Madapple

Title: Madapple

Author: Christina Meldrum

Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (2008)

Genre(s): Young Adult Fiction, Religion, Mystery, Crime

Length: 404 pages

Synopsis:  Aslaug is her mother’s daughter.  In fact, she knows almost no one else.  Though they live only minutes from a modern town in rural Maine, Maren Hellig has kept her daughter in almost complete isolation.  Their house has curtains tacked over the windows and no electricity or running water.  Aslaug’s understanding of the outside world comes from her mother’s lessons in science and languages, including everything from ancient Greek to the meaning of runes.  But when Maren dies unexpectedly, Aslaug learns that despite all her lessons, her mother had kept  many secrets.  Sent to live with relatives she never knew she had, Aslaug is thrown into a world she doesn’t understand with terrible consequences.

My Rating: 5 Stars

My Opinion:  

This book was quite unexpectedly intriguing.  Its twisted plots unravel mysteries in almost every sense of the word.  Religion winds in amongst science, divinity with evil, dreams with hallucinations, old with new, truth with perception.  The story alternates between Aslaug’s expressive voice and the rigid but misleading half-truths that are laid out in the court records of a murder trial.  As the story unfurls, readers can’t help but wonder themselves what is true and what isn’t.  Nothing seems implausible in Aslaug’s world of science and religion, but questions are more common than answers, whatever the source.  Who, for example, is Aslaug’s father?  Who poisoned her aunt and cousin?  Why did Maren abandon her family to raise her daughter alone?  Every question only poses more, adding momentum to the driving force of the plot.  Madapple isn’t for the faint of heart, however.  It deals with dark realities and poses probing questions about the nature of our world and our relationship to it.  Moreover, the Aslaug’s first-person chapters have a tendency toward stream-of-consciousness, which some readers may find distracting, though I think it perfectly captures her isolation, confusion, and sense of herself.  Though the novel’s geared toward the ever popular and apparently voracious young adult market, it’s one that any mature reader could enjoy, provided he or she is all right with a brief trip down the rabbit-hole into a world that’s anything but wonderful.