Dawn Kurtagich The author of the story is Dawn Kurtagich. The title of the novel is “And the Trees Crept”. The physical setting of the novel is at the family’s secluded mansion, La Baume, also known as the blood manor. The temporal setting is present day. The author manipulates the time to advance the story line by not giving any certain years about how long the characters stay in the house but by foreshadowing earlier events of their mother and her sisters at La Baume. The setting is critical to the story since the setting starts to torment the characters, which gives off a sense that the mansion is haunted. The woods that La Baume is surrounded by starts to wither away the walls and slowly creep into the inside of the …show more content…
She deals with the death of her mother, aunt, and sister and her own insanity while she lives in the La Baume. She also have to deal with Gowan, a boy who used to live in La Baume while it was an orphanage, who find a way into the mansion and refuses to leave. She also have to deal with the war that is coming upon London and the shortage of food it has brought. The central conflict of the novel is when the Creeper Man appears in La Baume and takes Silla. When he arrives he takes Nori (who is deaf) and kills Aunt Catherine. The character experiences internal conflicts. She soon finds out that The Creeper Man is her own imagination and that she went mad in the house. Her mind made up the trees creeping in the house, the trees strangling her Aunt, and the Creeper man taking Nori. At the end of the novel she comes back to her state of mind and realizes that due to the foods shortages that Nori starved to death, that her aunt Catherine hung herself, and that she also died and is now stuck in a place between heaven and earth. The most critical events in the novel is when Silla’s father killed her mother, when her Aunt hung herself, and when she realized that everyone in the house is dead. The poems in the beginning of each chapter gave away clues of the ending by putting certain words in bold letters, once you read all of the letters that are bold faced it revealed a sentence that gave a clue to the outcome. And the Trees …show more content…
The one unrealistic thing in the novel is the time period of the book. In the book it is explained that the characters are in London and they are facing world war three in the year 2016. In 2016, there was no war in London. The one thing I would change in the novel is the explanation of why Silla’s father was so depressed and violent to the point of killing his wife. There was no backstory of telling why he was the way he was. My favorite quote from the book is “Things can stay safe for long. They can pretend to fit, but then you hear Discord’s song and things crack bit by bit” which is on page 34. This is my favorite quote because it means that even though life seems perfect there can be hidden secrets. Soon the secrets would be revealed even if you don’t want them to and that those hidden secrets can destroy anyone’s life in a long period of time. I would rate this book a five out of five stars. This book will keep you flipping the pages to it all night long while you are curious of the backstory of the characters and their crazy