At just 88 pages, there doesn’t seem to be much to say about this book. But for being so brief, it packs a lot into so few paragraphs.
The story is about a recently divorced young woman with a questionable romantic record who, to recover from her latest heartbreak, moves to a remote town in the Scottish Highlands. There, she rents a cottage on the edge of a forest with a reputation for strangeness amongst the locals, where she plans to continue making a living as a botanical illustrator (she draws plants and animals). One day, whilst venturing into Blackwood Forest in search of interesting plant specimens to illustrate, she stumbles upon a never-seen-before creature in the act of dismembering the deer it had hunted.
It’s a shock as brutal as encountering a bear whilst it’s feasting on its prey, and naturally, the creature reacts by going into attack mode. Startled, she reacts in an unusual way: she starts drawing the monster.
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