{"id":5935,"date":"2026-03-30T09:12:13","date_gmt":"2026-03-30T09:12:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/?p=5935"},"modified":"2026-03-30T09:12:13","modified_gmt":"2026-03-30T09:12:13","slug":"goode-vibrations-of-the-dead-river-valley-by-amy-safford","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/?p=5935","title":{"rendered":"Goode Vibrations of the Dead River Valley by Amy Safford"},"content":{"rendered":"

A haunting without melodrama, a reckoning without sentiment<\/strong><\/h3>\n

In the shadow of Mount Bigelow, a gravedigger\u2019s casual inventory reveals the weight of history. \u201cA little girl had a China doll, so I kept \u2019em together.\u201d <\/em><\/strong>Then there\u2019s a line that lands like ash: \u201cSadness sat as heavy as the smoky air from the brush fires.\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Restraint defines Amy Safford\u2019s Goode Vibrations of the Dead River Valley,<\/em> a moody, history-haunted paranormal novel that treats Maine\u2019s landscape as archive and oracle, turning Penelope \u201cPennie\u201d Goode\u2019s visions into a story about what a place remembers and what a nation prefers to forget.<\/p>\n

For Pennie, history isn\u2019t mere trivia or lore; it\u2019s a palpable pressure, a sense of crowdedness in seemingly empty spaces. The visceral experience of the past shapes her journey and her character.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

Book II of Amy Safford\u2019s Goode Vibrations series drops Pennie into northwestern Maine, where the present-day problem is straightforward: a relative is threatened with losing his property. The complicated part is Pennie herself. Since a near-death experience in Book I, she has been haunted by visions and dreams that bridge past and present. She picks up the signals of spirits and stories embedded in the land, and in the Dead River Valley, the land has plenty to say.<\/p>\n

Safford sharpens Pennie from lens into character when her cousin Bri takes her to meet Greta, a local seer. Pennie arrives half-braced for carnival theatrics\u2014the performed clairvoyance she\u2019s always distrusted. What she gets though is something unshowy and unnerving: Greta doesn\u2019t treat Pennie\u2019s gift as a party trick. She treats it as responsibility. The encounter reframes Pennie\u2019s entire presence in the valley, not tourist, not savior, not even investigator. Pennie instead acts as a kind of medium for the land itself, a person being pulled toward what the place insists on surfacing.<\/p>\n

Safford makes smart use of the setting\u2019s social texture. Pennie moves among loggers, hunters, and fishers, people who know the woods in a practical way and live with the pride and friction that can make a small community feel both protective and combustible. It\u2019s perfect terrain for a protagonist who can\u2019t stop hearing what other people would rather tune out.<\/p>\n

Pennie\u2019s visions pull her backward into the days before the valley\u2019s villages were flooded by a power company, then deeper still into the Revolutionary era, where Safford uses Benedict Arnold\u2019s notorious expedition as the valley\u2019s deepest historical layer, a national myth Pennie can\u2019t keep at arm\u2019s length once the land starts pulling her under. The result is a layered haunting: personal stakes in the present, civic stakes in the more recent past, and national mythology getting mud on its boots in the deep past.<\/p>\n

Structurally, the book moves in fragments: archival records, oral memory, local lore, visions that flare up and vanish before you can fully hold them. What Pennie sees confronts what the records preserve, and what they erase. Again and again, the same brutal mismatch: official documents protect ownership more faithfully than they protect belonging. The human costs are filed away as logistics. Safford is at her best when she shows that machinery working in real time, without speeches, without sentimentality.<\/p>\n

The graves aren\u2019t abstract \u201cheritage;\u201d they\u2019re bodies in boxes, names turned into a relocation problem, tenderness surviving only in small rebellions like a doll kept with a child. Around that, the village is unmade piece by piece: church windows and pews stacked for transport, a bell with a widening crack at the base, the school marked for salvage. The prose stays calm. That calm is the indictment.<\/p>\n

One of the novel\u2019s sharper threads is how power decides who gets to know things. Safford uses witchcraft accusations as a close-up on authority, not atmosphere: the relabeling of women\u2019s practical knowledge as threat. Herb knowledge, weather sense, childbirth, the body\u2019s seasons. The book isn\u2019t interested in offering a cozy empowerment arc or a spell that stops the logging or undoes the dam. Witchcraft functions instead as a rival way of knowing, a reminder that the valley is animate and relational even as institutions insist it is inert, ownable, and disposable.<\/p>\n

What works best here is the series\u2019 central idea: history isn\u2019t over just because it\u2019s old. Safford frames Pennie\u2019s ability less as a paranormal gimmick and more as a moral problem. If you can sense what happened, are you obligated to witness it? And once you\u2019ve witnessed it, what do you do with that knowledge in a world that benefits from amnesia? Safford draws deliberate lines from Revolutionary-era displacement to 1950s eminent domain to present-day property battles\u2014the same logic of erasure repeating. This isn\u2019t just \u201cspooky Maine.\u201d It\u2019s a novel that wants the reader to feel how cultural erasure and historical violence echo forward.<\/p>\n

The tradeoff is pace. Safford occasionally prioritizes historical context over dramatic momentum, especially when the novel pauses to position Pennie (and the reader) inside its larger argument. Book II is at its sharpest when it trusts the story\u2019s scenes to do that work without underlining the point.<\/p>\n

Goode Vibrations of the Dead River Valley <\/em>will appeal to readers who appreciate Simone St. James\u2019 supernatural mysteries or Diana Gabaldon\u2019s time-bending historical fiction, paranormal novels that take history seriously and treat landscape as more than backdrop. The book works as a series entry point if you\u2019re willing to let Pennie\u2019s abilities reveal themselves gradually, but readers who begin with Book I will find likely deeper resonance in watching her transformation continue.<\/p>\n

The post Goode Vibrations of the Dead River Valley by Amy Safford<\/a> appeared first on Independent Book Review<\/a>.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A haunting without melodrama, a reckoning without sentiment In the shadow of Mount Bigelow, a gravedigger\u2019s casual inventory reveals the weight of history. \u201cA little girl had a China doll, so I kept \u2019em together.\u201d Then there\u2019s a line that lands like ash: \u201cSadness sat as heavy as the smoky air from the brush fires.\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5935","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bookreviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5935"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5935"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5935\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5935"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5935"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5935"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}