Genre: Magical Realism
Published: Stillhouse Press, March 2025
My Rating: 2.5/5 stars, rounded down
"Jo moves through a world that is doubled, the unreal and the real mapping over each other. Leafwhisper moonsong raintap and the waiting for the phantom feelings of kicks that she knows will come soon. She carries layers of secrets inside her.”
Leafskin is a musing, folkloric magical realist novel about love, family and our relationship with the changing natural landscape around us. Although I loved quite a few elements of this novel, I really struggled to enjoy it as a whole.
What I loved:
Our story follows Jo, a young woman undergoing fertility treatments with her husband Liam in the midst of a harrowing wildfire season. As she’s pondering whether or not it is the right choice to raise a child in the midst of an environmental crisis, an ex-girlfriend re-enters her life and helps her redefine her ideas about connection to nature.
My favourite part of the novel by far is its use of language and writing-style. Both our narrator Jo and the author share a profession as poets, lending an almost hybrid quality to their writing that is somewhere between poetry and prose. Just listen to gems like this one:
“Welcome to the ghost forest, Ness said. Jo had never heard the term before, had never seen anything like these petrified arboreal memories. The tidepools caught their reflections and sunk them all down like doubles, sylvan twins above and below.”
It’s a perfect example of style matching content, that elevates both to a higher level.
The novel investigates relationships, parenthood, queerness and the way those intersect with nature. The views of our protagonist (and the author?) are a little outside the mainstream, which might polarize readers, but is always a perspective worth sharing and exploring. In short: it’ll either resonate with you, or it won’t. For me it didn’t: more on that in the next section.
What I didn’t love:
When you strip away the lyricism, much of the plot boils down to a love-triangle between Jo and her boyfriend Liam, and her (ex-)girlfriend Ness. Specifically the sapphic side of this triangle, including Ness as a character, is heavily romanticized. Their connection is presented as almost preternatural and mystical (which I never felt) and is used to justify continuous cheating and emotional abuse of the boyfriend.
Slight spoilers ahead, because I want to explain why this bothered me so much.
Jo rekindles her sexual relationship with Ness whilst still actively trying for a baby with Liam. Mind you, this is not an open relationship, and Liam is not aware or okay with this. Meanwhile, Ness is revealed to have a series of sexual partners all at the same time, even though Jo thinks the two of them are exclusive. She justifies this by saying that “people like us (referring to artists) don’t claim to own each other like that”… The amount of red flags in this dynamic is staggering, and somehow we’re supposed to support this.
Then, things get even worse. Jo falls pregnant and becomes convinced that the baby is somehow Ness’s instead of Liams. This is obviously incredibly hurtful to Liam, who’s doing everything a good dad should be doing, and yet is put aside in his wife’s mind for a woman who’s not even in their kids life. I don’t know if this represents the authors view, but the romanticization of this toxic relationship, to the point of including the child in it at the end, really put me off of the characters and the story.
Similarly, there’s an aspect of mythologizing a disability (syndactyly in both Ness and Jo’s son) that didn’t feel right to me. Own-voices authors have drawn parallels between the Selkie- and mermaid-mythology and limb-differences before, to great success. Here, it just felt like it was an aesthetic choice to somehow mythologize a disability as a symbol of a closer connection to nature. As a disabled person myself, it gave me the ick.
Overall, I’m giving it 2.5 stars, rounded down due to the strong issues I personally had with the content. Your mileage may vary and I encourage everyone to form their own opinions on personal topics like this.
Many thanks to Stillhouse Press for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.
Find this book here on Goodreads.
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