Readers who enjoy murder mysteries will encounter intrigue, secrecy, and surprises in McCormick Templeman’s new book, The Little Woods. Set at St. Bede’s Academy, an upscale boarding school in California, the novel features 17 year old Calista Wood (Cally) who claims membership in the “dead family members and drunken moms” club. A mid-year transfer student looking for opportunity, Cally escapes her dead end home life inPortland and undertakes the Cally Wood Social Integration Project, but she struggles to find solid footing among the hipster debutantes and sybaritic males; the catered breakfasts and competitive natures of these privileged, Yale and Harvard bound students are just not her scene. Being an outsider on scholarship also sets her apart. Cally knows that adolescents have an uncanny sense for family dysfunction and disadvantage—as if she is an injured member of the herd, the privileged shun her so that when the predators come, they are no where close to become victims of collateral damage.
Rich with allusions to numerous classic texts—most notably to Homer’s The Odyssey—and to contemporary media like the Addams family, the book offers many opportunities for character connections, including Cally’s namesake. Derived from the Greek name of a huntress in the myth of Calisto, Cally is hunting for answers to both Iris’s and her sister’s disappearance, a pair of puzzles that grows more convoluted as multiple suspects surface and secrets get revealed.
Besides this core conflict of girls disappearing in a haunted woods, Templeman’s book realistically describes adolescence with all of its challenges, temptations, and effort at finding acceptance. In her confusion, Cally aptly states: “No matter what I might do or try, I [realized that I] was still a work in progress and I was raw and aching, straining to make myself fit into something stable when the world around me was constantly morphing” (249-250). As the intrigue thickens, Cally grows more persistent, determined to solve the puzzle box of clues and to unravel the truth from the deceit.
- Posted by Donna