Review: The Rowan by Davis Bunn

A rowan tree with mysterious and unique powers is extending its grip over humanity, and investigative writer Valentina Garnier is caught up in a battle between supernatural forces and the federal government.

The Rowan is a book that doesn’t quite know what it’s trying to do.

Proper pacing is a very delicate balance when telling any story. This is made even more so when working on a trilogy, or any other serial fiction.

As the author, you have to be careful of playing too close to the vest, but you also need to give away enough that your reader is still part of the inner circle. Each book in the series needs to be able to stand on its own, to a certain extent.

This is The Rowan’s primary problem. It’s the first book in a trilogy (the other two aren’t out yet) and very quickly it becomes obvious that not giving away even a hint of what’s happening is being used in place of actual pacing.

The little blurb at the beginning of this review is what drew me to the novel in the first place. I love a bit of contemporary urban fantasy meshing worlds together.

It is not an accurate depiction of what happens within the novel itself.

Admittedly, I struggled to get into the book for the first few pages. In fact, I was seriously regretting my decision to review it. By the end of the prologue, though, Val had won me over and I was ready to go along for the ride. I’ll talk more about Val in a bit; she’s an amazing character and I want to gush. But for now, the issue is pacing.

As The Rowan progresses through its main conflict points, events and interactions become more and more obscure. I had definite Celestine Prophecy/cult introduction vibes while reading it.

The characters kept referring to an “it” that they weren’t able to describe, but each of them “just got.” They experienced an equally indescribable feeling/urge/pull. There’s some suspiciously convenient telepathy going on as well.

Rather than build mystery and suspense, this adds up to a conversation the reader isn’t actually part of. Think meeting your partner’s work friends and they only talk about work things the whole time.

There also isn’t anything at stake. The characters never experience any real risk because this convenient telepathy and equally convenient supernatural other always gives plenty of warning that danger is on the way and the means to perfectly evade it.

You want the protagonist’s side to win, sure, but they have to earn it. Bear with me but I’m going to launch into some MCU fandom here.

Endgame is a perfect example of what I’ve been talking about so far. It’s the culmination of a collection of trilogies based around individual characters. Each part builds on the previous one, but they also work on their own, more or less. They have a Mini Bad, a short-term problem, a short-term solution.

Particularly because it’s based on comics, you know without a doubt that the good guys are going to win and the bad guys are going to be shuffled off to some undisclosed location.

When Endgame comes around, you know the Avengers will ultimately defeat Thanos, but there are some close - and some more than close - calls along the way. Integral characters are sacrificed, often with the person closest being forced into making that call. Even though cognitively you know Thanos will be defeated, you start to wonder exactly how that’s going to happen, especially when the indefatigable Captain America starts to lose faith.

It’s not until that point - the point where the character most convinced of fairness and justice, of the good guy always coming out on top, of never giving up realizes fairness and justice have never been a thing at all - that the audience is brought back from the brink.

More people are lost, the battle is still hard, and by the end, the heroes are more shattered than celebratory, but they won, just like you always knew they would.

That’s how you do good pacing.

Now that I’ve devoted a considerable amount of text to the particulars of pacing, let’s talk about Val.

Val is what “three-dimensional” character means. She’s a mess of contradictions that are all entirely believable and actually fit together.

She’s great at her job and extremely talented, but also full of doubt and known to make a mistake or two. There’s a tragic backstory, and, while it doesn’t influence her attitude and decisions, it’s not her entire motivation for everything. She makes dumb decisions that she knows full well are dumb decisions but makes them anyway because that’s what people do.

In essence, Val is a flawed anti-hero without being the Flawed Anti-Hero. It’s a welcome reprieve from the typical self-destructive addict/loner who just so happens to be the most brilliant person in the room and gets away with everything short of murder even though they are obviously a tsunami of chaos who should never be left unsupervised ever.

The Rowan comes with a very big pro and a very big con, which leaves me with mixed feelings.

On its own, I wouldn’t recommend The Rowan to anyone, but as part of an as-yet-unseen trilogy, it’s unfair to judge without the whole picture. It’s possible that the next two books will redeem it and show that the confusion here is necessary.

It’s possible.

But I’m not going to read those books to find out. I’m just not curious enough to carry on with this story to see where it goes, which says that, even if it turns out that this first book had to be so obtuse, it still fails its mission to pull the reader towards the next instalment.