David James Covington, serving a life sentence in Oregon State Penitentiary, often reflects on his years in the Northern California Siskiyou Mountains as the happiest memories in his tumultuous life: “The Siskiyou Mountains, in many ways, were the only parents that we ever had.” He has reached a unique sort of clarity during his time of imprisonment, at least when he introduces himself. He is now thirty-three, and a chance at parole looms in his immediate future—if he can get past the mandated therapy sessions with Dr. Owen Garrity.

As his story unfolds, though, it’s shocking to find out the many ways human memory distorts and reforms to shield someone from the trauma they endured. The suspense that draws from David being an unreliable narrator—sometimes purposeful, sometimes not—brings a lot of great tension to the story. G.M. Davis’s THE SISKIYOU SON is a scathing commentary on the failures of adults in regards to their responsibility of protecting children and the law enforcement’s unspoken code of protecting their own at the expense of innocent lives. (Readers should be aware that the book does depict horrific child abuse—central to David’s story—and law enforcement cruelty, as well as child sexual assault and period-accurate racism with coarse, racist language.) It’s also a stark tale about how people fall through the cracks of an unjust prison system. While David is forced to confront the demons of his past, Dr. Garrity works to untangle truth from lies and maybe give him a second chance to seek justice for a stolen childhood.

The mountains themselves serve as a character, always rising in the distance of David’s painful memories: his beacon of hope, his strength, and a well of calm that he relies on. The descriptions of nature—and David’s relationship with it—are serene and poetic. The Siskiyous of his youth are filled with a certain reverence as he recalls childhood memories: “When I allow myself to drift back to that spring, I can still feel the harmony and the majesty of nature and taste the pine deep within my lungs.” The freedom of those mountains, and the freedom for him and his brother and sister to exist as children, even in a certain survival mode, really comes through in the book. There’s a distinction between survival as an abuse victim and survival in the wild, and it’s incredible to realize how liberating the mountains are despite their dangers.

The brief interludes into David’s memories are kind of jarring at first, as the point of view shifts tenses and italicizes in the middle of present-day David’s narrative insight. There are many instances where David talks about incidents or his siblings’ personalities at length, instead of allowing the reader to learn about them or what they are like by showing these events within the story itself. They put the narrative at a distance, almost, by not directly engaging. Though the second half of the novel deals with the siblings’ time in the Siskiyous with much more captivating detail, there are some awkward and sudden point of view switches toward the end that are confusing from David’s first-person perspective.

Because of the fast-paced nature of the plot, the execution sometimes feels rushed; and David’s shifting attitudes toward his therapy sessions seem to happen a little too quickly for his previously stoic, tightly closed off demeanor. There are also times when his thoughts run in repetitive circles, instead of covering new ground. A minor dialogue quirk of overusing character names while they’re speaking to each other often becomes grating and ultimately unnecessary.

Even though some details of David’s story are difficult to suspend disbelief for, his tale is both tragic and triumphant in its own bittersweet way. How his relationship with Dr. Garrity grows within the book is harrowing in itself, especially given how these two men are able to learn from each other and share their grief and trauma. The culmination echoes that same bittersweet beauty of life. As David himself says, “Life is a funny thing. Grossly unfair, spectacularly unjust, and yet still wonderful in a peculiar way.”

THE SISKIYOU SON by G.M. Davis is both tragic and triumphant, tinged with a painful bittersweetness. A scathing commentary on the failures of adults in regards to their responsibility of protecting children, the novel also touches on the power of nature to heal and restore.

~Jessica Thomas for IndieReader