If I had picked this one up, thinking it was a raw story about addiction, family, pain and how missing prostitutes don't get investigated in rural America, I might have hesitated but still grabbed this one. But this one was listed as a mystery. I thought there would be mystery, maybe even a little police procedural. Instead, there was just sadness. There is violence, abuse, animal cruelty, drug use, prostitution. There is definitely someone out there killing these women and the police are not looking for them, but that's it. I didn't learn anything about the true crime this is loosely based on. To say I'm disappointed would be an understatement. On top of all that, there is odd writing. Daffy, Thursday, Mamaw, and Arc all talk like they are writing poetry. Every single interaction with the aunt had "spittle, spittle spider, where you gonna hide her?" The words felt overly-flowery to moments that were dark and I found it distracting instead of adding an additional depth to any character. It was until Arc was mad and fighting back that she started to communicate and talk in ways that were clear.

I started this with my book club and only 2 of us continued reading because the childhood abuse was just too much. I wish we'd be warned how graphic it would be and that IT would be the focus and not a mystery at all.

A huge thank you to the author and publisher for providing an e-ARC via Netgalley. This does not affect my opinion regarding the book. ( )

“In life, there is a savage side and a beautiful side.”

Set in Chillicothe, Ohio, On the Savage Side by Tiffany McDaniel revolves around twin sisters Arcade ”Arc” and Farren “Daffy” Doggs. Raised by their addict mother Adelyn and their Aunt Clover both of whom are prostitutes, Arc and Daffy spend their time dreaming of a life away from the hell they call home, drawing on the cement floor of their home with markers gifted to them by their maternal grandmother Mamaw Milkweed. The time the sisters spend with her, listening to her stories full of magic, life lessons and words of wisdom is the only bright spot in their miserable childhood.

“Wings were the one gift we kept giving ourselves. Each year we would draw them with more feathers, hoping they would be big enough to be real. No matter how hard we wished, or how large we drew the wings, we never got more than a foot off the ground, the highest we could jump on any given day.”

Their childhood comes to an abrupt end after their grandmother dies in a tragic accident when they were nine years old. Sexually abused and with no one looking out for them, they are left to fend for themselves. Unfortunately, the darkness of their childhood follows them into their adult lives and what follows is a painful cycle of sexual abuse and prostitution, violence and substance abuse, and ultimately tragedy. The friends they make along the way lead into some beautiful heartfelt moments of friendship and support but with each of them struggling to step out of the darkness in their lives, the friends are unable to keep themselves and one another out of harm’s way. As evil lurks in their community, _targeting women like themselves, law enforcement turns a blind eye only compounding the tragedy in the lives of these women who have been profiled, judged and victimized their whole lives.

“When a woman disappears, how is she remembered? By her beautiful smile? Her pretty face? The drugs in her system? Or by the johns who all have dope breath and graceless desires?”

On the Savage Side by Tiffany McDaniel is a dark, brutal, atmospheric and heartbreaking read. The narrative flits between the past and the present day when Arc and Daffy are twenty years old. The author develops her characters with meticulous detail and weaves their stories together seamlessly. I put down this book multiple times but was unable to stay away from it for too long. Exceptionally well-written, this is a compelling read that will stay with me for a long time. With consistent pacing and a tightly woven plot, featuring Arc and Daffy and their friends Thursday, Nell, Violet and Indigo the author tells an emotionally hard-hitting story inspired by the unsolved murders of the Chillicothe Six. This is not an easy read but a powerful one.

Many thanks to the author, Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor and NetGalley for the much-appreciated digital review copy. All opinions expressed in this review are my own, The book is due to be released on February 14, 2023.

“We humans have always been in pain. History tells us that in the artifacts civilizations have left behind. Pain is there in the broken vases, the fractured poetry, the overwhelming music we have played for centuries. We belong to grief until the engine goes out. Then we belong to the dirt, our bodies identical to other fallen things.”

⚠ child-neglect, sexual abuse of a minor, sexual violence and substance abuse. ( )

I don’t really have the right thing to say. When I read ‘Betty’ I struggled to articulate what it had meant to me, personally, but also what it had made known to me in the reading. It imprinted upon me in a way that remains, nearly as vivid as the day it was placed. Earlier this year I read ‘The Summer that Melted Everything’ and it spoke to a place and a time that I recognized, familiar and terrible and present.

As I closed the final pages of ‘On the Savage Side’, on what has been a particularly challenging day… as I collect these thoughts before they become to precious to share… as I move through the grief for things lost, real and imagined— I am in awe of the tenderness, empathy, honesty and love, with which this horrific, relentless story, was told. Stories matter for the voice they give to the voiceless. Stories matter as they navigate the uncharted.

It matters.

Based on the mystery surrounding the real life, “Chillicothe Six” we follow the story of Arc Doggs, her twin sister and friends in a very real, small town, plagued by poverty and addiction and corruption. They live life on “the savage side”, a place that people see as dark and devoid of love and meaning… but there IS love there. And these lives matter. I don’t recommend this broadly. It’s triggering in many many ways. But it is magnificent. And in light of any more of a review, I will share the names of the real women, just as Tiffany McDaniel has done. You are not forgotten.

Charlotte Trego
Tameka Lynch
Wanda Lemons
Shasta Himelrick
Timberly Claytor
Tiffany Sayre ( )

I really wanted to give this book 5 starts but there were a couple of things that lessened my enjoyment.
- I loved the Appalachian folklore, but there was just way too much of it.
- Everyone talks like a poet.
- The Daffy twist didn't make sense and was unnecessary. Took away from the focus of the book.

I did love the ending or the lack of one however! I do think I rated it higher because I am from the area she is writing about and I find nostalgia in her work. ( )

#FirstLine ~ Prologue : The locals called the river in Autumn, the eye of God.

WOW. This book was an emotional read. I was honored to read it because I feel like it gave voice to those women, to what happened to them and was told in a raw and real way. Compassion mixed with McDaniel's brilliant writing, exceptional character building and pacing lent itself to an engrossing, eye-opening and unforgettable story. What an amazing retelling of true crime. A must read! ( )

The fantastic cover for On The Savage Side by Tiffany McDaniel made me think of twins or multiple personalities. It made me read the blurb and grab a copy. You can judge this book by the cover, because it tells of what is to come, psychological chills that made many emotions rise to the surface. Sorrow, disgust, happiness, wonder.

In the beginning, and throughout the book, we smell the stink of the papermill. Arcade and Daffodil, along with their mother and aunt, live on the wrong side of town and when it snows, it snows ash from the papermill. I worked at one in Alabama, so I know exactly what she is talking about, the indescribable stench and the car being covered in ash. It creates its own ecosystem.

I was confused, and I believe that was a good thing. It meant I wasn’t able to figure out what the hell was going on half the time. Getting lost in the mind of drug addicts I find unable to describe.

The family are drug addicts, and I think you can guess what everyone thought of them…disposable. When the first girl was found in the river, they rolled right by it. Add another, and another, and another….Who will find out what happens to the lost and the forgotten. Everyone deserves a life, for someone to care about them.

Arcade and Daffodil broke my heart. They pretty much raised themselves, with the help of a loving grandmother who painted a future full of dreams and imagination. Their father had died when they were six years old. Their mother and aunt were sex workers and drug addicts, so that doesn’t bode well for them and their friends. That doesn’t mean they don’t deserve being acknowledged as human beings.

Tiffany McDaniel paints pictures, some pretty and some ugly, but she does it with such panache the characters come to life. The evil oozes off the page as much as the sweetness of the girls and the love of their grandmother, who is the most positive person in their life.

Tiffany draws me in deeper and deeper. The more I read, the more involved I get. I cannot say enough about the writing, getting lost in the words. I am having difficulty describing all my thoughts and feelings. It’s wondrous and awful, disturbing and inspirational.

The sketches gave me the creepy crawlies, and that sure fits the story. Six young girls, living a horrible life but finding moments of brightness and love, breaking my heart and for those who preyed on them there is nothing bad enough. Sometimes I saw those spiders moving…my skin crawling and tears in my eyes.

Tiffany McDaniel had me surfing the internet, not only for The Chillicothe Six, but references to other things that made me curious.

I voluntarily reviewed an ARC of On the Savage Side by Tiffany McDaniel.

See more at http://www.fundinmental.com ( )

This is a powerful and beautifully written book. When I pick up a book, I hope that it makes me feel something, even if what I end up feeling is uncomfortable. This book did exactly that. It could be hard to read at times since it deals with drug use and sexual abuse but I am so glad that I did. This was a visceral story that I won’t soon forget.

This story follows a set of twins, Arc and Daffy, from childhood until their early adult years. The bulk of the story is told from Arc’s point of view. I felt the desperation along with Arc and Daffy and wanted to see them come out on top even though the deck was very much stacked against them. Their mother and aunt are prostitutes and drug addicts and to say that their home life is lacking is an understatement. Their grandmother was a bright spot in their childhood. My heart broke over some of the decisions that they made but I love the fact that I was able to understand why they did what they did.

Catherine Taber did an amazing job with this audiobook. This was such an emotional story and I thought that she did a great job of expressing those emotions through her narration. I believe that this is the first time that I have had the chance to listen to this narrator’s work and I was quite impressed. I found her voice to be very pleasant and I do believe that her performance added to my enjoyment of the story.

I would recommend this book to others. I would encourage any reader with triggers to look up trigger warnings for this book before diving in. Scenes from this book will live in my mind for a very long time and the writing is absolutely gorgeous. I cannot wait to read more of this author’s work.

I received a review copy of this book from Knopf and Penguin Random House Audio. ( )

This originally appeared at The Irresponsible Reader.
---
So, you can tell from the title of this post [on my blog, it's called "A Funeral for Dreams"], that this is not a happy tale. The other big hint along those lines is the author's name. I'm sure that Tiffany McDaniel is perfectly capable of writing a fun romp of a novel—I just have no evidence that she's interested in doing so.

When you do see her name on a cover, you know a few things going in—the book is going to feature some sort of childhood trauma; the beautifully stylized dialogue (that doesn't even pretend to be realistic); and prose that can only be described as gorgeous.

Everything else may differ from book to book, but the above are pretty much a given at this point.

WHAT'S ON THE SAVAGE SIDE ABOUT?
We meet 6-year-old twin sisters Arc and Daffy on the day their father died. Believe it or not, this is likely the best their life is going to be for the rest of this book. They spend most of their childhood in a home with their mother and aunt (I'm very carefully not saying they were raised by their mother and aunt), prostitutes who spend what little money they have on drugs—heroin, primarily. There are brief periods where the children are taken care of by their grandmother—who is kind, loving, and able to take care of them—but those are brief.

We see them age—struggling to separate themselves from their mother and aunt, and eventually following in their footsteps in addiction and profession. As adults, Arc's focus is her (more fragile) sister's safety and well-being. It's because of Daffy that she finds a rehab facility, there's a (probable) serial killer out there leaving women's bodies in the river, and Arc is determined to not let Daffy become the next. Hopefully, she can prevent her friends from being the next, too.

Interspersed with chapters describing their lives (with some time jumping involved), we get some selections from their mother's diary—back when she was capable of keeping one. We see her struggle with addiction and knowing the danger she poses to her daughters (and I was so glad when the book gave us that—it was the first maternal action I saw from her, but we didn't get to see it for a long time).

We also get chapters describing the point-of-view of the river that flows near their town. How it reacts to being where the bodies of women are discarded, along with its thoughts on other things as well. It's these chapters—particularly early on—that give the novel its depth and perspective. It feels to me like those chapters are McDaniels speaking with the least amount of artifice. The river feels like her voice unfiltered through the devices she uses the rest of the time.

CHILLICOTHE, OHIO
Until I started this book, I knew Chillicothe, Ohio as the birthplace of Archie Goodwin of Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe books. I half-assumed it was a fictional location, and never bothered to look it up. Now I know that it exists, and I'm going to have a hard time reestablishing the positive associations I had with the name. It feels like a great place to be from, not a great place to be. I'm sure that it's a perfectly fine place in reality, but the small city does not come across very well in these pages.

SO, WHAT DID I THINK ABOUT ON THE SAVAGE SIDE?
This was just a brutal read. Every time you get a glimmer of hope, a glimmer of a feeling that things might be okay for some of these characters—something snuffs it out. But there's another source right around the corner. But, to go back to that line from the novel I borrowed above—the book is full of funerals for dreams.

But there's beauty in the darkness. And a drive to keep persevering shared by the reader and the characters. I wondered more than once why some of them kept trying—but they did. The mother of one of Arc's adult friends is a strong vision of enduring love and hope—she's always ready to help her daughter no matter how tight the grip of addiction is on her at the time. She's always trying, always striving to give her daughter the care she needs—even when (especially when) there's no reason to think it'll do any good.

I mentioned a serial killer above—it's not a serial killer novel, though. It's a novel about the women that may be his _target and their fears about it. But people looking for a Thomas Harris read will be disappointed. Actually, people looking for most things you find in typical novels will be disappointed. Many of the looming questions in our characters' lives are left unanswered. But you don't walk away frustrated that you don't get the answers like you would from other novels—because we're given answers to questions we never thought to ask. Some of those are more important, too.

Like always, Tiffany McDaniels delivered a book that's going to stay in my subconscious for a while—lurking there, making me rethink what I read from time to time. It'll probably stay there until her next novel comes along (Betty's been there for a couple of years, and really only was dislodged by this one—and The Summer that Melted Everything is still there all these years later). It's somber, it's sober, and it's difficult to read. But it's so worth it in ways I cannot adequately explain. It'll make you think. It'll make you feel.

I'm having a hard time articulating exactly why you should read this without getting into the details—if you've read McDaniels before, you know what I'm saying. If you haven't—it's time to. ( )

In On the Savage Side Tiffany McDaniel sets herself the challenging task of building a novel out of the gruesome and notorious Chillicothe Six murders of 2013-2014. The Chillicothe Six were women marginalized by the town and the town’s authorities, whose approach to the growing body count is a yawn and a shrug: they were either tricked or coerced or forced into drug addiction and prostitution, or their families simply bequeathed these conditions to them. This is a stunning, challenging work, a full flowering of a fine novelist’s powers and compassion.

The first-person narrator, a woman in her early twenties named Arcade Doggs, tells the story of herself and her twin sister Farren; they had the bad luck to be born to heroin addicts in a small town in Ohio. Farren frequently spoke in rhymes, and would declaim her verses while standing among the blossoming daffodils, so she came to be called Daffodil Poet, or Daffy for short. Arc and Daffy associate with other women of the street and after they befriend them, these women start to disappear and wash up dead on the shore of the river.

With unblinking honesty this book portrays the abuse and the ruined lives some women must endure. The fact that these crimes against women occur, and by whom they’re perpetrated, is met by vast indifference, as I have said. We have a clear object lesson here about the forgotten and ignored sex workers, many of whom are under the thumb of amoral men who simply enjoy being cruel.

Part murder mystery, part psychological thriller, and part parable, this plaintive novel pulls us into the squalid and essentially hopeless world these women occupy. After an early, rather desolate stretch, the book begins to soar as Arc and Daffy try to track down who’s doing the killing. Predictably enough, the police make an assumption early on that the murders of the young women are committed by one of their own.

Rather than treat these real-life crimes in magazine pieces or podcasts, McDaniel boldly sets her compass in a more rewarding direction. More than simply producing a fictionalized account of a ghastly episode, she has injected elements of wonder, and mystery, and psychological depth. The surprising hyperbolic course the story follows before it finishes, proves the author’s technical mastery, as if further proof were needed after Betty and The Summer that Melted Everything. If you savor technical mastery bolstered by an out-of-the-blue surprise at novel’s end, take up The Savage Side. ( )