Thank you for providing this book as part of the 2020 Hugo Awards Voter’s Packet (Lodestar finalist).

This is a lovely book. It has the magic of portal fantasy but also meatier, harder to digest parts that show the torture of living/being raised in an abusive home. Very touching.

YA ( or Middle Grade?) fantasy novel about sisters Eleanor and Mike who escape their stressed, dangerous family situation to the surreal dreamland of the River. Here they encounter various strange creatures, learn about their family's connection to the River and contend with an evil adversary. They discover and set out to repair a series of leaks to stop the River from spilling over into the Real (world) and causing further chaos and dysfunction. I liked the dreamlike nature of the story and the strong relationship of the sisters, who really looked out for each other. Nominated for the 2020 Lodestar Award for Best YA Novel.

Thank you to NetGalley for including this book in the Hugo Award Voter's Packet so that I could make an informed vote (and not have to suddenly buy a lot of books I had missed this last year just to vote).

This book is very imaginative. Two sisters fall into a faerie-type world and manage to return to real life followed by another trip to faerie land, etc.

This, in itself, struck me as unusual. Yes, kids suddenly find themselves with the faeries but, in other books, usually they do not see their home again until the end of the tale. However, there is no rule that states that the homecoming cannot happen prior to the end of the story, even if it means that the kids have to repeatedly switch between the two realms.

Recommended for teens who enjoy fantasy mixed with a bit of realistic fiction [the latter re the kids' relationships with their parents & other adults and with their friends].

This is one of those books that has a stunning premise behind it and I think it talks about some really important issues with sensitivity and grace. I really wanted to love it, and had it been set completely in the real world, I think I would have. Unfortunately the large segments that involve the dream world just didn't work for me at all and perhaps more importantly, I don't think they melded very well with the real world. It felt forced, the two halves not quite fitting together well enough.

Eleanor and Mike and two sisters who share a secret. The secret is house magic; things that are broken or lost are fixed or replaced if you just keep the rules. Or at least that is what Eleanor tells Mike and Mike is young enough to believe her. The fact is though that the rules are important, but not for the reasons Mike believes. If you break the rules, if you make trouble, then dad gets angry. And when dad gets angry, things get broken, mum gets hit and punishments happen.

Fran Wilde does a stunning job at depicting the girl's reality; a life of broken glass, whispers and hiding under the bed. The ways in which Eleanor has found to cope and to shield Mike from the worst of the abuse are starkly portrayed. The ways both girl's perceptions of the world have been skewed and altered by the turbulence of their home life is heart-breaking. The way they dance around the issues with other adults, take the blame on themselves and try to navigate the tight-rope of their father's anger is hauntingly portrayed. I cannot fault these sections of the book.

Where things fall down is in the portal fantasy aspect of the book. At night, Eleanor and Mike find a world in desperate straights through the cracks and the leaks between the worlds. And it just didn't work for me. I was invested in the real world conflict that the girl's were embroiled in, but the whole 'save a fantasy world' bit just didn't sit right. I could see some of the parallels between the fantasy and the reality, but even then they just didn't work well together. And because of this, I felt forced out of the aspect of the story I was really engaged with and into this fantasy world I honestly didn't really care about.

Part of the issue is going to be in how unsubstantial this dream like fantasy is. You get some descriptions of the river, the lighthouse and the tunnels, but it never really came together into a place I could truly imagine. Likewise, whilst the characters in the real world felt stunningly real for good and for ill, the characters in the dream world never quite became fully formed. Perhaps this was deliberate; after all, it's meant to be a world of dreams and of nightmares, but it just didn't work for me.

So this is a book of two halves for me. The sections where the girls are in the real world are stunning. Beautifully written, hauntingly real and starkly depicted so I felt as though I were stood beside Eleanor at times. Her fear, uncertainly and anger resound off the page. Her doubts of her own self-worth, belief that her father must be right about her, desperation to not let her mother down and keep the rules in order to maintain some semblance of normality really struck me. But the dream world just didn't do anything for me. If this had been almost entirely set in the real world, I suspect it would be an easy five stars. But it's not. And it feels like two uneven halves jammed together and forced to try and fit.

Many thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for my free review copy of this title.

Read as part of the Hugo packet when this was nominated for the not-a-Hugo YA award. Very enjoyable; not sure if it would be too dark for the target audience but maybe I have no idea about what mid-YA are reading! Overtones of Seanan McGuire's Wayward Children. I'm a fan.

I received this as part of the voter packet for Hugo Awards in 2020. This felt like a deeply personal piece about two young girls struggling with domestic abuse in the house, and then experiencing a fantasy world that more tangibly allows them to confront the problems. Honestly, I found it a little hard to follow/suspend my disbelief in the fantastical parts, but admittedly that may be because of my pace in trying to speed through it before Hugo voting closes. I also recognize that I'm not the target audience for this book—or any of these middle grades—so that may have affected my response to it as well. I did think it did what many great children's books do: addressed a serious topic with magic and allegory. So kudos there.

3.5 Stars
A YA novel with a good heart and a difficult subject. Eleanor and Mike live with their parents in a riverside development. The family dynamic is tense, occasionally violent and abusive. The girls must navigate the tides of their Poppa's anger, violence and psychological abuse. Above all it is important to keep to the rules and not bring home trouble.

But beside everything runs the river. And through it to as magic leaks through from another world where an agreement has been broken, and nightmares and disaster threaten to leak through the cracks to the real. In all though, the power of story and of magic must reign supreme.

Fran Wilde navigates these shoals with impressive surety, with crisp prose and page turning narrative.

DNF. The magic as metaphor for abuse is too heavy handed and there isn’t enough else in the beginning to hook me.

Riverland by Fran Wilde is a portal fantasy book for children (aka middle grade). I first encountered it during a reading by the author at Dublin WorldCon last year. This year, I finally got around to picking up Riverland after it was shortlisted for the not-a-Hugo Lodestar Award and hence was included in the Hugo voter's packet.

When things go bad at home, sisters Eleanor and Mike hide in a secret place under Eleanor’s bed, telling monster stories. Often, it seems those stories and their mother’s house magic are all that keep them safe from both busybodies and their dad’s temper. But when their father breaks a family heirloom, a glass witch ball, a river suddenly appears beneath the bed, and Eleanor and Mike fall into a world where dreams are born, nightmares struggle to break into the real world, and secrets have big consequences. Full of both adventure and heart, Riverland is a story about the bond between two sisters and how they must make their own magic to protect each other and save the ones they love.

Riverland is not exactly an easy and relaxing read. It follows twelve-year-old Eleanor and her younger sister Mike, as they deal with an abusive family situation and periodically fall into a fantastical fantasy world made of the river and dreams. The abusive father is the hard part to read, of course, but there is not very much physical violence on the page. Wilde captures the fear, confusion and instability of an emotionally abusive household excellently. I absolutely felt Eleanor's stress as she strived to keep everything just right to avoid bad things happening, and I felt the way she was always kept off-balance by the house rules changing without warning.

The fantastical river world under her bed was where dreams come from and was also caught in a battle to maintain the delicate balance between dreams and nightmares. As well as Eleanor's responsibilities at home — to always do the right thing, to look after her sister and keep her parents happy — she finds herself tasked with fixing the leaks in Riverland; yet another burden. We watch Eleanor try to juggle more balls than a twelve-year-old should ever be expected to, and Wilde transfers some of her fear and tension to the reader.

So as I said, it wasn't a fun, light read, but it was interesting. I liked the fantasy world and I liked the fact that it was somewhere the girls kept revisiting rather than a place they went to and stayed in to have adventures, à la Narnia. And for all that I've emphasised the difficult parts of the book, there were also plenty of hopeful moments, though I don't want to spoil them. The ending was also a good one (though, again, not spoiling).

I highly recommend Riverland to anyone looking for a crunchy children's fantasy book I would probably hand it to slightly older children, because it does deal with some heavy issues. But I expect younger children in similar situation may benefit seeing themselves in the narrative.

4.5 / 5 stars

First published: 2019, Amulet Books
Series: No
Format read: PDF
Source: Hugo Voter Packet

A very convincing and well-written depiction of an abusive household, the maladaptive behavioural patterns developed by the children, and the attempt to find a successful escape. I loved the idea of leakage between the real world and the fantasy world, and especially the way that the fantasy world portal was located underneath the bed, but I didn't find the fantasy world itself as compellingly realised as the real world events.

I haven't read much of Fran Wilde's fiction, far less than I would have expected given how well regarded her Bone Universe novels are (start with Updraft), but I have fairly consistently bounced off each story of hers that I have read. Whether it is The Jewel and Her Lapidary, "Clearly Lettered in a Mostly Steady Hand" or The Fire Opal Mechanism, I have a growing suspicion that I'm just not a Fran Wilde reader. That, no matter how good or how well regarded, these aren't the stories for me. It also means that I am unlikely to give Updraft a go, but that is a different point.

I had hoped that Riverland would be the book to buck that trend. It is completely unrelated to her Gem novellas, it's YA rather than strictly written for adults, it's a portal fantasy novel dealing with domestic violence. Riverland is beautifully written for those readers able to dive in and work their way through Wilde's storytelling. I know Adri gave Riverland 5 Stars on Goodreads, so there's at least one editor here who strongly disagrees with me on Riverland (this is not likely to be our only disagreement in this category) - but Riverland really locked down the idea that unless Fran Wilde is on an awards ballot I am actively reading for, I probably won't be reading more of her work. It is worth noting that this is written before I read any of the Short Story finalists, which does include a selection from Fran Wilde, so there's one more chance for me to connect with Wilde's fiction this year.

This is a book I am accessing via Netgalley for the Hugo nomination packet. Due to this, I will not be reviewing this book via Netgalley at this time.

3.5 stars

Oh how my heart hurt for the Prine sisters, 7th grader Eleanor and her younger sister Mike! Growing up with an abusive father, Simon, and a mother, Moira, who would prefer to blame them rather than defend them, the girls resort to telling each other stories about magic in order to explain the horrifying circumstances in which they live. On one particularly bad evening, when their developer father breaks a witch ball heirloom they'd inherited from their mother's Scandinavian forebears, a portal opens up beneath Eleanor's bed that whisks the girls to Riverland, an odd place that shares a name with the coastal Baltimore development they live in (and, it's implied, that Simon helped build from land Moira inherited.)

Portal Riverland is a scary place inhabited by birds who tend to the budding dreams and nightmares that grow in the reeds along the banks of the river that dominates the landscape. Things aren't going so well in Portal Riverland tho, as the nightmares, under the guidance of the monstrous Anassa, are trying to break through the cracks in the tunnels that form the border between Portal Riverland and reality. Eleanor and Mike just want to go home, especially after they're told that staying past daybreak will trap them there forever. But the girls keep coming back for one reason or another, even as the reality of their abusive family life threatens to escape the confines of their home.

This depiction of abused children feels so achingly honest and personal, as if Fran Wilde is exposing her own wounds (which, it is implied, she is.) Eleanor and Mike are easy to root for, even as their upbringing makes them occasionally awful. Is anyone surprised when they're casually violent with one another, given what they've been shown is acceptable behavior through what their father does to them and their mother? Ms Wilde's exploration of complicity and blame is haunting, so much so that I wanted to reach out to the two Prine girls and assure them that none of this is their fault. It made my heart hurt as a mom to see parents fail their children as completely as the Prine parents do here.

That said, this book is unfortunately less successful as a fantasy novel. Portal Riverland is meant to be an extended metaphor for what the girls are going through but often feels sloppy and disconnected, which is fine for a personal fable but not so great for mass publication. Also, almost everyone outside of the Prine family is barely more than a stick figure -- Aja and Kalliope get particularly short shrift, at odds with the author's note at the beginning that hopes we will love them -- and Pendra, who is probably given the most depth otherwise, is eye-gougingly annoying. Maybe it's because I was a pretty empathetic, private kid myself whose circle of friends was generally sensitive to each other's feelings, but her oblivious insistence on having things her way even when it obviously hurt her friend's feelings made me pretty mad.

I also wish that there had been more of an emphasis on Eleanor learning how to manage her feelings in a healthy way beyond the two sentences James said to her about her anger. Given that Ms Wilde wants this book to be available to any kids going through a similar situation in hopes that it will spur them to get help by telling the truth, I felt that it might have been even more helpful in overtly assuring them that they're not bad kids simply by virtue of being abused, and that their conditioning is not irreversible. I guess that's a lot to ask for from any one book, but I would honestly rather have read about that than the half-baked fantasy world the girls find themselves in.

I got this as part of the Hugo Awards Voting Packet. I love this author! She once complimented my Wonder Twins T-shirt at New York Comic Con! I look forward to reading the author’s next book.

I adored Fran Wilde’s Bone Universe trilogy, so I was excited to read her YA novel, Riverland. Sisters Eleanor and Mary (known as Mike) live by the banks of a river. That river extends into a dreamworld, and like many real-world ecosystems, it’s fragile. When their abusive father destroys a talisman that was maintaining the balance of that ecosystem, nightmares start leaking into the waking world, and the real river threatens to flood their whole neighborhood.

My favorite part of this novel was the friendship between Eleanor and Pendra. Many stories center a romantic arc, and this would have been even more natural in a book aimed at younger readers. But platonic friendships are just as important, and it was nice to see the main relationship in a book being between the main character and her friend. I especially appreciated that their friendship isn’t perfect. They have arguments, and sometimes Pendra gets upset with Eleanor over something petty—but that doesn’t mean they’re no longer friends. Even in a fantasy novel, the relationships between the human characters need to ring true, and this one does.

This is a book that deals with some difficult subjects, chief among them living with an abusive parent. Eleanor’s father’s abuse puts strain on all her other relationships: with Mike, with her mother, with Pendra. This felt realistic to me, and my understanding is that the way Eleanor’s parents make her feel as though she’s responsible for her father’s anger issues is also realistic. I felt that Wilde did a good job of tackling an issue that could easily have been mishandled.

There are some things I liked and some I didn’t about the climax and ending of the story, which I will put below on account of spoilers.

***SPOILERS AHEAD***

Riverland doesn’t have as crisp a resolution as most standalone novels, but I think that’s due to Wilde’s desire to handle her subject matter respectfully. While Eleanor and Mike end up in a better situation than they started in, a home situation like theirs isn’t going to be solved immediately or easily in most cases. Something that might have been a flaw in another book is, I think, a necessity in this one.

At the same time, I felt like Anassa was a red herring, or maybe an unfired Chekov’s gun. I was expecting her previous human identity to be a major revelation, perhaps that she was an ancestor or other relative of Eleanor and Mike. The fact that she was defeated without us learning anything much about her disappointed me a bit. Still, this was overall an enjoyable novel and definitely a worthy Hugo/Lodestar nominee.

Magical realist story about two sisters. It's not quite a fairy tale, it's not quite a way to process abuse. It's about the power of stories.

I received this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

4*

It's weird to say I enjoyed reading this book because it does focus on some incredibly serious topics, but I did enjoy it. I was thoroughly swept up in it. It resonated with me on a deeply personal level because, while I won't go into specifics here, I can say that I saw my childhood self represented by Eleanor and the struggles she goes through with her parents, in particular her emotionally abusive father.

This is a Middle Grade contemporary/fantasy story that flips back and forth between our world and an imaginary Riverland made up of dreams and nightmares. Our protagonists fall into the Riverland after their father spends yet another evening rampaging through their house, blaming the girls for stuff outside their control and breaking important familiar artifacts. This kicks off an increasing problem where cracks start splitting between the world of Riverland and the girls' home reality, turning an already tense homelife into an increasing pressure cooker and burdening a 12 and 7 year old with the task of trying to be "good enough" to hold their homelife together.

This book deals with emotional and physical abuse. It won't be for everyone and definitely consider trigger warnings for angry and emotionally abusive parents. That being said, I do think it's a valuable story and easily something I would give to a kid suffering in similar settings or for in general any young reader who likes portal fantasies.

You can hear more of my thoughts about Riverland by checking out my full video review down below.

I originally reviewed this novel in 2019. I received this NG offering as part of the Lodestar/Hugo Award packet.

I cannot say enough how much I love this novel and its masterful approach to children dealing with domestic violence in their home and family. It manages to be both poignant and accessible and to teach children the importance of identifying an adult they can trust. A novel that highlights sisterly love and devotion, I heartily hope it continues to cut a wide swath through the awards season. Thoroughly deserved. The best middle-grade novel of 2019.

Riverland is a 2019 Middle Grade/YA Portal Fantasy novel by author Fran Wilde, who previously one the Norton Award - the Nebula Award for best YA SF/F novel - for her novel "Updraft", and has been a Hugo/Nebula nominee for multiple other works. Riverland itself wound up winning this year's Norton Award for best YA/Middle-Grade Fantasy novel and is nominated as well for the Lodestar Award, the equivalent award in the Hugos. In short, Wilde is critically acclaimed in the field, especially in writing for YA audiences, and while I haven't always loved her works as much as some, they've always been interesting, and so Riverland was the first book I decided to read from the now released Hugo Voters Packet.

And Riverland is worth the praise....but it's an utterly brutal one, and I absolutely wish it wasn't necessary. This is a tale of parental abuse, and while the abuse basically never gets physical, it's no less brutal for it, and Riverland pulls absolutely no punches. it is not a long book, but it took me longer than a book nearly twice its size to finish because it is the type of content that is that rough to read. And yet, while the fantasy elements are probably not the strongest, Riverland is a terrifyingly believable story of abuse that will absolutely be useful for the many many kids who grow up in such a household, and god, I wish that wasn't the case.

Trigger Warnings: Emotional Parental Abuse, if you couldn't tell from above.

-------------------------------------------------Plot Summary------------------------------------------------

The "Magic" doesn't work if you don't follow the rules. That's what Eleanor tells herself and more importantly, tells her younger sister Mike. For when they don't follow the rules, their parents get upset - in their own ways - and things in the house start breaking or disappearing. No matter how insignificant the rules are. But if they do follow the rules, their mother's "House Magic" makes sure everything stays intact, or even becomes better.

Eleanor has grown up in this house, unable to tell anyone else about it (because that would break another rule), and has tried to comfort her sister at night, hiding under Eleanor's bed, by telling stories of magic to her sister - stories of a Troll Father, a Magic Mother, and of real parents rescuing kids from monsters. But when a family heirloom is broken by their father after one day, Eleanor and Mike find themselves swept away through a river that appears under the bed, into a fantasy world of dreams and nightmares.

But this is not a happy fantasy world - it's one that's breaking and in need of repair. But when every time Eleanor tries to fix anything - in real life or in fantasy - it goes wrong, and if she can't tell anyone of the problem, then how can she possibly manage to put things right?

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Riverland is a rough book to read, as I've mentioned above, because it is a tale of parental abuse. Eleanor and Mike's father is a control freak, who reacts to any small thing out of his desires with rage, yelling, and destruction (of property for most of the book). Their mother reacts to their father's reactions by blaming the pair of them, as if they were the only ones in the wrong. And not all of their parents reactions are even due to actions by Eleanor and Mike - their father is invested in real estate, including their house, and it isn't going well, and his reactions to that carry over to their domestic life. It's a terrifying atmosphere to read for me, an adult in his 30s, and this is a book for Middle-Grade audiences! But there are unfortunately too many in that audience who are living in such an atmosphere, and that's who this book is really aimed at.

Eleanor and Mike's reactions toward this abuse - not that they understand enough being in middle and elementary school respectively - are honestly as painfully real as the descriptions of the abusive behavior themselves. Mike acts out in school, sometimes with violence, other times with actions designed to fix things based upon the white lies Eleanor has told her. And poor Eleanor lives in desperate fear of breaking the rules to the point of being desperately scared to try and prevent anyone from finding out about them for fear of what will happen - an act of holding things in that constantly threatens to ruin her one significant friendship and has ruined friendships from the past. Her best friend, a girl named Pendra who comes from a more loving family, just wants to be closer to Eleanor and to share secrets, and Eleanor is too terrified to say otherwise. And mind you, Eleanor is not a simple or dumb girl, she's clearly very smart as seen in the book - but her environment forces her inside herself, so that she will not under any circumstances get in trouble.

This attitude of course carries over to the portal fantasy world as well, where Eleanor is afraid to trust others with truths, afraid to make promises, and doesn't feel like anything she can do will go right. And really, that's the lesson this book is going for throughout - that Eleanor (and Mike eventually) needs to figure out their own self worth, to assert themselves for who they are, and do what they need to do, not their parents. That they need to be able to admit the truth to themselves and to others at times, and well, that's hard. It's a rough journey and this book makes it work - ending in a situation where Eleanor has thankfully been able to do that. It's not all better, but it's better, thank god.

I should point out that this book has some flaws - you'll note I barely mention the fantasy world in this review: that's deliberate, as it's probably the weakest part of the book: it's both utterly strange and unusual in ways and absolutely generic in others, with its dreams/nightmares/villains setup and a crab repairmen sequence that feels almost out of a Disney movie. The book is powerful enough in the real world parts - which take up nearly all of the book mind you - that this doesn't matter, and the fantasy world does serve as a significant part in Eleanor's emotional journey, so it works out in the long run. I also kind of disliked an aspect of the ending which suggests a very different end for several characters, who absolutely deserved that end, only to chicken out at the last moment. I honestly wonder if that was a last minute switch because of the Middle Grade nature of this novel.

Spoiler in ROT13: Va gur svany frdhrapr, nf n uheevpnar ornef qbja ba gur gbja, Ryrnabe'f cneragf, yrq ol ure pbagebyyvat sngure, ershfr gb yrnir gurve ubhfr qrfcvgr gur rinphngvba beqre, naq Ryrnabe naq Zvxr yrnir jvgubhg gurz (snagnfl fghss unccraf nf jryy va guvf). Vg jbhyq xvaq bs znxr frafr sbe gur cneragf gb qvr nf n erfhyg, be ng yrnfg fhssre frirer unez, ohg nyy gung unccraf va gur raq vf Ryrnabe naq Zvxr jvaqvat hc yvivat jvgu gurve tenaqzn juvyr gurve cneragf erohvyq, frrzvatyl ab jbefr sbe jrne. Vg'f n ynpx bs pbafrdhraprf sbe gurz gung qbrfa'g ernyyl znxr frafr tvira rirelguvat ryfr.

But overall, Riverland is a terrifyingly powerful novel, and one which i fear is all too needed for the Middle-Grade audience. It's the best and worst thing of Wilde's I've ever read as a result, and it deserves the awards it earns for sure.