A Review of Asa James by Jodi Lew-Smith

 

(Virginia Beach, VA: köehlerbooks, 2025). ISBN: 979-8-88824-930-7

Asa James is a beautifully written, poetic novel rendered in the tone of the time of which it talks. It’s cinematic and evocative, like the great English classics that have endured through time.

Supporting and enhancing the text are illustrations of flora and fauna in the part and chapter titles.

As we’d expect, the Prologue begins on a proverbial dark and windy New England night in late autumn 1851. Sister Ruth, who co-runs the local poor farm (which services unwed mothers and orphans), finds a baby in a shack in the woods beneath its dead mother. Rats have gotten at the baby’s face…

Chapter 1 jumps 24 years, and the baby, our titular character, is now grown into a restless young man with dreams of being a naturalist like Darwin. Asa’s stumbling onto a secret is the novel’s inciting incident; the hero’s call to adventure.

Now a stranger in a strange land—economically and socially rather than geographically—Asa navigates

life among the equally secretive wealthy after a literal climb up a steep mountain to the mysterious, nonordinary world represented by a centuries-old granite castle called Mansfield Hall.

Replete with rambunctious boys, their solitary aunt and mistress of Mansfield Hall, an iron-fisted spinster, and the typical flotsam and jetsam of a country estate and its surrounding village (all of whom offer pieces of the puzzle), Asa mentally wends his way through this complex world while engaging with the natural delights of the mountain in pursuit of his dreams.

Over time, as friendships form, increasing information is revealed. Flashbacks serve this purpose as well, as the novel’s myriad sociocultural themes take hold and begin to fuel the perfectly paced narrative.  

Halfway through, the story takes a supernatural turn, in the tradition of James, Machen,

Doyle, Stoker, Blackwood, Collins, and Kipling. Not quite magical realism, it nevertheless

acknowledges the Fortean maxim that things beyond our ken are a natural condition of the

planet—even more so on the sprawling estates of the wealthy in England and New England. When the

nested truths of this “haunting” are revealed at the two-thirds mark, Lew-Smith stands stronger with

these beloved Victorian/Edwardian wordsmiths.

 

The last quarter of the novel turns again, as Asa undertakes a widening of his world and studies that

evokes the nautical tales of Melville, London, Conrad, Golding, and Melville.

 

I wasn’t surprised to learn from the author’s bio that Asa James is an expression of their literary

and scientific education and farm experience in Vermont.

 

In the end, Asa James offers dizzy spirals and secret circuits of story defining its arcs and

enhancing its themes.

 

With winter approaching, it’s a perfect literary companion for a cup of tea by the fire on a calm and snowy night.