Loxley Fiddleback can see the dead,but the problem is… the dead can see her.Ghosts have always been cruel to Loxley Fiddleback, especially the spirit of her only friend, alive only hours before. Loxley isn’t equipped to solve a murder: she lives near the bottom of a cutthroat, strip-mined metropolis known as “The Hole,” suffers from crippling anxiety and doesn’t cotton to strangers. Worse … Worse still, she’s haunted.
She inherited her ability to see spirits from the women of her family, but the dead see her, too. Ghosts are drawn to her like a bright fire, and their lightest touch leaves her with painful wounds.
Loxley swears to take blood for blood and find her friend’s killer. In doing so, she uncovers a conspiracy that rises all the way to the top of The Hole. As her enemies grow wise to her existence, she becomes the quarry, hunted by a brutal enforcer named Hiram McClintock. In sore need of confederates, Loxley must descend into the strangest depths of the city in order to have the revenge she seeks and, ultimately, her own salvation.
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I read Alex White’s Every Mountain Made Low for two reasons: First, I was scheduled to be on a panel with them (Alex’s preferred pronoun) and I like to shock other panelists by being familiar with their work. Second, Alex and I have the same literary agent so I wanted to peek over their shoulder.
Like Turtles All the Way Down and How Evan Broke His Head and Other Secrets, Every Mountain Made Low puts the reader in the PoV of someone who is atypical. In this case, Loxley Fiddleback is an autistic girl. Loxley’s struggles are brilliantly portrayed and, based on the neuroscience I learned while writing Left Brain Speaks, the Right Brain Laughs: A Look at the Neuroscience of Innovation Creativity in Art, Science Life, accurate right down to the punctuation. Sure, the book has a Stephen King level McGuffin–Loxley can see the dead and the dead can see her, too–but Loxley’s interactions with the world and, even more, the world’s interactions with Loxley, hit all the notes in the autistic symphony: she takes the words of others literally, doesn’t recognize social cues, demonstrates massive anxiety, and is confused and overwhelmed by too much sensory input.
What Every Mountain Made Low has in common with Turtles All the Way Down and How Evan Broke His Head and Other Secrets is our experience in Loxley’s point of view (PoV) as others treat her as though she’s stupid or insane or ignore her altogether.
In portraying a character on the autism spectrum, really putting us in her head, Every Mountain Made Low has the buzz of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Like Mark Haddon’s character, Christopher John Francis Boone, Loxley is thrust into the role of a detective. Other than that, the books are not similar. Every Mountain is set in a cutthroat, dystopian urban setting built from the bowels of a huge mine. There’s nothing precious or cute about it. We’re thrust into the complexity of Loxley’s life. Some reader reviewers didn’t like Loxley enough to cheer for her, but I did. She’s trying to survive in impossible conditions and that added to my sympathy for her.
Another interesting diversion from Curious Incident was that Alex wrote the whole book from Loxley’s PoV, but in the third person, whereas Haddon wrote Curious Incident from the first person. I sent Alex an email asking why he went with the third person and they said that they didn’t want it to feel “hokey.” I think they made the right decision for the setting of this book. It’s not, after all, set in a tidy suburban neighborhood; it’s gritty and we need to see that world with a bit of the distance that writers can get by using the third person while still retaining the ability to move in close and intimate to the character’s PoV.
I loved the story of Loxley Fiddleback. I will be sure to put this author on my list so that I may read future stories by her. Really enjoyed!