Make "Beyond Mulberry Glen" your January read
A Review of Beyond Mulberry Glen by Millie Florence, published by Waxwing Books
“There is always light. When it seems as if there isn't, it's an illusion. Just a lie the darkness wants you to believe. You have to break through the illusion.”
Beyond Mulberry Glen by Millie Florence, with illustrations by Astrid Shekels, is Waxwing Books’ first novel.
The binding is beautiful, as one has come to expect from this boutique publishing house, with knee edges on the hardcover spine. The illustrations are simple and engaging, adding a bit of sparkle to each of the pages and at the beginning of the chapters.
What is this book about?
Theoretically, it's about an 11-year-old girl who doesn't want anything to change, as the cover tells us. There are stories within stories and Beyond Mulberry Glen.
Great storytelling is done in layers, with the different layers accessible to the different ages or levels of understanding who access it. Usually, we see this first as a plot with the bigger, global events; second, as the external trial of the protagonist; third, as the interior trial. Each plot or layer has its own arch, its own obstacles, and its own resolution. They each stand alone and are interwoven by the author.
In Beyond Mulberry Glen, the protagonist's unwanted move is to some kind of apprenticeship. Then, within that, family members go missing, and she must leave home to find them. But within that is the struggle that each individual must eventually face of our inward orientation toward hope. And this last plot is the heart of the novel. The question is not so much whether will she/won't she find an apprenticeship; will she/won't she find the missing family members, although this will certainly be the level on which young readers engage most with the story, but in the heart of all that is the question will she or won't she come out in the end okay?
Because Lydia is experiencing something strange that she has not experienced before, it's called The Darkness.
In psychobabble, it is a depressive symptom, a feeling of apathy. In spiritual language, it is sloth, listlessness, and a lack of vigor to move forward or believe.
Cognitively, it raises the question, “What's the point?”
Experientially, it works by dulling her senses.
Spiritually, it is the point at which our actions must go beyond our emotions.
Developmentally, it's the decision to arrive embrace or accept maturity.
We all have to make this choice.
We all have to decide what we will do in the face of difficulty or suffering.
According to Mother Mary Francis, P.C.C., that very decision is the path to holiness.
I thought, as I sat down to Beyond Mulberry Glen, that this would be a quick read, something I could devour relatively quickly since it's written as a middle-grade novel.
But I was wrong. Beyond Mulberry Glen is a book in which English language lovers can delight. It is prose, but author Millie Florence, who first wrote it at age 14 and republishes it now at age 20, chooses such prose.
The reader can detect the love with which she writes and the time she took to craft it beautifully. Her love of language shines on the pages. There are some sentences that betray the inexperience of a young author and ring with a certain sound one finds early on in a person's career, but these are few enough to be noticeable as they go against the grain of the rest of the work. Millie Florence will be an author to follow.
I often tell my young students, “Use better verbs.”
Florence, get this. She uses language to accomplish the most important task in fiction, the task of creating a sense of place and person.
It is with great enthusiasm that I can recommend this book for all ages. I could see myself reading it aloud to my youngsters or playing it as an audiobook.
The story’s gentle shift from internal struggle to external action, to character or scene building, keeps the interest of readers. Three of my six children devoured the book multiple times whole. They loved the action. They love the complexity of the characters. They appreciated that each character had her weaknesses and strengths. Indeed, it is through those weaknesses that the characters find the strength they did not know they had.
God made us who we are. God made the blueprint. And it's through those plans and the way he has crafted us that he plans to bring us to perfection or holiness or self-fulfillment or enlightenment; call it what you will. It won't happen by erasing the qualities that make us uniquely ourselves. Florence understands this and crafts her characters like a fine artist.
It is not an exaggeration to say that this book is excellent.
Beyond Mulberry Glen is available at all major booksellers, but, as always, I recommend you purchase it at your local bookshop, through Waxwing Books, or at Bookshop.org. Publisher Sarah Mackenzie interviews the author at Read-Aloud Revival in episodes #256 and #234.