The setting of Mara Rutherford’s The Poison Season is an intriguing one. Most of the story takes place on an island called Endla. A magical Wandering Forest lives there, along with a people whose songs have a magical effect on the living things around them. The Endlans are bound to the island, in no small part because the water around it is highly poisonous, so much so that it will dissolve anything that touches it. No boats can cross without dissolving, and any bird, squirrel or person who gets even a drop of the lakewater on them will be burned as if touched by acid and will, most likely, die.
Leelo is a teenager on this island who lives with her mother, her brother, her aunt, and her cousin, Sage. Leelo is seen as a fragile thing, someone who hates violence and tries to avoid the ritual killing of animals that the Endlans give to the Forest. She and Sage are also starting their year as Watchers, where they patrol the island’s borders to make sure no outsiders manage to get to the island and, if they do, kill them before they can cause the island “harm.”
The Endlans reaction to outsiders is a harsh one, but as a community, they are fearful of outsiders because it was others who purportedly tried to kill their ancestors generations ago before they found refuge on the island. That story and the beliefs that come with it are hammered home from birth. Because of this, anyone who is not Endlan is killed and any Endlan whose singing is not imbued with magic is banished. The latter are calle incantus and are shipped off the island (on the only boat that doesn’t get dissolved by the lake because it’s treated with a magical substance) when they turn 12, with no knowledge of the rest of the world.
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The Poison Season
A boy on the mainland named Jaren, however, becomes drawn to Endla, though he can’t say why. Through a series of events, he ends up on the island’s shores. Leelo is the first to come across him and instead of killing him, hides him in a secret cottage. The story moves on from there, with Jaren and Leelo ultimately falling in love, because of course they do.
The worldbuilding is The Poison Season’s strength. The origin story of the island and the tinges of magic that come with the Wandering Forest and the songs from the Endlans are vivid and intriguing—I want to spend time in this land and delve into its lore. The exquisite cover by Charlie Bowater further draws you in—how could you not want to pick up this book?
The characters, however, were hard for me to connect with. The dialogue between them was stilted and, at times, unbelievable. I couldn’t help but think how no one would talk like this in real life when reading exchanges between characters. This was true for Leela and Jaren, which made their intense romance not rise above the trope that it is. (Not that there’s anything wrong with this trope! I like this trope!) The stilted dialogue also existed between Leelo and her mother, Leelo and Sage, and pretty much everyone else. It made trying to connect with any of the characters difficult even though their histories and hardships had all the ingredients for making the reader care about them.
The one exception to this, for me, was Leelo’s relationship with her little brother, Tate. Tate is incantu, and thus will be exiled from Endla in a few short weeks. In the lead-up to his departure, Rutherford gives us scenes of Tate and Leelo clinging to the limited time they have together. That whole sequence and the actions of what they do is arguably the most heart-wrenching part of the story. And because of this, it is only relationship that moved me throughout the book.
Having characters you can’t totally connect to isn’t in and of itself isn’t a bad thing—books heavy in worldbuilding sometimes do this, and can still be well worth the read. But the relationships between the characters become the centerpiece in the second half of The Poison Season, causing the world they’re in to fall to the wayside. The result is a novel that is lacking in both categories, which might be frustrating for some readers.
The book ends in unsurprising ways, and has a long denouement explaining what happens to all the characters. Without getting into major spoilers, it’s fair to say that everything gets resolved quite neatly (maybe a bit too neatly, though I am a fan of happy endings).
Overall, The Poison Season is an okay read, especially if you’re more into worldbuilding than character development (albeit with the caveat I mentioned above). It’s also an easy read, and one you might enjoy at the time. I don’t think, however, that is a story that will stick with you once you’ve put it down and moved on to the next thing in your TBR pile. That, again, is not necessarily a bad thing, but something to keep in mind when you’re deciding what to read next.
The Poison Season is published by Inkyard Press.
Vanessa Armstrong is a writer with bylines at The LA Times, SYFY WIRE, StarTrek.com and other publications. She lives in Los Angeles with her dog Penny and her husband Jon, and she loves books more than most things. You can find more of her work on her website or follow her on Twitter @vfarmstrong.
