Brother & Sister Enter the Forest by Richard Mirabella

He doesn’t fit in his mother’s home and he doesn’t fit at school. But, Justin is also queer in the sense that he is an outsider and rebel, simultaneously gentle and contentious with his family, beyond his sexuality. It is to blame for pushing Justin away from home and school. Later, I realized the role homophobia plays in the story. When I started writing, I didn’t intend to write a novel about homophobia or specifically queer trauma. Richard MirabellaThank you for saying that. This could lead some people to read this story through the trope of queer trauma, but I’d argue Brother & Sister Enter the Forest stares down that reality while also challenging it-resisting to let that define both the novel and Justin as a character. Rachel LeónThe homophobia of Justin’s classmates sets off a course of events that ultimately changes Justin in a critical and tragic way. It urges us to consider: how do we love someone who is not well? Where do we go when our family won’t help us? Between Mirabella’s expertise on the sentence level and the love he infuses into the story-a love that explores the liminal space between tragedy and triumph-the reader is quick to trust that this journey is a necessary one.īrother & Sister Enter the Forest is haunting and gorgeous, pensively exploring memory, family, and love’s limits.

The novel is not without disturbing moments of trauma (content warnings for homophobia and violence), yet it resists-as does Justin-being defined by that. Through a skillfully crafted dual timeline narrative, we come to understand how Justin got to where we meet him: struggling to maintain sobriety, dealing with the lasting effects of a traumatic brain injury as well as the entanglement of Willa’s love, obligation, and hesitation in regard to her brother. We meet the two in adulthood when Justin is struggling and, with nowhere else to go, shows up on Willa’s doorstep.

Richard Mirabella’s spellbinding debut novel, Brother & Sister Enter the Forest (Catapult), as its title suggests, centers the complicated relationship between a brother, Justin, and his sister, Willa, with nuance and grace.

Brother & Sister Enter the Forest by Richard Mirabella