‘The overwhelming feeling with this novel is that the author wants to write a spooky story about a group of childhood friends while also penning a modern morality tale about the dangers of purity culture and casual racism. Keeping a foot in each lane, White struggles to drive either narrative at more than a surface level, and the novel feels far short of what it could have been.’

The nameless indigenous peoples of Siberia we envision are pure in the mind of the Western writer, a canvas equally mystical and remote which doesn’t conjure up all the shadows we have to invite into the room when writing about the Apache, Blackfeet, or Navajo.