The witch elm a novel6/7/2023 My feet thumping on the ground, my breath loud in my ears. Sallie’s piercing inhuman high note rising above Zach’s ragged howls. Both were rigid, arms out in shock, and by this time both of them were screaming. “Zach and Sallie were sanding at the bottom of the garden. Recalling the attack, Toby says, “His thumb stabbed into my eye and I yelled and then something hit me in the jaw, blue-white light splintered everywhere and I was falling.”Īnd, the discovery of the skull bears some mention because of the power and poetry of its discovery. The moment Toby’s apartment is raided and he is assaulted makes for tense reading, and there’s no escaping its raw engagement. There is death and violence and darkness in these pages. He has no way of knowing, for example, that his life as it is revealed here is affected by vicissitudes that are more than a little different from “the standard misfortunes you hear about,” to put it mildly. But just as there are limitations to any first-person narrative, there are limits to what Toby is able to see. It is Toby’s voice that guides the tale, with all its charming cadence and understated self-consciousness. Toby’s words that open the novel reveal much about how the novel will proceed.
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