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Out of the Thicket
A mysterious plague called The Seizing has cursed Yana for over a decade. On the same night each year every twelve-year-old boy vanishes with no explanation. A self-appointed grief counselor named Hannah leads the village through a strange ritual in which parents clutch their children until they disappear in their arms.
One mother, Ramia, refuses to participate in the ritual, which infuriates Hannah, revealing that her motives have more to do with issues surrounding her own son’s untimely death. When Ramia’s son, Hazaq, and his best friend, Bear, try to escape The Seizing by running away, Yana is thrown into a maelstrom of intrigue and doubt.
Featuring a cast of fiercely independent female leads, heartwarming childhood friendships, complex villains, sage prophets, and dubious religious leaders who are caught in an entertaining plot full of twists, Out of the Thicket is a story about the sacrificial nature of love.
One mother, Ramia, refuses to participate in the ritual, which infuriates Hannah, revealing that her motives have more to do with issues surrounding her own son’s untimely death. When Ramia’s son, Hazaq, and his best friend, Bear, try to escape The Seizing by running away, Yana is thrown into a maelstrom of intrigue and doubt.
Featuring a cast of fiercely independent female leads, heartwarming childhood friendships, complex villains, sage prophets, and dubious religious leaders who are caught in an entertaining plot full of twists, Out of the Thicket is a story about the sacrificial nature of love.
371 pages, Kindle Edition
Published October 16, 2025
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
October 16, 2025
If you’re looking for a book with some mystery, rituals and religion, this is the book for you! Drew really brings the characters to life and keeps you guessing. Highly recommend!!
September 1, 2026
Drew Kizer’s Out of the Thicket begins with a wonderfully unsettling idea: every year in the seaside town of Yana, twelve-year-old boys vanish in an event known as the Seizing. No amount of running, hiding, chaining boys to their beds, prayer, or magic has stopped it, so the town has built rituals around an apparently unavoidable grief. From that premise, Kizer builds a fantasy adventure that mixes mystery, folklore, religious imagery, family drama, and some surprisingly funny moments. The story feels lived-in because Yana has its own sayings, prejudices, legends, political arrangements, religious practices, and old wounds. All of those details gradually turn out to matter, so the worldbuilding isn't just scenery. The town itself becomes part of the mystery.
The strongest part of the novel for me is its cast, particularly Hannah. She's abrasive, controlling, funny, wounded, brave, and often painfully wrong, which makes her much more interesting than a conventional heroic figure. After losing her son Baruch, she creates stories and ceremonies meant to help Yana's families survive the Seizing, but her determination to help is tangled up with her own inability to release what she's lost. Ramia, whose son Hazaq is approaching the Seizing, challenges Hannah's assumptions at nearly every turn, while Hazaq and his best friend Bear give the story its adventurous heart. Bear is especially easy to like. His enormous size, gentleness, appetite, fearfulness, and loyalty make him funny without turning him into a joke. As the boys run from Yana, encounter the mysterious Isaac, uncover buried history, and stumble into dangers much larger than they expected, their friendship keeps the book grounded.
Kizer also gives the story more thematic weight than the fantasy mystery initially suggests. Images of hands, eyes, water, light, sacrifice, thickets, and things being held or released repeat throughout the novel until they gather meaning. The central question becomes less about defeating a supernatural phenomenon and more about the difference between loving someone and trying to possess, protect, or control them. Hannah's journey is especially effective because the book doesn't erase her flaws as she changes. Her final choices grow directly out of everything she's been wrestling with from the beginning, and the conclusion turns the novel's recurring language of clutching and grasping into an image of open hands. The biblical imagery is clearly intentional, beginning with the epigraph from Genesis, but Kizer works most of it through character and story.
I recommend Out of the Thicket to readers who enjoy character-driven fantasy with a moral or spiritual dimension, especially people who like stories built around mystery, friendship, sacrifice, grief, and redemption. Readers of fantasy with biblical or mythic echoes will have plenty to notice, but the emotional appeal is broader than that. It's also a good fit for someone who likes an adventure populated by imperfect adults and believable young characters. By the end, the Seizing has become more than the strange hook that opens the novel. It's the pressure that exposes what these people fear, what they believe, what they're willing to surrender, and what love asks of them. That gives Out of the Thicket an ending that feels connected to the questions it has been asking all along, while leaving behind a hopeful image of a community learning to live with open hands.
The strongest part of the novel for me is its cast, particularly Hannah. She's abrasive, controlling, funny, wounded, brave, and often painfully wrong, which makes her much more interesting than a conventional heroic figure. After losing her son Baruch, she creates stories and ceremonies meant to help Yana's families survive the Seizing, but her determination to help is tangled up with her own inability to release what she's lost. Ramia, whose son Hazaq is approaching the Seizing, challenges Hannah's assumptions at nearly every turn, while Hazaq and his best friend Bear give the story its adventurous heart. Bear is especially easy to like. His enormous size, gentleness, appetite, fearfulness, and loyalty make him funny without turning him into a joke. As the boys run from Yana, encounter the mysterious Isaac, uncover buried history, and stumble into dangers much larger than they expected, their friendship keeps the book grounded.
Kizer also gives the story more thematic weight than the fantasy mystery initially suggests. Images of hands, eyes, water, light, sacrifice, thickets, and things being held or released repeat throughout the novel until they gather meaning. The central question becomes less about defeating a supernatural phenomenon and more about the difference between loving someone and trying to possess, protect, or control them. Hannah's journey is especially effective because the book doesn't erase her flaws as she changes. Her final choices grow directly out of everything she's been wrestling with from the beginning, and the conclusion turns the novel's recurring language of clutching and grasping into an image of open hands. The biblical imagery is clearly intentional, beginning with the epigraph from Genesis, but Kizer works most of it through character and story.
I recommend Out of the Thicket to readers who enjoy character-driven fantasy with a moral or spiritual dimension, especially people who like stories built around mystery, friendship, sacrifice, grief, and redemption. Readers of fantasy with biblical or mythic echoes will have plenty to notice, but the emotional appeal is broader than that. It's also a good fit for someone who likes an adventure populated by imperfect adults and believable young characters. By the end, the Seizing has become more than the strange hook that opens the novel. It's the pressure that exposes what these people fear, what they believe, what they're willing to surrender, and what love asks of them. That gives Out of the Thicket an ending that feels connected to the questions it has been asking all along, while leaving behind a hopeful image of a community learning to live with open hands.
October 18, 2025
Loved this story. Like Lewis or Tolkien, Kizer creates an ancient world that operates on it's own supernatural rules but embodies values, virtues and worldviews born from biblical principles. Though not a morality tale, Out of the Thicket definitely provides readers a path from confusion and hopelessness to redemption and peace. And there are parables along the way that are instructive and enjoyable, for those who have ears to hear.
The characters are where Kizer shines, in my opinion. His efforts to create multidimensional personalities weave a community you could easily imagine inhabiting. It's not a story about one protagonist, and he creates children, prophets, widows, pagans, and fisherman with fascinating clarity.
My favorite character was the old prophet, who feels like he walked right out of the Jordan wilderness at the heart of the divided kingdom in 2 Chronicles, complete with personality quirks and absurd stories that keep most people at a distance but provide life altering truths for those who dare approach and listen.
The plot of the tale keeps you engaged, and you genuinely can't know the direction each turn will take or how the conflicts will resolve (do they?) by the final page. It leads to contemplation of bigger themes on life, guilt, consequences, and superstition.
In my opinion, Recommended as a read aloud with any children over 10 leading to great conversation. Great reading for young adult genre. Adults will appreciate the deeper themes and narrative style.
The characters are where Kizer shines, in my opinion. His efforts to create multidimensional personalities weave a community you could easily imagine inhabiting. It's not a story about one protagonist, and he creates children, prophets, widows, pagans, and fisherman with fascinating clarity.
My favorite character was the old prophet, who feels like he walked right out of the Jordan wilderness at the heart of the divided kingdom in 2 Chronicles, complete with personality quirks and absurd stories that keep most people at a distance but provide life altering truths for those who dare approach and listen.
The plot of the tale keeps you engaged, and you genuinely can't know the direction each turn will take or how the conflicts will resolve (do they?) by the final page. It leads to contemplation of bigger themes on life, guilt, consequences, and superstition.
In my opinion, Recommended as a read aloud with any children over 10 leading to great conversation. Great reading for young adult genre. Adults will appreciate the deeper themes and narrative style.
October 16, 2025
Out of the Thicket is a masterfully woven story of legend, bravery, conspiracy, redemption, and deliverance. Written in the vein of Burdens, Kizer’s fantastic collection of short stories, Out of the Thicket is not Christian Fiction or Fantasy. In contrast to Burdens, these characters often speak of their faith in The Light, their source of faith in the supernatural.
The story centers on the daring exploits of Hazaq and Bear, two twelve-year-old boys seeking escape from what the townspeople called the Seizing, a mysterious annual disappearance of all twelve-year-old boys on a particular day of the year. At times, Hazaq and Bear reminded me of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn–running away from home, trouble on a river, and other like events.
As one reads, he will be lost in the vivid descriptions that permeate the book. I found myself often stopping to contemplate the scenes and the people described throughout. As I was reading, I couldn’t help but think, this book would make a great movie!
From this perspective, though not overtly, Out of the Thicket shows the danger when faith in the supernatural is tainted by superstition. But it also shows how God-fearing humanity often struggles with the unknown. At its conclusion, one sees the freedom that comes when faith is made manifest in forgiveness.
Out of the Thicket is a great book for young and old alike. I give it my unqualified recommendation.
The story centers on the daring exploits of Hazaq and Bear, two twelve-year-old boys seeking escape from what the townspeople called the Seizing, a mysterious annual disappearance of all twelve-year-old boys on a particular day of the year. At times, Hazaq and Bear reminded me of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn–running away from home, trouble on a river, and other like events.
As one reads, he will be lost in the vivid descriptions that permeate the book. I found myself often stopping to contemplate the scenes and the people described throughout. As I was reading, I couldn’t help but think, this book would make a great movie!
From this perspective, though not overtly, Out of the Thicket shows the danger when faith in the supernatural is tainted by superstition. But it also shows how God-fearing humanity often struggles with the unknown. At its conclusion, one sees the freedom that comes when faith is made manifest in forgiveness.
Out of the Thicket is a great book for young and old alike. I give it my unqualified recommendation.
October 21, 2025
One of the hallmarks of “Out of the Thicket” is Drew Kizer’s ability to paint word pictures. His in-depth descriptions of people and places are not hastily thrown at the reader. Instead, each is developed in layers throughout the book. By the time you finish reading, you will feel as though you have personally visited the city of Yana and gotten to know its citizens. I enjoyed reading this book. I believe you will like it too.
July 4, 2026
Unique and powerful
This novel defies classification, but elements of ancient theologies, supernatural powers and ageless storytelling are all here. I wasn’t expecting the plot twists, but enjoyed them all. The setting was perfectly unworldly, but seemed totally natural for the story that unfolds in it. I recommend it for careful readers.
This novel defies classification, but elements of ancient theologies, supernatural powers and ageless storytelling are all here. I wasn’t expecting the plot twists, but enjoyed them all. The setting was perfectly unworldly, but seemed totally natural for the story that unfolds in it. I recommend it for careful readers.
October 28, 2025
Wonderful! A great book!
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews