The Listeners, by Maggie Stiefvater

I’m going to have a hard time not going on and on and sounding like the blurbs on the back of a novel

for this one. “Lyrical!” “Masterpiece!” “A tour-de-force!” ect. ect. without ever saying anything of substance. It is also, I realized quite a bit after reading it, another book about a magical house. I do like magical houses.

So here we go, this is what it’s about:

June Hudson manages The Avallon, a luxury hotel in the mountains of West Virginia. Living from her teens in the middle of her employers and clientele’s wash of wealth and luxury, she still remains not quite one of them, separated by her birth in poverty and the strange duties the Avallon requires of her in relation to the mysterious sweetwater that runs under the ground near the hotel.

Though she’s faced both the Depression and the onset of World War II with unblinking pluck, she finds a different problem when the FBI appears on her doorstep and conscripts the Avallon to house enemy diplomats. Their intent is to encourage Axis countries to treat American POWs well. But the reality for June is that she must provide a luxury living experience for Nazis, Japanese diplomats, and other influential people from Axis powers, while the governments they represent slaughter her loved ones and friends overseas.

Isn’t that such a great story concept?!?!?! There’s SO much potential in just the basic idea of the book! And Stiefvater fully realizes every inch of that potential, too.

She has always excelled at building tension, in The Listeners, she has honed her craft to such subtlety, it’s like a frog being boiled in water; you almost don’t even notice the buildup until you find yourself sitting on the edge of your seat, ignoring the fact that you were supposed to leave the house five minutes ago. And that goes for all the elements of the story—the external problem, the internal problem, the romance, all delivered with a deft hand.

Another reason I love this book is the way Maggie writes about the Virginia/West Virginia, Shenandoah Valley area. It feels like going home. She loves that area like I do and it’s a uniquely wonderful experience to hear such a talented writer use all her beautiful stock of words to describe the places I grew up in.

I love, love, love the fact that the fantastical element in the story, the sweetwater, almost escapes notice as a fantastical element. It’s magical realism at its best in my opinion. It might hit harder if you’ve spent any time around Covington, Virginia. Despite the vast difference implied between the sweetwater of Avallon and the real, eggy-sulfur water in Covington, the Covington water smell is so intense it’s easy to imagine it has special properties!  

(Parenthetical add-on after I went to goodreads to grab the cover art for my post and found a bizarre amount of 3-4 stars for a Maggie Stiefvater! I would just like to say, I one hundred percent stand by my evaluation. This is a book of nuance and place. It’s a book driven and inhabited as much by where it lives as it as it is by what happens. Any book about a house, whether a private dwelling or a luxury hotel, should have a sense of permanence, of unspeaking force about it—and this has it. There are no man-eating horses, star-crossed lovers, vampires, or werewolves—this magic seeps up from the bones of the mountains and it is a different, deeper beauty than her other work. Stands to reason some won’t get it.)