A hauntingly beautiful exploration of the encompassing and overwhelming experience of grief
—Amanda Khong, Bookish Brews
Bookish Brews Snapshot
Deep in Providence by Riss M. Neilson
After Jasmine dies in a car accident, her best friends Miliani, Inez, and Natalie are determined to do anything it takes to bring her back from the dead using the magic that Miliani’s grandma taught her.
💔 Grief and Love 😭 Emotional 🌺 Friendship Goals 🔮 Magical Realism
- Genre: Contemporary, Speculative Fiction, Young Adult
Book Review
Haunting, beautiful, heartbreaking, magical, important, challenging
Deep in Providence is beautifully haunting. It’s an exploration of grief and all of the wrong ways that we deal with it. I found myself with a heavy heart the entire time I was reading. Neilson has a profound way of weaving magic into the lives of these characters. Magic is something that we live with and it is something that helps us get through the tough times. It isn’t a magic switch that we use to solve our problems, it’s an extension of ourselves and how we manage our lives.
Best friends Miliani, Inez, Natalie, and Jasmine have filled Providence, Rhode Island with memories of magic spells and mixing potions with the help of the magic taught to them by Miliani’s grandmother. But when Jasmine dies in an accident, the city becomes filled with grief and the shadow of Jasmine’s friendship. Unable to accept her death as final, the friends vow to use their magic to bring her back, but magic that powerful ends up growing darker and more demanding than they ever could have imagined.
Deep in Providence will pull at your heartstrings in more ways than you can imagine. The exploration of grief, friendship, and love is nothing short of beautiful. Magic in novels shines brightest when it is used to emphasize the human condition and Neilson portrays grief intermingled with magic flawlessly. Though we don’t all turn to necromancy or trying to raise the dead, the way that the characters desperately try to do whatever it takes to bring back someone they love is a painfully raw human experience. The magic growing darker and more demanding is the perfect way to express what happens when we refuse to deal with our grief.
The most beautiful part about Deep in Providence was the way that the girls, especially Miliani, embraced the magic from her grandmother. I often think about how the magic that we live with every day is vastly misunderstood by the west but it’s truly who we are. It lives with us every day and in moments of intense grief or high emotions, we turn to it more and more. When the girl’s best friend dies, they desperately cling to the magic and though their lives splinter from the darkness, they are also pulled closer to their roots. In their roots, they find what they are made of and eventually learn to heal. Turning inward to embrace these pieces of you is not easy or straightforward but it teaches us about where we came from.
Deep in Providence is a hauntingly beautiful exploration of love, friendship, and all ways that grief can completely encompass everything in our lives. It will pull at your heartstrings in more ways than you even realize. It is a truly stunning debut.
