80 pages • 2 hours read
Glendy VanderahWhere the Forest Meets the Stars
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Healing Power of Love
The way the relationships between Jo, Ursa, and Gabe develop shows how love heals people. The novel’s main characters all bear the wounds of their traumas and illnesses at the beginning of the story. Jo is dealing with the aftermath of her cancer and the grief of losing her mother, Gabe with his mental health condition and resentment toward his family, and Ursa with the horror of the night she became an alien in a human body. Whether Ursa is an alien, both the alien Ursa and human Ursa experienced the image of her mother’s severe head injury and the other horrific events of that traumatic night.
The way love heals Ursa is evident early in the novel, when Jo and Gabe begin to work as a team to ensure her well-being. After four days of stability, a place to sleep, and consistent meals, “Ursa didn’t look like a changeling anymore. The dark circles under her eyes disappeared, her skin turned a wholesome pink, and she’d gained a few pounds” (74). The love and care that Jo and Gabe show Ursa by housing her, clothing her, feeding her, and enriching her life have a swift effect on her health and happiness, and their ongoing love and support help Ursa heal from her deeper issues, like her mother’s murder. When Jo and Gabe get Ursa to talk about the night she became an alien in a human body, the divide between the alien and human Ursa becomes clearer. The alien Ursa describes being assaulted and watching her mother’s murder in third person, switching to first person only to describe the events after Ursa’s “death” and the alien’s possession of the body. The gulf between Ursa’s two identities widens when she revisits the trauma of that night. However, once Jo allows Ursa to stay, this divide begins to narrow as Jo’s love and guidance heal her. Ursa refers to the human Ursa’s parents as “Mama” and “Daddy” (311). She explains, “[Jo] said the alien could be kind of like Ursa’s soul, so Ursa and the alien could be a whole person” (318). With Jo and Gabe’s time, love, and nurturing, Ursa’s physical and emotional wounds heal, showing the healing power of love.
Gabe and Jo heal one another too as they grow close and build a relationship. At the beginning of the book, Jo feels like she’s “a woman who wasn’t exactly a woman anymore” (64), having had her breasts and ovaries removed. This view of her body makes it difficult to be around men, especially those she’s attracted to or who show interest in her, like Gabe. The first time Gabe shows interest in Jo, she attempts to summon her former confident self, but “Jo couldn’t find her, […] and the discovery of her absence made her shudder like a fever had come over her” (82). However, as Jo grows closer to Gabe, she slowly reveals more of her vulnerability, allowing herself to trust him with her insecurities. He shows her nothing but love and respect when she allows him to. When they have sex for the first time, Gabe tells Jo, “I want you exactly the way you are” (205). He says she’s “the most whole person [he’s] ever known” (205), reassuring her that she doesn’t lack anything to him. Love’s healing power is evident in the way Gabe quiets Jo’s insecurities and helps her gain confidence in her body.
Jo reciprocated love helps heal Gabe’s emotional scars, which have altered the path of his life, and the childhood trauma of witnessing his mother’s affair and learning he’s a product of it. When Gabe opens up to Jo about these things, he gives her the power to push him toward healing. Gabe’s mental health condition manifests shortly after he and Jo make their arrangement to care for Ursa. As a result, he stays in bed for days, encouraged by the presence of his overbearing sister, who attempts to keep Jo and Ursa away from him. However, Jo and Ursa manage to help him get out of the house. Jo notices that he “looked bad when they first saw him, but he’d livened remarkably in the last ten minutes” (110). In their company, Gabe starts to recover from his episode. By the novel’s end, Lacey observes that she hasn’t “seen [Gabe] so happy since he was a young kid” (298).
In addition, Jo helps Gabe face his past trauma and reevaluate his perspective on the affair between his mother and George Kinney, resulting in his forgiving them completely. Lacey says Gabe told them that “now that he was in love with [Jo], he understood everything they’d done” (297). The love Gabe receives from Jo and feels for her helps him move past his resentment. Through these character arcs and relationships, Where the Forest Meets the Stars establishes the message that love has the power to heal people.
The Process of Recovery
How the main characters work through their pain illustrates how recovery, whether physical, mental, or emotional, is an ongoing process. Jo is dealing with her self-image and confidence as well as grief over her mother’s death. Similarly, Gabe is recovering from the toll his mental health condition takes on him and how childhood trauma has affected his life.
Jo elaborates on her pain by explaining that she chose to love her mother fully and stay close with her until the very end instead of distancing herself to brace for the impact of her death. Jo feels “part of [her] died with [her mother]” but she “[has] no regrets” (160). She explains she’s “not recovered from it even now” (160), revealing the depth of her pain. Her prolonged emotional recovery informs her decisions about loving Ursa and wanting to adopt her. Later, Jo tells Tabby that “survivors can live and love more fully than people who haven’t stared death in the face” (225), adding that by loving Ursa, she’s “being a survivor” (226). Jo acknowledges that the recovery she’s still working through after her battle with cancer influences how she handles Ursa. Near the novel’s end, Dr. Shaw notes that he knows “what [Jo has] been through—how it could have…influenced what [she] did” (253), implying that understands how her recovery from cancer and her mother’s death influences her actions and emotions.
Gabe’s emotional battle emphasizes the idea that recovery is non-linear and requires continual work. After meeting Jo, he begins to open up about his ongoing experiences. He confesses, “When I was a sophomore at U of C, I had what my parents quaintly called a ‘nervous breakdown.’ I haven’t gotten my sh** together since” (80). Jo, whose recovery has been a slow yet steady uphill battle, has difficulty understanding Gabe’s mental health condition. She thinks he doesn’t “recover and move on” because of how his family treats his illness, but Gabe clarifies that her “view of depression is optimistically misguided” (128). His non-linear battle is evident when he experiences an emotional setback, which keeps him in bed for days despite how positive things were going for him in his budding friendship with Jo and lively days with Ursa. He would’ve stayed in bed longer had Jo and Ursa not intervened. The details Gabe provides about his past and the way his mental health condition affects him show how he manages his ongoing battle. Later, he admits that things are good but he adds that he’s “afraid to trust how good it is,” wondering “What if it all starts again?” (314). Gabe’s concerns about the back-and-forth nature of his emotional recovery illustrate his understanding of how recovery is an ongoing process that doesn’t always take a linear path, helping establish the theme The Process of Recovery.
Taking the Good with the Bad
Ursa’s quarks, Jo’s cancer, and the way the events of the book unfold help develop the idea that good things accompany bad things, and vice versa. When Jo and Tabby get the opportunity to lease a house they’ve admired for years, Ursa points to her quarks as the reason—but notes how sometimes bad and good things intertwine. The homeowner, Frances Ivey, must leave town in a hurry because “her former partner, Nancy, […] had been in a devastating car wreck and had no one to help her” (94). After Jo and Tabby sign the lease, excited about their new home, Ursa claims, “I made it happen” (95). She describes how she makes good things happen to those she likes, but Tabby realizes “that means [Ursa] made Nancy get in a car wreck” (95). Ursa articulates the theme, saying, “[S]ometimes bad things happen to make good things happen” (95). Ursa reiterates this sentiment after her head injury from a fallen branch. She clarifies, “[I]t’s not the forest’s fault […] I made it happen” (136), explaining how the outcome—Gabe’s staying overnight—was the good thing she intended to happen. The head injury was the bad thing that needed to happen to lead to the good thing. When Ursa explains what happened the night she came “down from the stars” (281), she describes how she stole the body of a recently murdered girl, climbed into the back of a random pickup truck, and rode until the truck stopped on Jo’s street: “That was how I found [Jo] […] My quark things did it for sure. They make good things like that happen” (282). The juxtaposition of her being strangled by men who wanted to kill her and her calling the aftermath a good thing illustrates the theme Taking the Good with the Bad through the motif of her quarks.
In addition to the Ursa’s quarks, several other events operate on the same principle of good things accompanying bad ones. During Jo’s conversation with Tanner, whose insensitivity is apparent in his comments, he observes that “at least your mom was diagnosed in time to save you” (55). Jo, still struggling with the grief from her mother’s death, concedes that he’s right: “No one gets a mammogram at age twenty-four. If she hadn’t gotten sick and found out she carries the mutation, my cancer might not have been found until it was too late” (55). Her mother’s diagnosis and subsequent death helped save Jo’s life by leading to her early diagnosis; had it been later, she likely would have had a much worse prognosis. The way her mother’s death saved her life illustrates how good things often accompany bad things.
Similarly, Little Bear’s death demonstrates this concept. On the night that the bad men attack Jo and Ursa at the cottage, Jo awakes when Little Bear goes “berserk, his barks generated so fast he hardly took a breath between” (235). The dog’s alerts allow Jo the time to wake up and formulate a plan to save her and Ursa’s lives. Soon thereafter, however, “[t]wo gunshots rang out, and Little Bear wailed a horrific sound” (235). Jo and Ursa survive the encounter. When Ursa asks Jo if Little Bear is dead, she replies that he is but adds, “He saved both of us” (271). Although Little Bear didn’t survive his encounter with the gunmen, his death helped Jo and Ursa escape. The dog’s death and Jo’s mother’s death both act as warnings to their loved ones about potential danger, saving Ursa and Jo’s lives. These events illustrate how bad things must sometimes happen for good things to come of them.
