Home » Posts tagged "Jessica McHugh"

Book Review: Hares in the Hedgerow (The Gardening Guidebooks Trilogy #2) by Jessica McHugh

Hares in the Hedgerow (The Gardening Guidebooks Trilogy #2) by Jessica McHugh

Ghoulish Books, 2022

ISBN: 9781943720767

Available: Paperback, Kindle edition

Buy:  Bookshop.org

 

Little did readers of Rabbits in the Garden, the first book to introduce Avery and her crazy mother Faye in The Gardening Guidebooks Trilogy, realize the full extent of the horror to come. As Avery tries to face her demons in the next book, Rabbits in the Hedgerow, by beating them out of her willing counselor while raising her sister’s daughter (Sophie), she slowly learns her mother Faye’s backstory as leader of a demented cult devoted to St. Agnes.

 

The central character in the new narrative, Sophie, is in terrible danger because she has been the victim of her boyfriend Liam’s machinations to bring her into the cult as its central figure. Sophie is blinded by her love for Liam as well as what she believes are her mother’s past crimes. Luckily, however, Sophie is smart enough to sort fact from fiction in time to make important decisions before Faye, her grandmother, leads everyone to their doom. 

 

In Hares in the Hedgerow, McHugh drives us full force into the psychological twists and turns of a cult’s sickness and the damaged minds of its victims. There is no shortage of physical violence in this book. We see the devastation of human lives up close, and it is unrelenting. The plot is a carefully layered history of three generations of women who have been their own worst enemies as well as destroyers of the people around them. Anything can happen, but none of it is going to be good.

 

Just as in the first book in the trilogy, the second is fast-paced with past and present events illuminating our understanding of the characters and leading to yet another explosive ending. But, just as compelling as the momentum is the way McHugh makes us believe we are looking into the minds of real people, the type that would have followed someone like Charles Manson. There is the fear we feel for the characters but also the fear we feel for ourselves knowing that fanaticism and a skewed perception can, in fact, exist side by side in the real world and that everyday people sometimes create horror and then willingly enter into it in senselessly appalling ways. 

 

Reviewed by Nova Hadley

Posted on October 18, 2023 by , Reply

Book Review: Rabbits in the Garden (Gardening Guidebooks #1) by Jessica McHugh

Rabbits in the Garden (Gardening Guidebooks #1) by Jessica McHugh

Ghoulish Books, 2022

ISBN: 978-1943720736

Available: Paperback

Buy:  Bookshop.org | Amazon.com

 

After reading Jessica McHugh’s Rabbits in the Garden, readers will never look at rabbits or gardening tools in quite the same way again.

 

Avery’s mom has a creepy interest in her garden, as well as in keeping Avery and her sister on the straight and narrow when it comes to boys. She is a big believer in correcting people’s negative proclivities with her own brand of vigilante justice… as in, murdering them.

 

Unfortunately for Avery, her innocent friendship with Paul and her weird mother-assigned responsibility for the behavior of rabbits in the family garden lead her to discover the truth about her mother’s evil ways, and put her in danger of spending the rest of her life in a nightmarish insane asylum. Her fellow residents have some serious problems and believe that Avery is trying to hide hers. The staff employs brutal methods designed to punish rather than heal. 

 

Avery struggles throughout the book, fighting against the lies that have been told about her, defending herself against the horrible crimes she has been accused of by her own mother, and dealing with the survival friendships she makes with the mentally ill where she has been imprisoned. The odds of changing her situation seem impossible, and Avery suffers far more disappointments than successes along the way. 

 

Although the restrained language and minimal horrific and sexual detail might appropriately put this story of young love and family dynamics under the YA umbrella for some, an adult reading of Rabbits in the Garden as a coming-of-age horror novel also propels the book over the YA line to older readers who will appreciate McHugh’s excellent storytelling and dynamic style. Even after the worst acts in the book have already been committed, there are always still more to come. Even after the most intense human responses to betrayal, emotional/physical pain and loss occur, there are inevitably still more of those to come too, but in supernatural form. This leads to a fast and furious build up of tension, anxiety, and crushing fear that grow in the shadow of evil and finally explode in the last chapters. 

 

Is Avery a lesson in female empowerment in the fight against injustice or will she be an example of “like mother, like daughter”? This is the first book of The Gardening Guidebooks Trilogy, so we will find out.

 

Reviewed by Nova Hadley

 

Posted on June 28, 2023 by , Reply

Book Review: A Complex Accident of Life by Jessica McHugh

cover art for A Complex Accident of Life by Jessica McHugh

A Complex Accident of Life by Jessica McHugh

Apokrupha, 2020

ISBN-13: 979-8647146519

Available: Paperback, Kindle edition ( Amazon.com )

 

The ghost of Mary Shelley haunts the pages of A Complex Accident of Life by Jessica McHugh. With words insightfully culled from Frankenstein, the blackout poetry in this brilliant jewel of a book captures the tragic intensity, dark fervor, and dramatic suffering of Shelley’s life as well as something totally new, inspired, and relatable.

 

Through startling images of struggle and determination, this collection also reveals the essence of Shelley’s creative imagination as a writer and her mind and heart as a woman. McHugh tells us, “She felt hope like a moon: / A bright heart nothing could extinguish. / She embraced its bounty / And settled passion upon purpose.” Shelley’s words, like gold deposited decades ago in the novel’s text, are mined and skillfully transformed into a contemporary memoir by the talented McHugh.

 

On each page of the book, the reader will find an entire printed poem and then, below it, a copy of the blacked out (in color) page from Frankenstein from which the poem was taken. The pages from Frankenstein are in numerical order, which is astonishing when you realize that the poems do not reflect a narrative that parallels that of the novel, and yet one poem smoothly flows into the next encouraging a slow, thoughtful reading.

 

McHugh has carefully shaped each eloquent verse to stand alone, a sort of reflective snapshot in time. There is something so tender and wounded about these poems; they sometimes seem like private thoughts that should not have been divulged: honest, raw, and deeply felt. McHugh draws us into that place where those thoughts and feelings are simultaneously hers and Shelley’s, and together, they become an expression of universal truths.

 

Jessica McHugh has truly lifted blackout poetry to an entirely new level of remarkable craftsmanship. Highly recommended.

 

Reviewed by Nova Hadley

 

Editor’s note: A Complex Accident of Life is a nominee on the final ballot for this year’s Stoker Awards in the category of Superior Achievement in Poetry.

Posted on March 19, 2021 by , Reply