A Crooked Tree by Una Mannion

Having often threatened to throw one of more of my children out of the car over the years, it was the terrifying premise of this book that initially piqued my interest. I also tend to really enjoy books set in the late 70s/ early 80s - even more so if there’s an Irish/American element - so there was plenty for me to love about A Crooked Tree. This coming of age novel is mainly about a non-typical, troubled family who are trying - each in their own way- to come to terms with the death of the father. The characters were all well drawn but I particularly loved how the mother was portrayed. I thought she was a terrible mom, yet I could still feel sympathy towards her and I was always waiting for her to show her true colours. Una Mannion is a beautiful writer and I look forward to reading more from her in the future.

Many thanks to Faber & Faber and NetGalley for giving me the opportunity to read and review this book.

The book opens with a frazzled single mother losing her rag with bickering from her 5 children, as she drives them home. With several miles of the journey still to go and darkness falling, she stops the car and tells 12 year old Ellen to get out and walk the rest of the way home. What follows is the repercussions of that decision.

I had gone into this expecting either a thriller or the story of a family healing after a tragic event, but it turned out to be more of a coming of age story running it's course through a single summer. Narrated by 15 year old Libby, the third child in the family, we see her navigate her dysfunctional family, friendships, first infatuations and social dynamics where she lacks the maturity to fully understand the impact of her actions. All the while, the back story of Ellen having received a lift that went very wrong continues at a pace.

An enjoyable read, which I'd give another half star if I could.

A Crooked Tree is Mannion's debut novel that follows a family of siblings after their mother leaves their sister Ellen by the side of the road and drives away. The siblings and their relationships all felt very honest and believable but the pacing of this was a little off for me, it dipped in and out of a "slow burn" and sometimes felt it dragged.

If you are looking for 80s nostalgia or a slow paced family filled novel then this one is for you, Mannion is clearly a good writer but sadly A Crooked Tree just didn't work for me.

Mannion is definitely an author I will keep an eye out for an am interested to see what she writes next.

A Crooked Tree by Una Mannion follows Libby, who is neither the youngest nor the oldest of the family.

I keep asking myself, why do I like this story so much? The main part of the book is a bit of a slow burn. It is voiced by a fourteen year old. The family is broken and dysfunctional. Something drastic occurs that they all want to keep a secret. It has Libby anxious and fearful, and she spends most of her time looking over her shoulder. I felt like I was there, in the past, living Libby’s journey with her. And this is why I felt compelled to keep reading.

Things about Libby:
- Her father died two years ago.
- Her mother is emotionally absent and wrapped up in herself
- She has one brother who is older than her
- She looks up to her eldest sister
- She feels jealous of her youngest sister, who has a different father than her.
- She feels responsible for her second youngest sister who doesn’t deserve what happens to her.
- She is scared of the older than her, young man who offers his help through the book, because of the whispered rumours about his past. She wishes her sister never asked for his help and he would just go away.
- She has a best friend who tells her things she doesn’t want to hear.
- Her employer is involved in a secret that Libby uncovers and wishes she hasn’t
- She loves trees.
- You might hate her, or just be angry with her for her choices, but at some point you will love her.
- She is a hero.


I anticipate this book sticking with you for a while, because the characters get under your skin.

Releasing on the 28th of January 2021, and available for advance purchase.

5/5 Stars

Thank you to Faber & Faber (the publisher), Una Mannion and Netgalley for the opportunity to read this novel in exchange for an impartial review.

3.5 rounded down

A pacy coming of age novel set in 1980s suburban Pennsylvania, A Crooked Tree follows 15-year-old Libby, a nature obsessed middle child during the fallout of a snap decision by her mother on a dark night in the mountains: Libby's mum flips when driving four of her five kids home, and sends fourth child, 12-year-old Ellen, out into the darkness on a rural road, some miles from home, to walk back by herself. The consequences of this decision play out over the summer, with Libby internalising a lot of the emotional turmoil brought about by the change around her and the tensions fraying within her family: her eldest sister leaves home, her mum borderline abandons the remaining three kids (taking the youngest with her to see her new man) and a sinister presence lurks on their doorstep.

This was an impressive debut, with some moments which slipped into melodrama - and a main character who was at times a bit insipid - preventing me from rounding up my final rating.

Fourteen year old Libby is horrified when her mother, losing her temper at the squabbling, crying and sniping amongst her siblings as they are driven home in the car, stops and leaves her little sister at the side of the road to walk home. This disturbing incident is the trigger for various events that occur over the summer, changing several lives and seeing Libby leave childhood behind. Her father has recently died, her mother , already separated from him, lacks parenting skills and leaves care of the children largely to the oldest daughter, Marie, and she has confusing feelings about boys. The portrayal of a girl growing up and beginning to understand the fallibility of adults is convincingly and sensitively handled, and the other characters are also drawn with sympathy and without judgement. There is an aching sense of nostalgia for being a small child and feeling secure within a family, but also of the powerlessness of being too young to know how to deal with life’s upsets effectively. I will look forward to reading more by this author.

The blurb of this book is somewhat vague and I wasn’t sure what exactly to expect. What I found was a delightfully vivid tale set across a single summer told from the eyes of teenage Libby as she helped her siblings through a difficult event. The family are dealing with grief and the way it weaves through the characters’ lives, like grief does in reality, is extremely clever. Alongside the main story (which reaches a tense climax- I’m not sure I took a breath ole it unfolded) and the theme of grief, is an interesting and complex coming of age tale. Suffice to say I adored this book. It handled multiple characters really well without being confusing and at different points I had different levels of sympathy with each and every character (even those I initially couldn’t imagine warming to- again something that happens in real life). 10/10- I’m recommending it to everyone that I speak to.

I really enjoyed reading A Crooked Tree. It had a really nostalgic atmosphere being set in 80's America where young people had a degree of freedom sadly missing now. Libby is 15 and narrates the story. Her father has died and her mother is emotionally absent. When her mother and younger sister Ellen, 12, are arguing in the car one day, Ellen is told to get out, and is left on the side of the road as darkness beckons. She accepts a lift from a stranger, and is sexually assaulted before jumping out of the moving car. This event is the catalyst for a summer that will change everything.

A friend of her older sister Marie, steps in to give the perpetrator a lesson he won't forget. Wilson is a bad boy, and being a small town, rumours abound. Libby is at first very uncomfortable around him, but she comes to see that he is a protective ally to her family.

Events build to a dramatic climax, and Libby learns that she is braver than she thought. The young people are the heroes of this book, and it is written so beautifully. Layers of history are revealed gradually, and it is engaging and exciting without ever being melodramatic. A real triumph.

A wonderful original story told in a skilled and imaginative way. I loved it from start to finish. It doesn’t fit into one genre because it has so many different elements to it. I find it hard to believe this is a debut novel it just makes me think this author has been knocking on publishers doors and eventually got this one accepted because it seems such a mature offering. Regardless I think it is quite remarkable and happy to recommend.

A good read but I kept expecting more.I felt that parts of the story were really slow and parts felt disjointed. It is a good for a debut novel and I would definitely read another book by this author.

Thank you to NetGalley for my copy.

The cover of this debut novel by author Una Mannion could be considered misleading, as it looks similar to many mysteries and thrillers currently on the market. This book is neither but is instead a gripping emotional read and finely nuanced character study of a family fractured by one of those once-in-a-lifetime rash moment that tip many exasperated individuals over the edge. The stressed individual who makes a fateful decision here is Faye Gallagher, a mother of several unruly children, who, during one night-time car journey in Pennsylvania, stops the carload carrying her bickering brood to order her 12-year old daughter Ellen to walk the five miles home as a punishment. When Ellen hitches a lift, a terrible chain of events unfolds. Told through the eyes of Ellen’s elder sibling Libby, who is on the cusp of adolescence and dealing with traumatic issues of her own, this novel spans the length of one summer and explores how the siblings deal with the disappearance of their sister. Adolescent narrators are a difficult stylistic device to pull off, but Mannion manages it very well and the writing is so fresh and the dialogue so natural that it is hard to believe at times that this novel is, in fact, set in the summer of 1981. It is at once a novel of its time and a universal novel, as it deals with disturbing issues that still surface nowadays. A fantastic literary debut that lingers long in the mind after you have closed the book. I thoroughly recommend it and cannot wait to see what Mannion writes next! Thank you to the publishers and to NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in review for this honest and unbiased review.

An intriguing but frustrating story - an interesting central conceit and a strong sense of place, but the characters felt a bit flat and the central mystery wasn't moving fast enough to keep me interested.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.

A Crooked Tree was an interesting book. It wasn't what I was expecting from reading the description but I still enjoyed it. It isn't the sort of book that I would normally read but I am glad I did. It gripped me from the start and I found it a quick read because of this.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for my ARC.

What a beautiful story, full of love, grief, family, friendships. It has it all. Libby is such a wonderful character, along with all her family and friends. So beautifully written, Libby will stay with me for a long time.

I was totally gripped on this book from the beginning, loved the characters and loved findingout lots of details about them. Really helped to get into the story and have backgrounds inbetween what was going on.
It really took me back to dys i ws growing up and how i looked at life to.

I really enjoyed this book - from the beginning where poor Ellen is left on the side of the road at dusk, miles away from home, to the utter drama of the Gallagher family’s summer.

Told by Ellen’s sister, Libby, this is a family drama, with a distracted mother who doesn’t really know how to parent, and a group of young, bereaved siblings dealing with a horrific event. My only real criticism of this book is that the blurb doesn’t do it justice at all. While it intrigued me, this book has so much more to offer than it initially seems.

I really liked the tie to Ireland too (and the Americans’ utter bemusement to Libby’s ‘wellies’!). A great read that I would definitely recommend.

Thank you to Netgalley and Faber & Faber for the ARC in return for an honest review.

3 ¼ stars

The opening of A Crooked Tree is certainly chilling. Libby, our fifteen-year old narrator, is in the car with her siblings. When their squabbling gets too much their mother dumps twelve-year old Ellen on the side of the road. Hours pass, and to Libby's increasing concern Ellen has yet to arrive. When Ellen finally makes an appearance, something has clearly happened to her.

Sadly, the suspenseful atmosphere that is so palpable at the start of this novel gives way to a slightly more predictable coming-of-age. The premise made me think that A Crooked Tree would be something in the realms of Winter's Bone (we have the rural setting, the dysfunctional family, the bond between the siblings). But A Crooked Tree tells a far more conventional story: a summer of revelations (from the realisations that the adults around you have their own secrets to the having to say goodbye to the innocence of childhood). While what happened to Ellen certainly has an impact on the storyline, A Crooked Tree is not a mystery or thriller. We follow Libby as she fights and makes peace with her best friend and siblings, we learn of her less than stellar home-life, and, most of all, of her dislike of the neighbourhood's bad boy (this last tread was pretty annoying). I did appreciate how vivid the setting was, from the references to 80s culture to Libby's environment (she is particularly attuned to nature). I also really enjoyed the family dynamics and the unease that permeated many of the scenes. The author succeeds particularly in capturing that period of transition, from childhood to adolescence, without being sentimental.

What ultimately did not work for me was Libby herself. She's hella bland. Love for trees aside there was little to her character. While her siblings, bff, and adults around her were fully fleshed out, Libby's personality remains largely unexplored. Her obsession with the 'bad boy' was also really grating and her refusal to see him as anything but bad news didn't ring entirely true. A lot of the observations she makes about the people around her seemed to originate from someone far more mature and insightful that she was (as in, they did not really seem to stem from the mind of a particularly naive 15-year old girl). Elle, although younger, would have made for a more convincing and interesting narrator. Libby...is painfully vanilla.

Still, Libby aside, I did find this novel to be engaging, occasionally unsettling, and exceedingly nostalgic.

ARC provided by NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I loved this book. I think it is a clever bit of marketing to have the hook as "12 year old abandoned on road" in the first chapter but it's not really about that, is it? A Crooked Tree is a beautiful novel about the disintegration of a family, and then later, a small mountain society. There is a lot of tension and anxiety in this book and Una Mannion's writing is sharp and exact. This book is so much more than it seems and if I could give it 6 stars, I would.

This debut by Una Mannion begins memorably: ‘The night we left Ellen on the road we were driving north…’, particularly as we soon learn that Ellen is only twelve years old and the ejector is her mother. What is her crime? She accuses her mother of hating her children, not such an unusual childish reproach shouted in the heat of the moment. However, to leave Ellen by herself on a desolate road ‘five or six’ miles from home as it is growing dark emphasises that the responsible adult in this family is far from responsible.
As the first section of the story builds, the author is very successful at delineating the siblings’ anxiety. Narrator Libby, just a few years older than Ellen, captures the tension between their fear of irritating their mother further and the terror they feel in abandoning Ellen. It is a bold and gripping opening and the reader is desperate to know just how Ellen fares.
We discover later that, miraculously, although she was picked up by a very strange man, she had the sense to recognise this and react bravely and appropriately. This incident casts a long shadow over the rest of the tale.
Sadly, the overall telling of ‘A Crooked Tree’ does not live up to its initial strong impact. Mannion writes well. It’s easy to imagine the isolation and cultural desert that is Schuylkill, Valley Forge Mountain and the surrounding woodland that was once inhabited by indigenous people. Early on in the novel her use of natural symbolism underlines the idea that poor parenting has negative repercussions: ‘the crooked tree… could have been caused by a bigger tree falling on the oak when it was young, and then over time the bigger tree rotted away or fell apart. The young tree survived but was left with this strange shape.’ Well, yes, but this isn’t a new idea and it isn’t portrayed very memorably after the initial incident. All in all, disappointing, especially given such an unusual and shocking opening.
My thanks to NetGalley and Faber & Faber for a copy of this novel in exchange for a fair review.

In December 2015, an Irish journalist called Teresa Mannion went viral for an OTT account of Storm Desmond.
The clip is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzx3MeYonT8 (note, this isn't the original but one of the many skits that followed). I thought she'd written this book so I was expecting something quite different.
It starts off so well, particularly for a debut. There's a carload of kids, a mother on the brink of a breakdown and the mother snaps and tells one of the kids to get out of the car.
Except it's dark, snowing, on a mountainside and it's not an idle threat. She drives home. Our narrator Libby beats herself up for not saying anything but this is her trademark personality trait.
The story sort of falls apart after this strong start and there are numerous plot failures, unnecessary detail and unbelievable actions and reactions, mostly from our narrator. There's a weird issue within the family where they do not mention the dead father under any circumstances although they're all surely thinking about him all the time. This sounds like they neglected to have therapy but there's a whole section on the bit where they did.
In contrast to Libby's lack of self awareness, inability to construe anything meaningful out of anything is her friend Sage. Sage's emotional intelligence is stellar. Yet Libby time and time again chooses to be enraged by things Sage says or does or doesn't say or do and is usually fighting with Sage. There's a kiss with a boy for no particular reason. There's a crazy neighbour called Wilson who leeches onto the family and they can't seem to get rid of him. No spoilers but the cause and effect here just didn't add up. The only thing that made sense was setting it in a time before mobile phones. Other than that, nothing that followed made sense. If a man tries to abduct a minor, there is no world where that man then moves heaven and earth to abduct her again, to get revenge for the revenge gotten by others to avenge the abduction in the first place. It's not logical.
Similarly when Libby decides to reveal her knowledge of an affair to a friend, there is no logic in how it unfolds the way it did. This was an ok story, but it lost its way.