The Removed Review

The Removed   
By: Brandon Hobson
Released: February 2nd, 2021 
Pages: 288
My Rating: 3.5/5

Goodreads Synopsis: 
In the fifteen years since their teenage son, Ray-Ray, was killed in a police shooting, the Echota family has been suspended in private grief. The mother, Maria, increasingly struggles to manage the onset of Alzheimer’s in her husband, Ernest. Their adult daughter, Sonja, leads a life of solitude, punctuated only by spells of dizzying romantic obsession. And their son, Edgar, fled home long ago, turning to drugs to mute his feelings of alienation.
With the family’s annual bonfire approaching—an occasion marking both the Cherokee National Holiday and Ray-Ray’s death, and a rare moment in which they openly talk about his memory—Maria attempts to call the family together from their physical and emotional distances once more. But as the bonfire draws near, each of them feels a strange blurring of the boundary between normal life and the spirit world. Maria and Ernest take in a foster child who seems to almost miraculously keep Ernest’s mental fog at bay. Sonja becomes dangerously fixated on a man named Vin, despite—or perhaps because of—his ties to tragedy in her lifetime and lifetimes before. And in the wake of a suicide attempt, Edgar finds himself in the mysterious Darkening Land: a place between the living and the dead, where old atrocities echo.
Drawing deeply on Cherokee folklore, The Removed seamlessly blends the real and spiritual to excavate the deep reverberations of trauma—a meditation on family, grief, home, and the power of stories on both a personal and ancestral level.

My Review:
I'll be honest, when I first started this book, I did not think I would get into it. I was only about 20 pages in and almost DNF'd it because it felt like I was getting patchy storylines from the four narrators the book follows, and also it was just plain sad to read. However, I am here to say, I am very glad I stuck with it because I thoroughly began to enjoy it and even read this faster than I have a book in a good few months. While I originally did not like the layout the different exerts, I ended up loving that aspect of it. It became a heavily character driven novel (my favorites) and I looked forward to learning more about each family member as their chapters came up. The way the chapters were spliced up turned out to make the entire novel feel more connected and sped up the reading tenfold, in my opinion. Now, I will say, this is not the most uplifting book in the world and it follows a family who is grieving and trying to process the loss of a brother and son years after his sudden death, so if you are in the market for something more positive, I would maybe skip this one for now (add it to your TBR list though!). While the story is heavy and sometimes just plain sad, it is a book that will make you feel for and grow attached to the characters in it.

Catch you later, 

Molly