We Arrive Uninvited

by Jen Knox

When Emerson was twelve, she was enamored of her grandmother Amelia and believed that what others saw as eccentricity or mental illness was instead a misunderstood gift.

Five years later, hardened by her mother's suicide and worried that she might be destined for a similar fate, Emerson visits Amelia at The Lavender House, a mental health facility for the elderly, to learn more about the enigmatic women in her family who found either magic or madness in response to a world that often seemed too small to contain them.

As Amelia's warped fairy tale emerges, buried stories are unearthed, and everything Emerson thinks she knows shifts as she begins to confront her own magical thinking and burgeoning feelings for her best friend.

Genres: Fantasy, Fiction, Mental Health, LGBT

226 pages, Paperback

First published March 15, 2023

About the author

The Founder and Executive Director of Unleash Creatives, Jen Knox is an educator and storyteller who teaches writing, leadership, and meditation.

Her books include the short story collection The Glass City (Hollywood, CA: Winner, Prize Americana for Prose), and the novels We Arrive Uninvited (Steel Toe Books) and Chaos Magic (Kallisto Gaia Press).

Her first essay collection, At Work, will be released by Cornerstone Press UWSP in 2027.

Jen's writing has earned multiple awards. Her short stories, poetry, and essays have been featured in textbooks, classrooms, and publications in the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Turkey, India, and Scotland. Her fiction appears in The Best Small Fictions (Braddock Avenue Books), The Adirondack Review, Sivana East, Chicago Tribune's Printers Row, Chicago Quarterly Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, Crannog, Cutthroat Magazine, Elephant Journal, Fairlight Books, Fiction Southeast, Juked, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, MJI News, Poor Claudia, The Saturday Evening Post, The Santa Fe Writers Project Quarterly, NPR, Short Story America, and Sequestrum, among over a hundred other publications. Read many of her stories here.

Reviews

[Tara · Rating 5 out of 5]

My book blurb for this lovely book: A tender coming-of-age story set in the Ohio flatlands that plays deftly with mystery and the wonders of female power and intuition. Jennifer Knox explores with insight and wisdom the “hysteria” that women were, and still are, often labeled with, and counsels us to connect with the “pulse of the earth” and to each other. A talented writer exhibiting her own intuition, Knox understands that our greatest fear is loneliness. In We Arrive Uninvited, she gifts us with myriad ways to find a cure.

[Tony Burnett · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had to read this book slowly because it was told in a voice both familial and foreign to me. Even though I'm not the intended audience for this book, it opened my eyes to the generational complexities experienced by the gifted matriarchs of families that don't understand the value and beauty of their special brand of empathy. While underlining the danger of exposing a gift, to only have it interpreted as madness, the story centers on the generations of women who understand that their abilities of intuition makes them stronger. I recommend this book to women who understand the magic they possess or those who want to access it. Take your time with this one. It's nuanced!

[Kate Niestrom · Rating 2 out of 5]

Okay. This is one of the first self-published books that I've read in a long time, and I have to say that this definitely felt more like a draft than a fully finished novel. The premise itself is interesting; magic passed matrilineally has wreaked havoc on the lives of the women in Emerson's family going back five generations, and is beginning to manifest in her as well. She seeks guidance from a grandmother her family has shunned, and learns about both her history and inheritance. But god did this book lack focus...

Here's what I liked:
- The concept. Like I said, the idea behind this book was interesting, if not super original. A young girl must deal with the burgeoning magic that arrives (uninvited!) to all the firstborn women in her family.
- The characters. Amelia was plucky, full of spirit, empathetic, and compelling. I liked her at all ages. Emerson was okay. She was a fine receptacle for Amelia's story. Kat was fascinating, if comically awful, and Grandma Grodzki was warm and lovely.

Here's where I struggled:
- The plot. What was it?? Was this story about Emerson coming into her own power? Was it about her coming into her sexuality? Was it about Amelia coming to terms with the limitations of her power and the grief she feels over her daughter? Was it about Amelia reconnecting with a lost love? I honestly don't know. The focus kept shifting, and nothing felt climactic or overarchingly important. The pieces of Amelia's story that she chose to share with Emerson confused me. Why so much about her childhood? The last chunk that had to do with once she and Jake had been separated seemed like the most intriguing portion to me, but she glossed over it so fast. Why? What was the point of telling Amelia all the previous parts? What was she trying to teach her?
- The main character. Did this book belong to Emerson or Amelia? It could have weaved both stories together nicely, but every time Emerson sat down to hear more of Amelia's story, none of it had anything to do with what Emerson was going through. Emerson is experiencing anxiety and panic attacks because of her growing magic. Do we see Amelia experience any of that? No. She just wants to tell someone her story. Which is fine, but then why is Emerson a part of this book at all?
- The Courtney of it all. Emerson's romance with Courtney came out of nowhere. They're best friends, and then after a bad date with Ian, she just decides that she's in LOVE with her. We see no tension between the two, no sparks, no build-up. Just sex with Ian, and then "Wait no, I've loved Courtney the whole time." I just didn't get it. And I didn't get why Courtney was mad at her at the end, or why she refused to talk to her. I also didn't get why both girls felt so bad for Ian. He went on two dates with Emerson where he seemed really self-involved, and then they hooked up. She decided she wasn't into it so she broke it off. What did Emerson do wrong? She does not owe the story of sleeping with Ian to Courtney, so she shouldn't have been mad. The whole situation really confused me.
- The sense of place. Unless the girls were on their way to the Lavender House to see Amelia, I usually had no idea where anyone was in this book. The back cover says it takes place in Ohio, which is news to me. I never knew if conversations were happening at school, at someone's home, or on Mars. There are no descriptions, nothing is grounded in environment and the pacing is so off that no one ever has a chance to just sit back and breathe.

Overall this book just needed a lot of work. It needed to pick one central storyline and have everything focus around that. It needed Amelia's story to marry better with Emerson's. It needed to slow down and ground itself in the environment of the Ohio flatlands, if that's indeed where the characters are. Every bit of dialogue and every action of its characters needed to serve the story, and it just didn't. This book was only 200 pages but it took me forever to get through. I think this book could have been great, it just needed a few more drafts and a good editor.

[Kari Nguyen · Rating 5 out of 5]

From the stunning cover to the last, lingering sentence, I loved this book. Jen Knox writes with heart and vision. I enjoyed the stories within the stories, and the way Knox weaves them all together. Here is a beautiful, mesmerizing tale of generational love, trauma, and the magic and wisdom of women, filled with memorable characters facing the conflicts of their lives. I’m still thinking about the women here, and all they’ve endured, shared, and overcome. An empowering read!

[Beth Gilstrap · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jen is an incredible storyteller and this book is a delightful coming of age story full of magic, heartache, and ultimately how familial and platonic love transcend time and loss. If you love characters who stick with you, this is absolutely a book for you.

[Matthew Meade · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ok. Here is the elevator pitch for why you should read this cool, weird book: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest meets Beloved. Interested yet? You should be. This book has everything: Generational oral history, Mental illness, the looming specter of grief… ghosts!

Jen Knox is a seasoned writer whose sentences are always sturdy and sometimes arrestingly revelatory. Take the first sentence in chapter two, for example. “The dead are tricksters…” How is that for a way to start a chapter?

The real selling point, however, is the cast of limit-pushing, rabble rousing, and often very funny characters. Emerson, Courtney , and Grandma Grodski all have their moments, but the real scene stealer is Ameila, the main character’s delightfully blunt, bourbon-sipping curmudgeon of a grandmother. Amelia is a witchy old soothsayer whose advice sounds like threats and whose love looks like discipline. She barks out that nurses are “no-good, second-rate drug dealers,” and warns her granddaughter that “The nicer you are, the more likely you’ll find a downright mean old husband.”

The book is thoughtful, patient, and honest. Also, the cover art rocks.

[Arundhati Rakshit · Rating 4 out of 5]

We Arrive Uninvited: A Tale of Magic, Madness, Love and Life

Many a times, I have wondered if the world around me is worth fitting into. I wondered if I had been too incongruous in a world of a trillion Las Vegas and dapper normalcy. So, when I came across Jen Knox’s exotic debut novel, ‘We Arrive Uninvited’, revolving around generations of schizophrenic women and their untold stories, it immediately piqued my interest.

Written in the perspectives of two central characters, Emerson, an adolescent girl and her grandmother, Amelia, this story explores the narratives of the women in their family, women who had been misunderstood, mistreated, undermined, and women who struggled through all odds and discovered the truth in the core of their being. Emerson, while dealing with the loss of her mother and in her reconciliation with the new way of living, encounters her uncanny abilities and physical and mental sensations that she fails to comprehend. Her quest of answers to her fear, pain and insecurity leads her to a remarkable journey, one on which she reaches her grandmother, Amelia who has been imprisoned in a mental health facility for years on account of schizophrenia. As she listens to Amelia, Emerson steps into an entirely new world. She embarks on a quest to delve into stories of generations of women in their family, who had been tagged as mentally ill or schizophrenic, in the process of trying to uncover their power, magic and mystic abilities.

In a lucid, flowing writing style, Knox has narrated an enchanting story of generations of stories buried deep in the mounds of time, with charisma and grace. What touched me more was that it is not only a story of Emerson uncovering her past, but also discovering herself, her identity and learning to accept and embrace herself in spite of what the world wants her to be. Both Amelia and Emerson speaks of their stories parallelly which keeps us grounded to the past as well as the present. As I read more, I began to connect the lives of these two extraordinary women and felt as if I was with them and among them. The subtle and evocative expressions of grief, fear and love moved me. Though, at a few places, the dialogues and the moves of the characters felt predictable, the freshness in the ultimate expression of the characters made up for any defects there may have been. At the end Amelia, Emerson, Jake and Courtney – all of them left a place for themselves in my heart.

When the story ends, it calms and soothes you from within, healing your scars, and you will know that there could be no better ending for this story. As a debut novel, I should say, Jen Knox has created a remarkable piece of work and we can expect more from her in the years to come.

So, if you are looking for a novel, that is absorbing, thought-provoking, sensitive and intense, one that will leave you quiet, contented and thoughtful, this is it!

[Karen Poppy · Rating 5 out of 5]

We Arrive Uninvited, Jen Knox’s debut novel, and winner of the Steel Toe Books Award for Prose in 2021, allows the swimmers to swim—metaphorically. The epigraph by Joseph Campbell tells us what we need to know of the book’s female protagonists: “The psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight.” The characters who swim in the symbolic waters of mysticism, Emerson and her grandmother, Amelia, do so in the wake of death. Amelia foresees the death of Celine, Emerson’s mother and Amelia’s daughter. Emerson’s father fails to understand the lines between insanity and suffering, as well as those between insanity and awareness. While otherwise sensitive and caring, he asks in a playbook line from the patriarchy, “Why are all the women in this family insane?” This novel is Shirley Jackson meets Anne Sexton, except instead of one woman who is judged insane, we have a familial lineage of women who are considered mentally unbalanced when they are truly mystics with far-reaching gifts. Shifting from judgment to an open assessment through these women’s own voices is an important and vital feminist act.

[Cindy Sostchen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first encountered Jen Knox’s extraordinary talents via her short stories, and I was immediately hypnotized by her unique writing style and ability to craft off-beat but realistic characters and compelling plots. I also sensed that this author was destined to write a novel, and indeed she has—an award-winning debut novel, as a matter of fact, that does what a work of fiction should do: compels you, haunts you, hugs you, tugs you, and doesn’t let go. We Arrive Uninvited invites the reader to ponder the fine line between intuition vs. insanity and magic vs. madness. In language that is at once tender and searing, Knox makes a strong case for banishing the words “mental illness” when describing the non-conformists among us. Jen Knox’s powerful words are full of womanly wisdom, insight, and yes, a bit of madness, but like everything she has written to date, a huge dose of her own marvelous and miraculous magic too.

[Karin · Rating 5 out of 5]

We Arrive Uninvited, Jen Knox's debut novel, winner of the Steel Toe Books Prose Award (STB, 2023), weaves together themes of magic and matriarchy within the intergenerational stories of teenage Emerson and her maternal grandmother Amelia. Questions of what is normal and acceptable vs. what is madness in reference to women through the decades arise again and again as societal and structural constraints within the novel. Art, breath, focus, drive, rituals, the natural world, grief, love, and determination are revealed through a female lens, and the strength of women on their own and collectively decides the narrative's momentum. Feminine, mystical personas influence future paths and linger after death to guide the living, and the prose is tempered with their compassion.

[Max Davine · Rating 4 out of 5]

A modernist take of the witches among us subgenre, We Arrive Uninvited is a deeply moving chronicle of two separated generations of women and the passage and healing of intergenerational trauma through a subtle touch of magic or insanity. Which it is depends entirely on you.

Some of Jen Knox's dialogue was a little ropey and the dates are a touch hard to reconcile - Amelia was born in 1921 and the US is involved in the war while she's in highschool, Cynthia was born in the forties but Emmerson is using a touch phone in highschool...? - but her prose is simplistically beautiful and the characters, real enough in Knox's heart in spite of some of the things they say, make for a captivating read.

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

In her fascinating and delicately written debut novel, We Arrive Uninvited, Jen Knox, explores the spiritual and mystical belief and disbelief that her characters must struggle through when their inner voices and intuition won’t be silenced, and what happens when such experiences are passed down generationally through families of women. What does one do with such connections? What is the price of turning away from them, and what is the cost of accepting and turning their way.

[Ashley Holloway · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book - It is a great story to lose yourself in that focuses on strong female characters without turning into a feminist manifesto. I thoroughly enjoyed the "witchy" theme and would describe this book as being like the movie Practical Magic meets Steel Magnolias only without all the Hollywood nonsense. Definitely one to add to your "must read" list.

[Lady Warfield · Rating 5 out of 5]

So good. I really loved this story. I enjoyed the different story lines and how they weaved together. The parallels. It's a beautiful story of love, trauma, and magic flowing through three generations. Filled with filled with memorable women facing conflicts in their lives- old and young. Amelia and Emerson are locked in my heart.

[Rebecca Grubb · Rating 5 out of 5]

Characters that seize one with their agency, their introspection, and the poetry of their contemplations---We Arrive Uninvited grips the reader compellingly, hypnotically, seductively. It is a journey like no other journey, and yet like one every one of us must take. Read it as a mirror, a window, an atlas, a horoscope ---just read it.

[Jen Knox · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my best book and one that took me a decade to write. If you are interested in buying it, please consider supporting an independent bookstore if you can.
https://www.indiebound.org/book/97819...

[Robain Vee · Rating 5 out of 5]

An engaging, evocative, subtle exploration of generational echoes in the lives of mothers and daughters.

[Steven Ridgely · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very interesting.