Melissa Brown

Mysterious and lyrical, Jess Kidd’s first novel, Himself, introduces the inhabitants of a village in County Mayo, Ireland, after the return of its most unfortunate son. Kidd wraps readers up in her tale like a mother swaddling a child—only in this case, not for safekeeping. In the curious village of Mulderrig, nothing is as safe as it seems.

It’s April 1976. Mahony, orphaned in Dublin 26 years prior, has followed a note—penned on the back of a photograph of him and his mother—to the place of his birth and, possibly, his mother’s death. Back in 1950, the town branded his mum Orla a witch, a whore, an outcast. The many rumors about what happened to her persist, confusing Mahony in his search for truth.

Strange things begin to happen when the handsome, dark-eyed Mahony steps foot in Mulderrig. Like his mother before him, Mahony can see and talk to the dead. The town’s eccentric Mrs. Cauley senses this, as she has some otherworldly tricks up her own sleeve. To find out what happened to his mum, Mahony and the meddling Mrs. Cauley conduct interrogations of both the living and the dead. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, it quickly becomes apparent that some people want Mahony gone, for good.

Moving between Mahony’s present and the village’s past, Himself is spun like a fairy tale and paced like a mystery told around a slowly fading campfire. Kidd is brilliant at setting the scene and painting it vividly with a twisted, comic voice. A Bogeyman haunts the forest, a protected island in the river only appears at low tide, and a holy well springs up in the middle of the priest’s library. Mahoney’s presence seems to trigger this and other chaos as it forces the villagers to deal with the demons they’ve tried to bury.

In Himself, the author revels in the magical and supernatural, deftly and often humorously melding superstition and folklore with real personal tragedy.

It’s fitting for a Civil War-era story to be told in letters: The excruciating wait between each hoped-for missive is mirrored in this debut novel’s slow and gradual denouement. Author and playwright Susan Rivers employs not only letters, but also diary entries and inquest reports to tell a story loosely based in fact. In The Second Mrs. Hockaday, Placidia Fincher, young and newly wed to a major in the Confederate army, is jailed and accused of adultery and infanticide. Her husband has been away for two years, adding to the intrigue. Only Placidia and her few slaves, particularly one named Achilles, know what transpired. 

As attested to in an author’s note, Rivers’ research has been thorough, and she writes convincingly in a mid 19th-century style and mindset. She is adept at creating arresting imagery and constructs a stark contrast between the life of privilege Placidia left and the life of struggle she comes to upon marrying the major, moving to his remote farm, and mothering Charlie, his son by his first wife. After only two days as husband and wife, the major is called back to the front, and his “fair girl” Placidia must run the farm and protect the homestead. 

Passages relating to what Placidia and others suffer build slowly and unfold in painstaking detail, making them all the more appalling. The cruelty in a world besieged by war is hard to fully comprehend. Men fought on battlefields, but everyone at home was fighting, too—to survive. In The Second Mrs. Hockaday, Rivers gives readers an illuminating glimpse into a part of our country’s past that still has repercussions in the present.

This article was originally published in the January 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook

There may be animals, an imminent flood and a guy named Noah, but Noah’s Wife is not the familiar Genesis account. Imagine not a wind-tossed ark on rough waters but a town where the rains began and never stopped. Never a break in the gray clouds, never a feeling besides damp, no change in the forecast. The town at the center of Noah’s Wife is such a place—a place where the weather is the topic of conversation. The town’s inhabitants, who have stayed and watched their town slowly contract and the waters rise, are embittered, doggedly optimistic or simply resigned. First-time author Lindsay Starck excels at detailing her characters’ emotional and physical responses to this bizarre meteorological situation.

Into this near-ghost town arrive Noah and his wife. He, an energetic pastor with salvation on his mind, brings her, a quieter participant, skeptical but supportive. As the rain continues and the town’s once-lauded zoo floods, the townspeople begrudgingly rally to shelter the remaining animals. It’s the stuff of slapstick comedy: tortoises tucked into car trunks and monkeys buckled into passenger seats. Mauro, the happy-go-lucky Italian general store owner, becomes enamored with the brilliant peacocks he almost runs over. Mrs. McGinn, head of the town council, tries to maintain normalcy as she runs her diner and penguins bed beside the dairy in her cooler. But years of rain have made the people hard, and their rescue effort only adds to the feelings of despair and falls short of reuniting them.

Noah is especially floored by the town’s somber state and, as his eagerness cracks and doubts blossom, his wife finds herself without the man she put all her faith in. Noah, the man who “walked with God,” may have gotten the call, but it is his wife who ends up being the one to answer, to lead.

Starck writes thoughtfully, with a real ear for the rhythm of language and talent for finding surprising moments of humor amidst the dark nights of the soul her characters face. How do they hold onto hope in this rain-drenched place, where they have become experts at noticing different shades of gray? With wisdom and insight, Starck captures all their losing, leaving behind and longing. It takes one last defiant stand, one last tenacious grasp at hope, for this community to become one.

Our past never really leaves us, as much as we try to leave it behind and erase the marks it leaves on us. The especially painful memories etch themselves deeper than those of happier times.

In Sarah Nović’s first novel, Girl at War, her protagonist Ana Jurić lives  “suspended between the living and the dead” after witnessing the atrocities of the Croatian War of Independence. Violence methodically consumes everything that was once good and innocent in her young life, ensnaring 10-year-old Ana, her mother and father and her baby sister, Rahela. Not fully understanding the growing danger, Ana and her best friend, Luka, try to continue being kids, riding their bikes all over Zagreb, teasing one another, and making games out of the power outages and food shortages. When the war inevitably becomes personal to Ana and her family, it does so in truly horrific fashion.

Nović steers us along Ana’s trajectory from an impressionable and impatient child to a 20-year-old New York college student soon after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Ana has spent the past 10 years refusing to talk about her history to most everyone outside her adoptive family. Memories of what she has endured haunt her and propel her toward seeking some kind of resolution. Her mind continually returns to the pain of her past; it is only a matter of time before her feet must follow. 

Nović’s observant prose is visceral and incisive, capturing Ana’s inner turmoil and vulnerability as well as the practiced harshness she tries to use to cover it. Her story is also firmly rooted in the tangible. Detailed depictions of the horrors of war share space with the mundane, everyday aspects of a child’s—and then a young woman’s—life. Nović writes in a self-assured voice that ably carries the weight of tragic history and explores the depth and contradictions of the human response to that history. A remarkable story of one girl’s struggle to survive and her struggle with surviving when others did not, Girl at War is devastating to read but too compelling to put down.

RELATED CONTENT: Read our interview with Sara Nović.