Author: Scott Alexander Howard
Published: 2024
Target audience: Adults (appropriate ages 16+)
Heartbreak, inevitability, and dogged hope. Welcome to ‘The Other Valley’, a stunning speculative fiction novel about an isolated town neighboured by its own past and future.
Sixteen-year-old Odile is a shy, awkward girl vying for a position in the coveted Conseil. If she lands it, she’ll get to decide who’s allowed to be escorted past the town’s heavily guarded border and across the mountains into the valley over. There, it’s the same valley, the same town. However, to the east, the town is twenty years ahead. To the west, it’s twenty years behind. The towns repeat in an endless sequence across the wilderness.
Knowing that a change in the past will alter the timeline and eradicate the existing future, crossing the border is heavily restricted, permitted only to limited petitioners who must don disguises to take one last look at departed loved ones. But when Odile inadvertently recognises two mourners from the future, she realises it’s for her friend Edme - a cheerful, violin virtuoso, and the first boy to really know Odile…and who Odile now knows is going to die.
Sworn to secrecy, ‘The Other Valley’ is a story of unwanted foreknowledge, as Odile wrestles with the consequences of both intervention and inaction.
From debut Canadian author Scott Alexander Howard, ‘The Other Valley’ is perfect for fans of Emily St. John Mandel, David Mitchell, and Kazuo Ishiguro. The story is poignant with a unique premise, and explores the burden of managing the expectations of others. Odile lives under the expectations of her mother, who has long declared that Odile will work for the Conseil with no other options to be considered. Should Odile achieve this, her life will revolve around the desire of those wanting to visit other valleys for grief, closure, or illegal hopes to change their fate. Then there are also the secrets held at the behest of others, concessions made in hope of a tolerable future, and favours bestowed ladened with expectations that can’t be denied.
The novel is compelling character study that slowly unfolds. Odile’s glimpse of the visitors from the future spurs her to reach out to her classmates, push herself in the Conseil vetting process, and allow herself to fall for a boy she knows is on limited time. The narrative pace is steady, though the lack of quotation marks for dialogue is annoying and makes the physical act of reading more taxing than it should be.
Readers are introduced to the speculative elements unobtrusively through the lens of adolescent jokes and social taboo, allowing the implementation of these elements feel believable and emotionally resonate as the story progresses. There is an excellent sense of creeping trepidation that asks if in a place where the past and present run concurrent, can you truly change fate or are your actions just part of a self-fulfilling prophecy?
‘The Other Valley’ is a fascinating tale with an unusual take on time travel that explores how a glimpse of the future or bit of information you think is true can greatly effect your life. This is a story that will stay with you long after you’ve finished the book.
Excerpt:
When I was on my own, I was mostly able to partition my friendship with Edme from what I’d seen at the pond. Later on, I would wonder whether the reason I let myself develop feelings for him was, in fact, my foreknowledge: that it offered me a secret reserve of confidence, or a sense of liberatory abandon. But while it was happening, I tried to confine the distant future to the darkness where I didn’t have to face it yet. What else to do with an certainty that was also unknowable, a sadness about which I was forbidden to speak?
