🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 ➕

If the Earth itself (wait, make that the “Universe”) could write, this would be its creation. Deeply wise, there’s a core of truth captured with such aching beauty that the images, ideas, and feelings so seamlessly poured into this work surround you, in the manner of something eternal and infinitely all-knowing.

Grief, angst, the redemptive power of love; Nature, a “grander power beyond his senses”, an immersive all-encompassing healer – how can Tristen, our main protagonist and a sixteen year old boy – dealing with the loss of his father, an emotionally absent mother, raging hormones, buried half-forgotten memories and truckloads of swirling sensitivities he has no idea how to handle – possibly hope to figure it all out?

Gorgeously poetic, with a narrative stream as beautiful as it is extraordinary, this story captures your heart completely and runs away with it – pulling you along on a spellbinding journey that encompasses Tristan’s search for his “forever”; for the meaning of a life held hostage by a soul-crushing conflict between his desire to escape, out-run, dissolve and meld into nothingness, and his raw and caustic yearning for identity, meaning, love, acknowledgement, and the profound solace he craves.

“When it was this dark, this melancholy, he imagined there were secret beings and forces which hung about the air. “

“The end of the world is always approaching. But I can keep moving.”

Written in places with the vivid immediacy of theatre, (see Chapter 2: Ember) this work blew me away with a skill rarely seen in the author’s in-the-moment capture of the raw emotional urgency of a scene unfolding.

As his world comes to a head with the (real or imagined?) fall of a comet, a forest ignited, enchanted woodland gardens and mysterious night-time monstrous happenings, Tristen’s journey, and where it takes him , (no spoilers here), is exquisitely captured, with insight after insight tossed out like dazzling nuggets, – so many, in fact, that that this reader, for one, will want to revisit – this is a book so packed with inspiration that a single reading will not suffice.

My stop today on the @randomttours #blogtour for #BelowTorrentialHill by @JonathanKoven

A great big thank you to the author and the publisher for an ARC of this book. All thoughts presented are my own.