The Listeners by Maggie Stiefvater
A Novel
Title: The Listeners
Author: Maggie Stiefvater
Publisher: Viking Books
Publication Year: 2025
ISBN: 9780593655504
Rating: 4 stars
Here is another book hot off the presses and hitting your local indie bookstore today! Maggie Stiefvater is best known for being a YA fantasy author, but with The Listeners, she is taking a foray into adult publishing. One of my students wanted to base their final project for one of my classes on The Raven Boys, so I read that book and quite enjoyed it. I haven’t made it around to finishing the rest of the Raven Cycle series, but when The Listeners was talked about at the Summer 2025 launch meeting last year, I instantly put it down on my TBR list. To make this book even more appealing (to me at least) it is set in West Virginia!
This book takes place at the Avallon Hotel and Spa, a luxurious resort in West Virginia for the wealthy elite of the US centered around springs of healing water. To someone familiar with West Virginia, this will probably sound a lot like the Greenbrier Resort and Spa, but it isn’t really. The Greenbrier is also mentioned by name several times in the book as a separate luxury resort in West Virginia. It is January of 1942 and June Hudson, the hotel’s general manager is preparing for the hotel’s upcoming summer season. June, a local with a thick accent, learned everything there is to know about running a luxury hotel from Francis Gilfoyle, the hotel’s previous owner, and a mentor and father figure in June’s life. Mr. Gilfoyle has recently passed away and the hotel was taken over by his son, Edgar, and while June misses Francis and his guidance, she loves the hotel, loves the guests, and loves the “sweetwater” that made the hotel a destination in the first place.
However, the 1942 season is not going to be business as usual. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, June knows she will have to help keep joy alive during wartime for her guests while losing staff to the armed forces and dealing with rations and scarcity. She knows it will be a big task, but June isn’t daunted. Her ideas were what kept the hotel alive through the Great Depression and revamped the Avallon’s image within well-heeled society. She knows if she could make it through that, she can pilot this ship through the war as well. However, Edgar throws a wrench in her plans when he shows up unexpectedly at the hotel with FBI Agents and men from the State Department in tow. June is crushed to discover that the hotel is going to be used not for their typical guests, but as a holding cell for foreign diplomats and high ranking prisoners from the Axis countries. With no choice in the matter, June is forced to do her best with the task at hand, but she worries about how she is going to be able to make her staff—many with loved ones fighting in the war or missing in Europe take care of prisoners from the very countries causing their misery. She also worries about how the townspeople of Constancy, the nearest town to the hotel, will react to POWs living in luxury at the hotel while they ration and scrape to make it through.
Despite these challenges, June is a hotelier at heart and does what she must to take care of her charges (both staff and prisoners), protect the hotel and balance the sweetwater, and figure out what these changes mean to her own future and identity. The war is causing the hotel to undergo a change in identity, but life after Francis is forcing June to make changes of her own.
While this kind of sounds like straightforward historical fiction, there are some fantasy elements in the Avallon’s relationship with the sweetwater. The water that feeds the springs functions as a character in the story. It has feelings and a personality of its own, but these things are only apparent to those who can “feel” the water. This includes the late Francis Guilfoyle, June, and Hannelore Wolfe, a possibly neurodiverse child being held captive in the hotel. The water absorbs the feelings of those who interact with it and if it gets unbalanced, it can potentially damage the hotel. When that happens, it is up to June (and formerly Francis) to balance it and absorb the bad feelings. Under June’s tenure at the hotel, the water needed to be balanced less often due to her excellent management, but as you can imagine, when the hotel becomes a gilded prison, the water requires a lot more of June’s attention. While I think this definitely makes the book qualify as fantasy, it’s not high fantasy. You don’t have to understand a whole new world system or any made up creatures to get the premise and keep up with what is going on. As someone who isn’t a huge fantasy fan, I liked the balance of the realistic and the fantastic and didn’t feel overwhelmed or turned off by the way the water is portrayed. Also as someone who has visited multiple towns with healing springs in West Virginia, in those places, the water is kind of treated like a person with agency, so this felt right and accurate in that sense too.
I was originally a little nervous about this book because I am always nervous about how WV is portrayed in books. I love my state, but it gets a lot of bad press. I think Stiefvater does a pretty good job at portraying West Virginia here. Most of the book takes place at the hotel, so the guests and then the prisoners aren’t West Virginians, but June, many of the staff members, the people in the town, and one of the FBI agents are all from West Virginia. They aren’t ubiquitous and none of them are reduced just to stereotypes, though most of them have at least one stereotypical “West Virginian” trait. It is a big part of June’s characterization that she still has a thick West Virginia accent, which I am cool with, but I felt like it got doubled down on a bit too hard a few times. As a West Virginian, I also know many people with accents code switch and kind of smooth out their accent around people without one. Because June is someone who works a lot with wealthy people from all over the world, and to a certain extent yearns to fit in and live the lifestyle of these people, I’d definitely expect her to code switch at least around the guests, so I found that a little unrealistic. Especially because June’s lore is that she was nonverbal for much of her childhood, came to the Avallon as a young teenager, and then practically grew up within the ranks of the Guilfoyle family. Realistically, I’m not sure how much of an accent she would have developed or hung onto, but the accent was a huge part of her character.
I do think that Stiefvater does a great job at highlighting West Virginia history. She talks about the Battle of Blair Mountain, the Mine Wars, and the ways industry has taken advantage of West Virginia without giving back to the people and the land here. Additionally, the Avallon was used to hold prisoners during the war and at the end of the book, the plan is to convert it to a military hospital—both of these things happened during the real World War II in West Virginia at the Greenbrier (and the book does mention that the Greenbrier is also housing prisoners). These parts of the book felt well-researched and lined up a lot with other historical accounts I have read about the roles hotels like the Greenbrier played during the war.
The geography was also realistic. The nearest town of notable size to the Avallon seems to be Malden and characters in the book travel to Charleston and Fayetteville and one of the character’s fathers was involved in the Battle of Blair Mountain. While I did find it a little hard to believe the Avallon and the Greenbrier were both able to be profitable while being less than two hours apart, the geography of the book all made sense and seemed reasonable—which is not always the case for books set in West Virginia.
I vastly simplified the plot of this book for easy summary, but there is a lot of character-driven action in this book and Stiefvater does an excellent job at writing well-rounded characters in this book. Despite there being so many characters, hardly any of them are one-dimensional. I think in a book like this, it would have been easy to portray the American characters as “good” and the Axis characters as “bad,” but Stiefvater doesn’t do it that way. All of the characters are complex and contain good and bad motivations—just like real people. It is emphasized any time a character makes a choice that they have compelling reasons and motivations even if those aren’t obvious to other characters. I liked this emotional complexity and it kept me engrossed in the book and spending time thinking about what the “right” thing is to do and what I might do in the same situation. It is clear that tensions and emotions are high for all of the characters and these circumstances often require the characters to make choices they might not make otherwise.
I loved this book and I think there is enough here to appeal to a lot of different readers. If you like historical fiction, strong and spunky female characters, romance, light fantasy, setting as a character, or even locked room mysteries, there is something here for you. This book is emotionally complex, well-researched, and gorgeously written, so I hope this is just the beginning of Maggie Stiefvater’s career as an author for adults.