Milana Marsenich

Serious problems surrounding run-away children mix with crime, mystery, and a touch of magic to form a potent read.

Juliet has just turned eighteen and lives in a shed on the edge of a small town after escaping abuse from her mother's boyfriend. She's not living the high-life but gets by, which is more than most of the runaways, who flee to the town. But then, many who show up, soon disappear. Juliet has her own problems as she tries to survive with only her tarot cards to earn money from tourists. When she gains the notice of a policeman, he offers to hire her to assist him with the disappearance cases. After all, she has a special connection to the runaways that he could never have. But even with her special skills and a dusting of real magic, searching for clues becomes a dangerous game.

This read dives deep into the serious problem surrounding runaways and the situations they try to escape from. It doesn't go into details, which keeps it appropriate for the young adult level, but still tugs at the heartstrings and makes the terrible circumstances clear. Juliet's background clicks her solidly into the group, gaining not only sympathy but also a bit of respect. Her life is far from perfect, but she's dealing with everything the best she can and doesn't play the victim. Even her attitude toward her mother is level-headed. She takes risks but isn't stupid and is easy to root for the entire way through.

The mystery is very well laid. Each step brings the solution closer, and while some aspects fall obviously into place, enough pieces remain in the shadows to make it a grabbing read until the end. Juliet finds herself weaving between the police, a tent-town haven for runaways, and several locals, while still maintaining relationships with other runaways and trying her best to string through the suspected villains. This creates a web of subplots, which are as intriguing as the main plot itself.

It's a read, which hits upon several difficult themes and eases in tons of heart. Add the dusting of magic, and it's a rich tale with so much to enjoy and dig into until the last page.… (meer)

Most of our stories and images of mining towns are about men, so I was intrigued by this novel about women in Butte, Montana. Copper Sky, by Milana Marsenich, tells the connected stories of two very different women in this town.

The novel starts off slowly, with a lot of repetition of the key facts. We also see our main characters considering their lives… Their choices are hard, but someone walking around town dithering isn’t a page-turner. Stay with the slow scenes and lack of character agency, though, for a worthwhile payoff in the compelling second half of the novel. Those slow-moving scenes helped develop these two women into vivid characters. Readers will care for these two so much by the time their secrets are revealed, and this mining town holds loads of secrets.

After growing up in town’s orphan home and tragically losing her sister, Kaly Shane is a sex worker. There are a lot of working girls in town, serving the miners who don’t have wives or who haven’t brought their families out west. Kaly’s newly pregnant, and basically everyone in town knows, except the baby’s father. I was intrigued by the drama, but also wanted to see where this was going.

At the same time, Marika is dealing with an arranged marriage by not dealing with it. She doesn’t refuse and she doesn’t accept and try to make the best of it, she just kind of drags her feet. Again, I was intrigued, but wanted some action. Marika wants to be a doctor, blending the herbal concoctions and folk remedies from her grandmother with modern medicine, but of course this isn’t an easy option for a young woman.

What seemed like a slow beginning and lack of character agency actually highlights the powerlessness of women in this city. The men are engaged in dangerous, grueling, and occasionally very profitable work, while the women try to cope as their husbands, fathers, fiances and friends risk going to work one day and never coming back. Every woman’s life has been touched by tragedy in the mines. They’re only reacting, not controlling these events.

In addition to Kaly and Marika, we also meet Bethie, another prostitute with an opium habit. Like Kaly, she turned to sex work as the only way to support herself, and she relies on her friendship with Kaly, opium, and an unsuitable “romance” to keep herself happy. Her madam is blunt about hiring only the youngest, prettiest girls,and blunt about the work they do. While she’s meant to be unsympathetic, I couldn’t help seeing the hard realities of mining town life in her practical money-making. Even the harsh orphanage matron reveals her reasons for what she’s done, and they’re a result of her own tragedies in life.

I enjoyed the scenes of daily life in Butte so much. This novel showed so many new aspects of life in a mining town. I also found the novel’s ending satisfying and believable, without being overwhelmingly positive, since that wouldn’t have been sense for this setting. At the end of the book, our heroines are on realistic but uplifting paths.… (meer)

Summary: Lilly Connelly can’t wait to turn eleven years old. Eleven is a magical year in the Connelly family. Eleven is imagination and limitless potential. Being eleven is like standing on the top of a mountain, wind in your face, arms outstretched and knowing that with just a bit of magic you could fly.

Lilly lives with her parents and fourteen-year-old sister, Anna, in the mountains of rural Montana. Her photographer father, Sam, drinks a bit too much and looks at the world through his camera. Her mother, Nell, tells Lilly fanciful fables that feed her imagination. Anna spends her days dreaming of marrying her boyfriend.

From her mother’s stories and her own nearly white hair, Lilly fantasizes that she is a soulmate to the trumpeter swans. In her mind, they speak to her. The graceful migratory birds come to the Montana mountains each year to nest and hatch their young. Hunted for their beautiful white feathers, meat and skins, the trumpeter swans are endangered. Lilly and her father witnessed the senseless slaughter of one of their young the previous year. Sam is sure he knows the identity of the swan killer.

In 1929, on the day Lilly turns eleven, the family rides their bikes out to the marsh to see the trumpeter swans. Lilly climbs a tree to get a better view. She sees Anna wandering off in the meadow flowers. She sees her parents smiling, watching the swans, taking photographs. Then she sees a man in a dark green coat shatter her world with a shotgun blast.

Comments: The imagery in The Swan Keeper is very powerful. It is swirl of white—the cold, the snow, Lilly’s hair, the swans, angels, dreams… The white and cold crept into my bones. But the coldest of all is the man in the dark green coat.

This is the kind of book to read by a fire, under a blanket with a cup of something hot to drink. But I think it would not be the kind of book to read in a cabin in the winter forest, alone with nothing but the sounds of the night with my mind listening for the crunching of boots in the snow outside my window.

Themes in The Swan Keeper span generations. I recommend this book for 12 and up.

I received this book to review from the Open Books book reviewer program, BookGlow.… (meer)