#Review - Cuckoo by Gretchen Felker-Martin

Cuckoo

Gretchen Felker-Martin
Titan Books, 11 June 2024
Available as: PB, 342pp,  e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781803367569

I'm grateful to Titan Books for sending me a copy of Cuckoo  to consider for review.

Cuckoo is a novel of two parts - and I need to be careful what I say about the second for fear of spoiling the first. 

In that first part, set in the 90s USA, we see a number of queer kids consigned to a brutal camp by their parents in order to make them "normal". The detail of this is enraging in the extreme, the children are in effect kidnapped by hired thugs and trafficked to a remote desert site where they are to be worked till they drop, physically punished, and indoctrinated. The details are harrowing.

The book is about more than. suffering, though. Felker-Martin takes time to ensure we come to know each of the kids - some of whom are gay, some lesbian, some trans. Some of them, of course, just aren't sure and had been trying to explore their identities, or grow into them, until discovered by parents, schoolmates or other adults. Of course the world often isn't a clearcut place and so we also hear tales of eating disorders, abuse and loss - and of love and infatuation.  A significant theme is the variance in the behaviour of the kids, reflecting their developing understanding of themselves and the relationships that develop. As you'd expect, some of them are brave (and suffer for it), others try to keep their heads down  ("do your time") while others cooperate with the new regime. 

All, though, begin to sense there is more to this than appears. Behind the straightforward prejudice and abuse, there is clearly something else going on - as we already know form the short prologue. The bigotry and hate that occasions the place is real enough but it it also enables something that is, if anything, even worse. The book's blurb gives pointers to a number of alien abduction/ replacement themes here so I will cite those, but I'm not going to say any more about exactly what is happening - I will let you unpick the horrifying details for yourself! The only thing I will add is that, in a cruel twist for all involved, Felker-Martin deftly inverts the trope of parents feeling their kids have been "replaced", that they aren't theirs any more, to consider families which, in fact, desire that, want to remake their children into something they're not - and of what the results might be. Themes of identity, honesty and truth are never far from the surface, with the abductees needing to discover very fast who they really are and what they really want, if they're to survive.

Of course, doing that has its costs and we see some of that in the shorter second part, where the survivors of the camp come together again. Felker-Martin shows us that mere survival didn't guarantee a happy-ever-after, the now adults have been through too much and are not each others' best friends, but they need to be together again and to face an awful truth. The conclusion is perhaps inevitable but nonetheless is filled with tension, it will have the reader totally hooked, desperate to see how things turn out and what the cost might be.

The only negative for me - and very much a personal matter of taste - was that at times, Felker-Martin uses a stream-of-consiousness technique to convey the emotional state and intensity of experiences. This creates long passages which, for me, were almost unreadable; after three or four lines, the sense of the writing just seems to get lost. Some readers will love these, I know. They are not though so frequent as to distract greatly from the narrative.

Overall, a tense and compulsive novel albeit one I had to set aside at time when it became almost too tense. 

For more information about Cuckoo, see the publisher's website here.