Wolfwood (Marianna Baer)

Wolfwood
Marianna Baer
Harry N. Abrams
Fiction, YA Fantasy/Horror
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: Seventeen-year-old Indigo Serra has grown up idolizing her mother... or the woman her mother used to be. Once, Zoe Serra was the toast of the New York City art scene, a young rising star whose Wolfwood series of watercolors is still talked about and sought after by collectors. But she hasn't picked up a brush in years, sliding into a deep depression that leaves her unable to function most days. Indigo tries to pick up the slack, working two summer jobs and talking their former landlord into letting them sleep (illegally) in the basement in exchange for cleaning services, sacrificing her own hopes and dreams to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table, but there's only so much a teenage girl can do... which is why, when a gallery reached out to Zoe about completing the Wolfwood series for a new exhibition, Indigo reached back.
She just wanted to give her mother a little nudge, something to get her back in the studio: surely, with the deadline of an exhibition and the interest of major buyers, that would be enough to shake off the crippling self-doubt. Then she thought maybe Zoe would get her confidence back if Indigo transferred the sketches to full-sized watercolor paper... Before Indigo knows it, she's painting the pictures her mother refuses to even look at - and finding out just why Zoe walked away from Wolfwood all those years ago. Whatever she paints, she finds herself living: a nightmare jungle of monstrous plants and silent clones and four terrorized girls, all controlled by an unseen master known only as the Wolf. By the time Indigo realizes the danger, it's too late to stop - even if finishing the Wolfwood series might mean finishing her own life.

REVIEW: Wolfwood is a different, dark fantasy that vividly illustrates the damage done by unresolved trauma and mental illness down through generations, as well as the pain and shame too often endured because of deep poverty.
Indigo has every reason to hate her mother, and in some corner does harbor some anger toward their circumstances, but still loves Zoe deeply and fiercely, sacrificing her own life and future trying to help a woman who can't even admit the depth of her own troubles. For all the girl gives up, though, and hard as she tries, she can't fix someone else, especially when the mother she knows is only one facet of the woman Zoe Serra; flashbacks take the reader back to Zoe's own teenage years in the 1980's, where young love and teenage impulsivity lead her to a small Mexican town with a man she just met and a life that's too good, too naive, to possibly last. It's here that the iconic Wolfwood series of paintings has its roots, for all that Zoe wouldn't actually create them until years later... and it's here, or rather a twisted, nightmare version of the Mexican jungles, that Indigo finds herself transported when she tries to finish her mother's paintings. In the painted world, she takes on the persona of one of the four girls in the pictures who face horrific torments and torture, though it takes Indigo a little long to connect these "dreams" with her mother (especially as she's called "Zoe" by the other girls in the jungle world).
Meanwhile, in the real world, Indigo struggles to juggle this new obligation and deception, fending off increasingly pointed questions from the gallery owner and from an old friend, the owner's son, with whom she used to be close back when life was better and Zoe still worked as an artist. Her impoverished circumstances fill Indigo with dread and shame, not just from having no money or free time but from a nagging sense of guilt that it's all her fault somehow, that if she were a harder worker they'd have more money, or if she were a better daughter she could fix whatever's wrong with her mother just like she fixes their perpetually-malfunctioning refrigerator. There are people she could reach out to for support, places she could turn, but she's so used to hiding the family secrets and shames that it doesn't even cross her mind to try, even as she slips further underwater and the painted world exerts more and more power over her. She starts falling into similar mental patterns that led Zoe to where she is, the paralyzing fears and mental loops that have sapped the woman's will to live. Still, even when she sees from a friend's life how it's impossible to help someone who is not in a position to even try helping themselves, Indigo keeps trying, and failing, to be the perfect daughter and make everything better. The paintings, Indigo's mental health, and Zoe's condition grow darker and more twisted as they near the finale, even as the flashbacks point to the roots of Wolfwood's bleak narrative in Zoe's younger years, building to a reasonably powerful climax. Not everything is magically fixed by the ending, but there is a reasonably satisfactory resolution.
There are times when the twisted tortures of the Wolfwood grow repetitious, and where Indigo's repeated denials that anything unusual is happening when she paints get tiring. A few characters and incidents also felt extraneous by the end. On the whole, though, Wolfwood is an interesting, often dark exploration of art and trauma and family secrets and how the ones we love can sometimes be the ones who hurt us most, even when they don't intend it.

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