Ucána the Unruly

5 Star Review

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Editorial Book Review:

By Andre Sainz

Gar Crane opens this novel with a premise that refuses to comfort you: a young woman on a journey toward acceptance who arrives somewhere considerably more complicated than peace. That refusal to offer easy resolution is the book's most distinctive and most honest quality, and it signals from the very first pages that Ucána the Unruly is not the kind of dark fantasy that wraps its pain in a tidy bow.

Ucána is one of those protagonists who grabs you immediately not because she is likeable in any conventional sense but because she is completely, ferociously real. The cheerful sarcasm she wields like a weapon while deep-seated wrath simmers underneath is a combination that anyone who has ever smiled through pain will recognize instantly. She is funny and furious and grieving and relentless, and Crane never asks you to choose which version of her is the real one. All of it is real. That is the point.

The world Crane builds around her is genuinely unusual. Dark fantasy colliding with harsh domestic reality, a cursed family history unraveling in real time, a brother lured into a perilous trek, an erotic Painted Eucalyptus tree that somehow lands them both in jail for a weekend, these are not the ingredients of a conventional fantasy novel. They are the ingredients of something stranger and more personal, a story that uses mythological and fantastical elements the way dreams use them, to process what ordinary language cannot quite hold.

What gives the book its emotional weight is the father who haunts every page even after death. The multiple abandonments, the vanished sailboat leaving only fragments of misery behind, the unanswered questions that grief never quite silences. Ucána's wrath is not a character flaw to be overcome. It is a completely logical response to what she was handed.

The glimpses of warmth that break through, the innocence of a child offering acceptance, the rediscovery of forgotten passions, are more moving precisely because they arrive inside all that justified fury rather than replacing it.