Sue Rainsford "Follow Me to Ground"

Black Swan, UK, 2020

 

Follow Me to Ground is a book about a girl named Ada and her father who live in a house in the woods. They are not human, they are made from The Ground. Ada and her father both seem to be something between the village doctor and the village witch, curing local people (the Cures) that visit them from all kinds of illnesses. But where does the illness go? Does it just disappear? How does curing them work? What actually happens to the people that go to them for help?

This book caught my attention from the very first pages and kept me interested until the end. I can say without a doubt it’s one of the weirdest and eeriest books I have ever read, and I felt slightly nauseous and disturbed the whole time I was reading it. A deeply ominous feeling shadows your mind, and you just can’t shake the feeling that something bad is going to happen, that there is no way Ada’s story can end well. And yet you can’t put the book down cause it’s so engaging. 

It’s difficult to say much more about the book without spoiling the plot so I will just stop here. I would recommend Follow Me to Ground to everybody who likes unusual eerie stories. However, I feel like there’s almost as much information left unwritten as there is on the actual pages. A lot is left up to interpretation. It might make some parts of the book pretty confusing so definitely take this into consideration when choosing your next read. Or maybe it was just me, who knows.

I absolutely loved the beautiful writing, the explicit descriptions and folk-like storylines. It’s a great pick for those readers who like to read between the lines, appreciate folk stories and don’t mind stories that will haunt them for a long time after they’ve closed the book.

 

- But we're from The Ground.

- We are, and it would take us back if it could.

This is something Cures don’t know about their curing. 

The sickness isn’t gone. 

It just goes elsewhere. 

 

 

We leave the graveyards be.

But why?

Because they’ll think we’re there to make them well, and they’ll sit up.

Sit up? In their graves?

All their heads will come up over the soil, all asking to be the first saved.