She expresses “a desire to shrink the world and make it manageable. She wanted to be happy and free of his pain.” And while both siblings would rather forget the circumstances of their fractured bond, the reunion exhumes buried traumas that Mirabella reveals with a careful hand, the dramatic revelations never eclipsing the grace of the story’s emotional core.īefore being forced to seek Willa’s help, Justin arrives home from work one day and sees that one wall of his building had collapsed and exposed its interiors to the elements, “like someone had peeled a lid off a can.” The metaphor recalls the dioramas of childhood memories-including various versions of herself and Justin when they were younger-that Willa now painstakingly creates in her apartment, miniaturizing the past to control its power over her in the present. Justin’s apartment building has recently collapsed, a literal representation of the shaky and unstable foundations of his new life following a period of addiction and other struggles, and he’s arrived at Willa’s home seeking shelter and support. Willa and Justin’s reconnection at the start of Mirabella’s debut novel after years of estrangement challenges them to find each other once again in the forest after all those years of wandering alone. Such is the world of Mirabella’s meticulously woven narrative, a chronicle of the relationship between siblings Willa and Justin that elegantly cross-cuts between their adolescence and adulthoods, peeling back layers of tension to uncover the wounds at its core.
The title of Richard Mirabella’s Brother & Sister Enter the Forest is evocative of the enduring promise of fairy tales: a familiar form giving shape to the darker corners of our imaginations, even as sparks of magic flash in the shadows.
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