Being a debut book, I didn’t have very high expectations, aware that I would probably have to wait sometime before the author’s style and ability to write truly captivating stories for readers would emerge. Instead...

Instead, I found myself loving every single sentence of this story and page. I empathized with the protagonist, young Sadie, who is overwhelmed by her mother's multiple sclerosis, forcing her to leave behind the childhood typical of a twelve-year-old and enter the adult world.

The entire story is rich with powerful reflections that Sadie is compelled to understand during her long (but never long enough) journey of preparing for the pain that will soon hit her when she becomes motherless.

What I sometimes disliked about this novel were the reflections Sadie made: although she is forced to think like an adult, and while she must face the world with a non-childish awareness, I found that many of her thoughts belong more to an adult woman than to a twelve-year-old. It’s as if Sadie is only outwardly twelve at times, and this is frustrating because it makes the narrative less credible.

But beyond these minor annoying phrases, it is easy to empathize with the protagonist, follow her emotions and events, and feel compassion for what she goes through. For a debut, it is a beautiful novel, original in many parts and with plenty of good stories to tell. It is a novel I highly recommend, and I thank NetGalley for allowing me to read it in advance.

<i>Thank you Netgalley and Boyle & Dalton for providing me with an arc in exchange for an honest review. </i>

Actual Rating: 2.5

This is a story told from the perspective of a 12-year-old girl in a span of one year as she slowly feels like losing her childhood in the face of coping with a terminal disease her mother has. This book is full of reflections on life, nature, belonging, finding oneself and a sense of wonder and magic but all this not shying away from the reality of life.

In theory, this book has everything that I love and look for in a book. And it was everything that I thought it would be for the first 50 pages.

I was fascinated by the writing, the context, the wonder and the tenderness this book carries. From the beginning, I truly thought I had found a new 5-star book. Sadly that feeling didn't last so long.

Oh... How I wanted to love this book...

As I progressed through the novel, my interest was slowly withering and I found it harder and harder to pick it up.

The thing is, this book is told from the perspective of a 12-year-old girl, and - even if the book deals with exactly this loss of innocence and loss of the wonder of a child when one has to face the brute reality of life - the voice of this girl was as if she was 35 not 12.

It didn't seem like I was reading from the perspective of a child. The emotional maturity the narrator had was beyond anything a child that age could come up even when dealing with hard circumstances. This bothered me deeply and, as much as I wanted to love it, it soon became hard to ignore.

At some point, this novel became a lot of telling and not showing. It felt like every character of that book was unreal, not flawed and more of a means to convey a message.

The more I read, the heavy-handed politically correct message became stronger. There was especially a scene with a nurse (no spoilers) that I couldn't pass through and I thought about DNFing it. It felt very woke and completely unnecessary in the plot.

I also missed a lot of the wonder and subtlety that were so present at the beginning of this book.

I feel like there was a lot of potential but in the end, it felt like a book just to convey values and ideas, with a lot of tell without showing. Don't get me wrong, I agree with most of the ideas in this book but I did not wish to be told them, I wished to have concluded them.

I truly wanted to love it and I felt bad about giving a negative review for a debut author but I only did so because there was so much potential in it, and I'm looking forward to seeing what this author puts up next.

What can I say about this book? It devastated me!! Such a raw, emotional book about a young girl trying to cope with the fact that her mum is seriously ill, and so she heads out in the forest and meets another girl who helps her to process what she's going through.

So beautifully written, but so haunting and bleak.

The Clearing by Cassandra J. Kelly had me hooked from the blurb.

Sadie's mother is very ill and is going to be dying soon and she knows that with her death, her childhood will be over, and she misses having her imagination - she's stuck in reality and can't seem to find her way back to being able to pretend. To cope, she goes into the woods behind her house where she goes back to her roots - literally - by trying to find herbs, and she collects and presses flowers.

In the woods, Sadie meets Cali, and becomes friends with her, and who shows her the wonders of the forest and gives her what she needs to cope with her mom's impending death and what life will be like without her.

I may have sobbed my way through part of this book, processing everything right along with Sadie. I loved this debut novel and can't wait to share this with my book club when it's published.

I look forward to reading more from Cassandra Kelly in the future.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher who gave me this ARC in consideration of an honest review. All opinions are my own.