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1953. WWII veteran Charles Hawkins sweet-talks his daughter, Lyla, into climbing the family's oak tree and hanging the rope for their tire swing. Eager, Lyla crawls along the branch and ties off a bowline, following her father's careful instructions, becoming elated when he playfully tests the rope and declares the knot to be "strong enough to hold the weight of a grown man. Easy."
But when her father walks out back one November night and hangs himself from the rope, Lyla becomes haunted by the belief that his death is her fault, a torment amplified by her grief-stricken mother, who sneaks up to the attic and finds comfort in the arms of her dead husband's sweaters, and a formidable grandmother, who seemingly punishes Lyla by locking her outside, leaving her to stare down the enormous tree rooted at the epicenter of her family's loss.
Set among the fault-prone landscape of Northern California, The Pale Flesh of Wood is told by three generations of the Hawkins family. Each narrative explores the effects of trauma after the ground shifts beneath their feet and how they must come to terms with their own sense of guilt in order to forgive and carry on.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
February 4, 2025 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9781647428358
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9781647428358
- File size: 4639 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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November 25, 2024
Tucker’s haunting debut unfolds against the whispered brushings of a family tree’s ancient branches, as they rustle through the heartbreak and resilience of the Hawkins family in Northern California. The story follows three generations of Hawkins women, as they comprehend and contend with the suicide of Charles Hawkins: Lyla, Charles’s daughter, who grows up in her father’s shadow, desperate to gain his approval; Caroline, Charles’s grim mother, who watches as her son succumbs to mental illness; and Louise, Charles’s widow, struggling with grief over Charles’s death and stymied by her strained relationship with her teenage daughter.
Tucker writes with incisive depth, exuding a palpable rawness that captures the melancholia of Lyla’s teenage angst. At the center of the story is the old oak tree in the Hawkins’s backyard, a silent witness to the family’s tragedies. Though the story plays out from the perspective of the women in his life, Charles is an extravagant, lushly developed character, his boisterous swagger masking something much darker in his personality. From a young age, long before his service in World War II, Charles struggles with lurking shadows that even his mother’s harsh punishments and doctor appointments can’t banish, an unsettling buzzing of something growing just under the surface of his bubbly, devil-may-care attitude. When he returns from battle, that buzzing magnifies, playing out in his unsteady relationship with Lyla—one minute, he’s her savior, ever-present to catch her, the next he’s the one orchestrating her falls.
Tucker’s careful distillation of tense domestic scenes makes for an atmospheric, page-turning read, one that plumbs the depths of intergenerational trauma and evokes a nagging gloom—where love, no matter how brilliant or far-reaching, just isn’t enough to keep the shadows at bay. As Charles’s actions reverberate throughout the Hawkins family for generations, readers will be transfixed by the women’s steely endurance and brutal fight to “let it all go.”
Takeaway: Evocative rendering of a family’s intergenerational trauma.
Comparable Titles: Celeste Ng; Gabriel García Márquez.
Production grades
Cover: A
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: A
Marketing copy: B+
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