West Trade Review: "Reconciling the Past: Grief and Transformation in Holly Ringland’s The Seven Skins of Esther Wilding" by Kelly Pedro

by Kelly Pedro

February 6, 2024

The Seven Skins of Esther Wilding by Holly Ringland; House of Anansi Press; 560 pages; $19.99.

Folktales are all about preservation — preserving rituals, preserving cultural traditions, preserving the past. With The Seven Skins of Esther Wilding, Holly Ringland takes readers on a journey through seven folktales that explores grief, transformation, joy, love, and courage.

The Seven Skins of Esther Wilding is Ringland’s sophomore novel after the 2018 release of her international bestselling debut, The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart. With her latest novel, Ringland blends genres, combining mystery with strong female characters to create a book that is an epic heroine’s journey.

The book is initially set in Tasmania and follows Esther Wilding as she struggles with the loss of her older sister Aura, who disappeared the year before. This mystery over what happened to Aura fuels the beginning of the novel. Aura was last seen walking on a beach in Tasmania and is presumed drowned. Esther attends a memorial her parents have set up for Aura. But the memorial is really a ruse to bring Esther home so that her parents can show her a diary Aura left behind. In it, Aura wrote seven cryptic verses, each connected to a folktale, that she also had secretly tattooed on her back before she disappeared. Esther reluctantly travels Denmark to provide her family with answers about what happened to her sister, and, later, the Faroe Islands before returning to Tasmania. Aura’s disappearance is never fully reconciled but thanks to Esther’s journey her family gets some uneasy answers that are the wellspring for other family secrets to be revealed.

The book is divided into seven sections, each representing a folktale connected to one of the cryptic verses Aura wrote. But the sections also represent Esther’s transformation as she inches closer to discovering what really happened to her sister. Each section bears a different title— death, reckoning, invitation, threshold, discovery, resistance, homecoming—and centers around a “skin” or layer of armor that Esther must shed to reach the truth. With each shedding, Esther gets closer to the truth of what happened to her sister but also the truth about the secrets her family has kept from her throughout her life. Each “skin” evokes the seven stages of grief, which sharpens Ringland’s focus in the book on the transformative power of grief.

Ringland also creates a mirror-like quality with the story. Esther’s journey from Tasmania to Denmark and the Faroe Islands and back to Tasmania is the same one her sister took before she disappeared. But while Aura’s journey ends with her returning to Tasmania consumed with grief and loss, Esther returns and finds joy and reconciliation. This mirroring journey is no accident. In large part, the book explores what happens when these two worlds merge for Esther as she travels to Denmark, and eventually the Faroe Islands to better understand what happened to her sister in Tasmania. A book that starts out as a story about grief turns into a story about love. “The thing is, when it comes to grief and love, I’ve found they’re one and the same,” (508) Esther’s cousin in Denmark tells her. Both are journeys that challenge Esther. Ringland explores how both grief and love change Esther using the transformative power of stories — both folktales and stories from Esther’s childhood — to achieve that. It’s a book about reconciling the past so that Esther can move on and find joy, and love. And through Esther, Ringland is perhaps sharing a broader message to readers: When it comes to loss, our grief becomes a mirror of our love.

Though the story begins as a tightly wound narrative, as it continues, it begins to fray as Esther inches closer to the truth of what happened to Aura. That’s because the story changes point of view, slowing everything down — from Esther to the people she’s left behind in Tasmania who convey information the reader already largely knows. And in the Faroe Islands, Esther has a romantic entanglement with someone in her sister’s life which was perhaps intended to fill the mirror-like quality between Esther’s journey and her sister’s but instead largely distracts from the overarching narrative rather than propelling it forward.

Also distracting are flashbacks Esther has of her childhood and her sister, which veer into present tense and jolt the reader from the story. While perhaps Ringland wanted the flashbacks in present tense so that they are separate from the main story, the abrupt shift in tense doesn’t feel urgent or visceral enough and is one of the less successful parts of the book. For the most part, these are relatively minor issues in what is otherwise a compelling narrative dripping with craft and command of the story. Ringland’s purpose here is not to just tell a folk tale. It’s also to challenge readers to move beyond loss in their lives. Grief and love are not that different. To deal with both we need to courageously shed our armor. In anchoring Esther’s journey and the book in folk tales, Ringland reminds us of the enduring nature of stories and how they help preserve memories of lost loved ones and become containers for our grief and love.

Even with its brief valleys, The Seven Skins of Esther Wilding is an enjoyable read infused with folklore, mythology, and mystery. It is as much a story about how familial love and devotion can heal the wounds of the past as much as it is a story about one sister’s journey through grief and how it transforms her. In exploring that, Ringland does her best work, travelling deep beneath the layer of initial loss and offering Esther true healing through reconciliation with her past. It is a story that is raw and honest, that explores the slippery parts of grief and how love and joy eventually help us resurface from it. Through Esther, Ringland shows us that no one survives grief alone. It’s a lesson that’s as relevant today as it was in folktales of the past.

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Reconciling the Past: Grief and Transformation in Holly Ringland’s The Seven Skins of Esther Wilding

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Kelly Pedro is the recipient of the 2024 SmokeLong Fellowship for Emerging Writers. Her fiction has appeared in PRISM International, The New Quarterly, Cleaver, Archetype Literary, New Flash Fiction Review, and Bending Genres, and has been shortlisted for Room’s 2022 fiction contest. Find her at kellypedro.ca.

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