Review Detail

Stuey, his mother, and his grandfather live in a large, old house that has been in the family for generations and stands at the edge of a woods. After a huge storm, his grandfather passes away. Stuey continues to explore the woods, because he did this frequently with his grandfather. Of especial interest is a deadfall (several trees uprooted by the storm that make a sort of leafy cave), and this becomes a place he and new neighbor Elly enjoy playing. There is some bad blood between the families, since Stuey's great grandfather was bootlegger who later turned to a legitimate business in a country club and golf course. Unfortunately, Elly's great grandfather was a Jewish lawyer who was not allowed to join the country club, and the two disappeared from the woods on the same night. When Stuey and Elly are enjoying some of her mother's pie, Elly disappears right in front of Stuey's eyes. This, of course, is hard to explain to the authorities, who don't believe Stuey. They try to find a man who appears in a photograph Stuey has taken, but as time passes, no clues are found and Elly does not reappear. However, in an alternative reality, STUEY is the one to have disappeared, and we hear how events unfold in both planes of existence. Of course, the families deal differently with the disappearances, but the trajectory of the woods' fate is different as well. Stuey and Elly occasionally see each other and try to put the worlds together. Does the secret to this lie in the grandfather's stories, which are laid out in the notebooks he was writing just before his death?