (sorry, I couldn't resist). Setting aside the bad tree puns, Elisa eventually stumbles upon the town of Greenborough, Massachusettes. She's warned by some girls on her inbound bus ride that "it's the kind of place where people get stuck," but she arrives, befriends the owner of a local bookstore, and finds a place where she can live for a few months as she searches for clues.
There's the obvious mystery to the story—what's the origin of the curse?—but Durst also sprinkles in bits of townplace oddities that fall short of horror but definitely add an edge of creepiness to the story. She also builds in enough doubt to keep the reader wondering if the story's central curse is a manufactured malady from the mind of a madwoman. Durst effectively leverages flashbacks to both Elisa's mother's and grandmother's childhoods to fill in components of the mystery. At its core, though, the story is about destiny, and it explores the expectations others have for our lives, and the paths we choose (or fail to choose) based on those expectations, historical norms, or what is typical.
Durst's Race the Sands was one of my favorite books of the last five years, and while The Warbler doesn't live up to that high mark, it was still a solid and enjoyable offering. This is a good one for mothers and daughters, and will likely be enjoyed by anyone who's ever felt like they were trapped in a life not fully of their making.
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