The Night Weaver (Shadow Grove, Vol. 1) by Monique Snyman

Gigi Publishing, 2018

ISBN-13: 978-1643163031

Available: Paperback, Kindle edition

Seventeen-year-old Rachel Cleary lives in the isolated community of Shadow Grove (it’s unclear how isolated, or how large, it actually is, as it has suburbs, a trendy downtown, three grocery stores, multiple chain stores, and a rundown nine-story apartment building, but also wooded areas and farms)  next to a mysterious wood that people know better than to explore. Disappearances and strange deaths, especially of children, go without investigation by the sheriff’s department and are apparently unnoticed by the town’s population… except for the local high schoolers, who have organized to protect younger children and impose a curfew, and Rachel’s eccentric neighbor, Mrs. Crenshaw.

Mrs. Crenshaw’s delinquent nephew, a good-looking Scot with an impenetrable accent, happens to be in town. While he and Rachel are driving home from a party, they are attacked by a creature he recognizes from Scottish folklore, a Black Annis (also known as the Night Weaver), which steals and eats children. Although Mrs. Crenshaw tells Rachel the town council has conspired to eliminate all records of past incidents, it turns out that Rachel’s deceased father, a historian who didn’t believe in computers, has boxes of handwritten journals on the history and legends of Shadow Grove that are stored in her attic. They discover a pattern: the disappearances have happened before.

Then Rachel notices that her mother, and a number of other women in town, are behaving oddly: they have all emptied their closets and dressed in gray. She decides to consult her estranged friend Greg, whose family has strong roots in the town, and see if together they can find additional information about the Night Weaver and, possibly, what both of them have been calling the “moms’ club.” Greg realizes the factor all the women have in common is that they participated in the same grief support group, and after Rachel witnesses what appears to be a nighttime visitation to her mother of her father, they discover together that the Night Weaver feeds on grief and despair. Rachel and Greg realize that the Night Weaver is manipulating the members of the “moms’ club” into taking and delivering children to it, in order to have visitations from their deceased loved ones. And then a drug-dealing fairy prince named Orion gets involved, and things start to get REALLY convoluted.

Before I ever started this book, I knew the author, Monique Snyman, was from South Africa, and I was curious to see what she would come up with. Interestingly, she chose to set her book in the United States (I’m guessing Michigan, although she never actually says where it is located). Her premise is original– I hadn’t heard of the Black Annis, and the idea of a creature that plays on the feelings of members of a grief support group is interesting to me (although on a personal level, I have difficulty suspending my disbelief that grieving parents would intentionally cause the same kind of grief to others) I also liked that the high school students were portrayed as independent and resourceful (for the most part). There is also some very impressive full-color artwork representing the Black Annis in different places in the book, which definitely added to the creepiness factor.

However, I also found some real issues with the book. The first noticeable issue was that the book is written in present tense, which is jarring at times, especially at the beginning. The second is Dougal’s nearly impenetrable Scottish accent. I understand this is supposed to reinforce his background, but it really disrupted the flow of the story for me to have to translate in my head before I could move the story forward.

Outside of these two issues, the setting is problematic. Snyman refers to Shadow Grove as an isolated small town– to me, that evokes a setting like Twin Peaks. And the story itself seems intimate. The town has a single law enforcement official (a sheriff) and a relatively small group of people are involved in the actual story– my mental picture was maybe a few thousand at most. But what she is describing is more like a small city, which can’t be terribly isolated if it has multiple grocery and chain stores and most certainly would have federal agents on the ground with so many missing children.

Snyman also seemed to leave her various male supporting characters at loose ends. I like that Rachel is the leading character, and that the supporting male characters aren’t all necessarily love interests, but when Rachel moved on from working with Dougal (whose bad-boy persona dropped pretty quickly) to Greg (who she had a history with) they just kind of stopped whatever it was they were doing until the next time they were needed for a plot point. It’s still sort of unclear to me why Snyman had Greg lead Rachel to Orion and then leave her alone with him.

There were also a few comments and incidents that rubbed me the wrong way. Early in the book, Dougal makes a reference to spoiled American girls and Rachel says. “Well, that’s mildly racist.” I’m surprised an editor didn’t catch that, as “American” is not a race.  Shortly after meeting Rachel, Orion, the drug-dealing fairy prince, pins her up against a wall, against her will, drugs her, and takes her cell phone.  Afterwards, he claims it’s because he needs to do this in order to share essential memories, but starting these two out with a nonconsensual assault made it hard to believe they could be equal partners in defeating the Black Annis.

Despite these problems, I found Rachel’s relationships with Dougal, Greg, and Mrs. Crenshaw interesting enough to want to learn more about these characters. As this is the first book in a series, I expect that Shadow Grove and its denizens will be fleshed out and smoothed over more successfully in future volumes, and it will be interesting to see where Snyman goes with it.

Editor’s note: The Night Weaver is on the final ballot for the 2018 Bram Stoker Award in the category of Superior Achievement in a Young Adult Novel.