Be careful where you step

“The Fallen Fruit” by Shawntelle Madison

c.2024,

Amistad                                             

$28.00                                      

437 pages

You’re lucky you didn’t hit your head!

The damage you did to yourself was bad enough, you didn’t need a head wound to lay you low, too. You haven’t skinned your knees like that since you were ten years old. Your elbow still hurts from that tumble. But read the new book, “The Fallen Fruit” by Shawntelle Madison and be grateful: you’re still in the here and now.

‘Fallen Fruit’ author Shawntelle Madison.Photo by Willow Run Photography

She should’ve just put a “For Sale” sign on it and sold the place, like she was told.

Cecily Bridge-Davis was warned by the locals that the portion of the old Bridge farm she’d inherited was “godforsaken,” but she had to see it. Maybe it would help her understand her father, who’d up and died when Cecily was just a baby. If she could find anything about him, the trip wouldn’t be wasted.

The property was overgrown, rundown, and there was a tumbledown cabin on it that she couldn’t resist. Inside the cabin, Cecily found a Bible, and an X-marked map…

Millie Bridge prayed that she’d be the one to fall.

It was 1920, and her brother, Isaiah, was meant for better things. She’d be able to handle a trip back in time better than he, but it was a fifty-fifty chance. Their father was a Bridge man, and the family curse that’d been around for hundreds of years would send one of his children to another time in the past, which is why the offspring of every Bridge man carried freedom papers with them.

Since one never knew if, where, or when they might fall, one could never be too careful.

Cecily Bridge-Davis looked over the Bible and followed the map to a hole in a tree stump, where she found an old satchel and more questions. Was she actually supposed to believe that, as an only child, she might disappear one day, only to reappear in another time?

How could that happen? Moreover, how could she tell her husband and children?

Autumn seems to be the right time for a spine-tingling, twisty-scary novel, doesn’t it? And “The Fallen Fruit” is just about the right book.

If you mixed together the movie Groundhog Day and Octavia Butler’s “Kindred,” you might have something close to what’s inside this novel. The difference is that author Shawntelle Madison adds a few more levels and a lot more characters to time-travel, meanwhile keeping readers guessing as to where this curse began. Sometimes, that makes this novel scrape against your imagination until it’s raw. Other times, it feels oddly like an adventure story or a survival-type tale, a test of resourcefulness that you can place yourself inside. And then there are shades of romance, to keep you rapt.

If you’re someone who tends to overthink novels, you may not like this one; it leaves a lot of questions that don’t get answered. But if you’re up for a thrill-ride of a novel, “The Fallen Fruit” is a gem. A speculative fiction fan will go head over heels for it.