Burning Marguerite
By Elizabeth Inness-Brown
Knopf, $23
ISBN 0375411968

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A riveting journey through time

In this debut novel from short story writer Elizabeth Inness-Brown, love in all its holy and devastating incandescence is explored through the central character of 94-year-old Marguerite Deo, who lies dead in the snow at the book's beginning. Moving backward through time and place, from the present to Depression-era New Orleans to an island in New England after the turn of the century, her character pieces together for the reader a life lived in devotion to the young boy she adopts, James Jack. We learn the reasons behind the difficult choices she makes in a life filled with twists and turns, right up to the moment she dies.

When we meet James Jack, a 35-year-old handyman on the rock-hard island that is home to him and his "Tante" Marguerite, he has just found her dead body outside his cabin. Reeling emotionally, he tries to hide her death from the local sheriff, a man whose past intersects with his and Tante's, as he struggles to fulfill her last wishes. These segments, written in third person, interweave with those written in Marguerite's voice, as she relates the death of James Jack's parents, her adoption of the boy who "gave me my life," her struggles in New Orleans during the Great Depression and World War II, and finally the memory of a young woman in the throes of a first, forbidden love -- a love that begets a crime so hideous as to stay buried for years, both literally and figuratively.

Inness-Brown employs a narrator whose voice carries the reader back through time with a compelling honesty that, as author Joe David Bellamy writes on the book jacket, portrays the present as if it is "already the distant past, viewed in the sepia tones of an old photograph." From the poetic imagery of Marguerite's thoughts as she dies in the snow, back to the crucial, violent act that defines her life and her subsequent actions, the author tells a story that won't let the reader go, even long after the book is read. In producing this story of "a love so hot as to incinerate all doubt," Inness-Brown incinerates any doubt that she is a wordsmith worth reading.

Bonnie Arant Ertelt is a writer and editor in Nashville.