The Blackthorn Woods

Monoprint, watercolor, gouache, and collage on paper

This unpublished middle grade novel is currently in progress.

2025

With the visual richness of a picture book and the narrative depth of a middle-grade novel, THE BLACKTHORN WOODS follows two cousins over one summer as they confront a monstrous force determined to erase their sense of awe. This hybrid novel asks whether growing up requires abandoning childish wonder, and suggests that kinship, nature, and narrative might help resist that narrowing.  

Sent to spend the summer with their stern aunt Esther, cousins Frances and Nell divide their days between her sun-drenched garden and the Blackthorn Woods behind her house. Nine-year-old Frances, seeking relief from the pressures of growing up, runs toward the mysteries of the shadowy forest: colors vanishing from the landscape, uncanny sculptures threaded with magic, and most of all, Sylvia, an enigmatic recluse who claims to live in league with fairies–and who offers a seductive vision of what it might mean to never grow up at all. Twelve-year-old Nell, meanwhile, prefers her excitement contained to books. She gravitates toward town, seeking the approval of local kids who scorn the forest as uncivilized. Soon Frances and Nell begin keeping secrets from each other, until a nighttime journey into the Blackthorn Woods brings their fraying relationship to a breaking point. Together, as a malicious force Sylvia calls “the imagination trimmer” seeks to blot out their imaginative spark, the cousins must learn to grow older without growing ordinary.