Welcome to The Afictionado’s Queer Book Rec Bonanza! It’s Pride Month, and to celebrate, I’ll be breaking my usual blogging schedule to post one review a week for the entirety of June.
And for our final June post, back we go towards the ocean…
Premise: Iris and her mother have been living life on the run, avoiding the earthquakes that wrack the whole world and fleeing from the sinister corporate operatives hungry for information that her mother is hiding. A routine stop in a small coastal town goes awry when Iris wakes to find her mum missing, having left a flash drive, a strange coin, and a cryptic note: if she doesn’t come back, Iris should call the Glassy Bay Travellers Hostel. But Glassy Bay doesn’t turn up on any maps, and hardly even seems like it exists…
Rainbow rep: two lesbian protagonists who fall for each other over the course of the book, queer side characters including a gay couple
Content considerations: natural disasters and climate change ennui; parental death
Erin Gough is a pretty big name in the Australian queer YA world, singlehandedly raising the literary profile (and pure number) of lesbian teen shenanigans published in the country with her award-winning debut The Flywheel (2017) and equally award-winning second novel Amelia Westlake (2018; published in the US as Amelia Westlake Was Never Here because I suppose they figured the US market wanted more words). Now, she returns with a piece of genre fiction, and you know I’m all about that.
I’m happy to say that this was a lot of fun, though I’m prompted to do something a little different with this recommendation. Talking about what I enjoyed about the novel means talking about twists and reveals that were very fun for me to discover, and I really don’t want to take that thrill of mystery-solving away from anyone. So here’s what I’ll do: first I’ll give the more general, spoiler-free rundown I usually do in these spotlight posts, and then I’ll dive deeper into spoiler territory under a nice, delineated heading.
Spoiler-free
Into the Mouth of the Wolf is a quirky sci-fi hybrid, neatly localised in its scope despite the Big Ideas going on—there’s a climate crisis, a government cover-up, and a real world-ending threat, yet the focus remains nicely on the main characters and keeps them at the core of the plot. It runs on a sense of adrenaline and mystery, and I got thoroughly sucked in even though stories about navigating and solving government conspiracies usually don’t do it for me.
Part of this is the other story elements I’ll get to in the next section, and part of it was the characters, most of whom I found very fun. Iris is the standout, with her brash practicality conflicting against her vulnerability and desire to just live a safe and normal life. I’ll also give a shoutout to the compassionate and sheltered Lena, who learns to be a bit of a hero; and to the authentically annoying non-fiction podcaster Marty. Marty has a romantic subplot with another side character that I found a little unbelievable and shoehorned in, but I did enjoy the odd but sincere relationship that sparks between Iris and Lena—not love at first sight, per se, but a sense of sudden connection and longing that propels them through the complicated events that soon begin to spiral around both characters. These two anchor the story and tie its multiple plotlines together, giving things a nice emotional core as they threaten to get galaxy-brained.
Gosh, that all sounds a little vague, but trust me when I say this is a lot of fun: it’s got romance, mystery, high-stakes thriller elements, and a heartfelt sense of good old adolescent ennui in the face of a world that feels like it’s falling apart. If all that sounds good to you, give it a shot!
And now, a peek behind the curtain…
Spoiler zone
Do you ever accidentally read an isekai?
Granted, I knew very little about the plot of this book—and the marketing copy and blurb give very little away—but I was certainly not expecting an inter-universe portal to be part of proceedings in what appeared to be a climate-crisis sci-fi. I love it, though, and the buildup to this reveal is probably my favourite part of the novel.
First, we meet Iris and spend a few chapters anchored in her POV, with her life on the run from government goons in a world shaken by quakes established as normal. Then, after her mother’s disappearance and mysterious letter, we switch to a new POV character named Lena: the daughter of the owners of the Glassy Bay Hostel that Iris has been pointed towards. We meet Lena’s friends and establish her local community and get to know her normal, right before it’s interrupted by the return of her long-lost best friend to town… who arrives just in time to find a body washed up on the beach.
Now we have two threads of intrigue, knotted together by the message Iris sends to the Hostel. This is received by Lena, prompting an online chat back and forth, and Lena earnestly scratching her head as to why Iris is having trouble finding Glassy… and why Lena is having trouble finding Iris’ mother. Are these mysteries linked? Surely, but how? And if Iris’ mother is our dead stranger, why was she found coming out of the sea, and who killed her?
Meanwhile, of course, you’re getting this uncanny feeling as you switch back and forth between Lena’s plotline and Iris’. Something doesn’t quite add up. The settings sound weirdly similar despite the girls apparently being miles apart. In Lena’s plotline, there’s been a conspicuous lack of mention of the Clean Machines and quakes that they’ve caused, both of which are a reality of everyday life for Iris. Instead, there’s an ominous emphasis on the navy presence in Glassy Bay and the new “packing facility” built on the rise.
And voila, just under halfway through, the penny (or, well, the mysterious fish-engraved coin) drops. One of the many results of the Clean Machine catastrophe is a tear in the earth’s “skin” and a gateway to another world. Lena and Iris are in the same place, just two different versions of it on two different sides of an interdimensional rift. It also transpires that the Clean Machine folks know about it and have been coming across attempting to set up shop in a whole new universe. So now we have a murder mystery, a climate crisis, a sci-fi government cover-up starring power-hungry corporations, and the question of whether Lena and her friends can get Iris safely across to the other side through an underwater portal guarded by navy vessels. Suddenly that cover imagery makes a lot more sense!
This twist is a lot of fun—I especially enjoy the bait-and-switch where Lena’s world, the world closer to the “real” one that readers will be familiar with, is the “other” world within the story. Introducing us to Iris and her version of normal first creates a wonderfully off-kilter feeling when Lena’s world is introduced, everything familiar and ordinary about it suddenly feeling out of place and uncanny.
When I said that Iris and Lena’s connection ties their plotlines together, it also ties two worlds together—and it’s played as pretty down-to-earth despite the Epic implications of such a setup. These cross-dimensional love interests have a fairly unconventional romance plotline, which I honestly enjoyed, and while it safety-pins the parallel stories and universes together it’s not the be-all-and-end-all crux of the story, nor the heart of the characters’ personal arcs.
Into the Mouth of the Wolf was an unexpected ride in a lot of ways, and I’m glad I picked it up. It ends on a bittersweet but hopeful note, lingering on the uncomfortable question of how you’re meant to keep going in a world that feels as though it’s teetering on the brink of collapse. Iris’ world was collapsing, but Lena’s has its own problems even after the gang saves the day and prevents the Evil Corporation taking root in Universe #2. But what do you do? You set down your feet on solid ground and you try to keep going. These are prescient and recurring themes in YA, but Gough pulls them off while feeling fresh and poignant. If she’s sticking in the genre space, I’d be very keen to see what she writes next!
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