Yellow Barks Spider

Yellow Barks Spider
by Harman Burns
Published by Radiant Press
Review by Toby A. Welch  
$22.00 ISBN 9781998926190

Yellow Barks Spider is a refreshing change from the mainstream books that fill shelves these days. This is my first book with a trans woman as the main character and I loved it! 

As for what Yellow Barks Spider is about, my takeaway is that it’s the story of one person’s turbulent journey. It starts with a pre-teen boy, Kid, who is struggling with issues that cause him to retreat physically and emotionally from the world. In time he escapes the town where he grew up in agony. He moves to a new city, finds work in a restaurant, and has a roommate in a fourth-floor walk-up apartment. We then skip ahead to after the boy has transitioned into a woman. Due to circumstances beyond her control, Kid must return to her hometown where all her old demons are waiting to welcome her back. It’s an interesting premise for a book, one that Saskatchewan-born Burns successfully pulls off. 

As I worked my way through the chapters in this book, the deviation from writing norms threw me off at first. But by the time I was halfway done, I found the unique writing refreshing. For example, for the majority of the first third of Yellow Barks Spider, none of the sentences started with a capital letter. And some of the pages have a more poetic writing style. (Like the page that has four lines on it, each line between two and four words and parentheses book-ending each line.) One full page is the words spiders are inside repeated seventy-five times. Other pages have words starting in random spots. Some chapters have words that are blacked out like you see in government documents in movies. These abnormalities may sound odd but they are effective, adding to the dramatic charm of the story.    

One of the aspects of Yellow Barks Spider that I enjoyed the most was the author’s ability to convey the turmoil that Kid was going through. The agony was a tangible character at times, which was cool to experience considering the amount of angst in the book.

I am not a fan of swear words in a book when they serve no purpose. You’ll find quite a few of them in Yellow Barks Spider but they are used with thought and are appropriate. That is a nice departure from carelessly tossed in f-bombs. You’ll also find some graphic sex scenes but you can easily skip over those if eroticism isn’t your thing.  

I tremendously enjoyed Yellow Barks Spider and felt like I was losing a friend when I turned the last page. If you are looking for a different type of read that has an uncommon storyline and compelling characters, grab yourself a copy of this fantastic book!

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM