Mari Carlson

“[Life] is a space full of agreeable and disagreeable surprises,” Pablo Escobar said in an interview in the late 1990s. In Fruit of the Drunken Tree, Chula Santiago and her family’s maid, Petrona, slowly build a friendship fraught with both types of surprises. Told with suspense and mystical lyricism in the vein of Gabriel García Márquez and Isabel Allende, this debut novel by Ingrid Rojas Contreras stings and heals, like salt on a wound.

To support her large family, teenage Petrona is sent by her mother from the Hills into Bogotá, Colombia. Meanwhile, feeling guilty over her own wealth and desperate for a confidante, young Chula obsesses over the mysterious Petrona. Each girl must make a choice: Lured by money and first love, Petrona must decide between the Santiagos and the guerillas; Chula must decide between her family and Petrona.

Chapters narrated by Chula are full of sensations. Imbued with a mix of Catholicism and her mother’s indigenous beliefs, the plot moves along dreamily as Chula witnesses traumatic events through a child’s lens. She calls on the cows in her courtyard to protect her. She calms herself by counting fly parts and the syllables Petrona speaks. She searches for the Blessed Souls of Purgatory, of whom she believes Petrona is a representative. Alternate chapters narrated by Petrona are more straightforward and action-based, giving the novel a robust balance of fantasy and realism.

The novel climaxes as politics become personal. Police all over South America search for Escobar as tragedy descends on the Santiago family. Rain finally appears after a historic drought, mimicking the story’s deluge of Chula’s vivid impressions. Safety and calamity collide. Contreras deftly brings the novel to a calm closing, with the Santiago women in Los Angeles and Petrona back in the Hills. Escape becomes a way of life for the two young women, providing a colorful perspective on a tragic existence.

Part thriller, part crime novel, part dreamscape, James A. McLaughlin’s Bearskin refuses to be contained.

The bears on the Appalachian nature preserve overseen by Rice Moore, the novel’s on-the-run main character, need protection from hunters—much like Rice. He is used to being alone and operating outside the law, having fled from a drug cartel in Arizona. Rice is thankful for a break from the guns and violence of drug-running, but the bear poaching he encounters in his mountain refuge might be more than he can handle—and he finds help in the most unlikely of suspects.

The book begins with Rice’s prison sentence in Arizona and traces his tumultuous journey from confinement to hard-won freedom. Rice is employed to survey and maintain the Appalachian preserve, but the discovery of bear carcasses—as well as the story of the previous caretaker’s tragic departure—trigger in Rice a desire for revenge. In homemade camouflage, Rice spends more and more time on the mountain, watching for bear hunters and becoming like a bear himself. Wonderfully lucid prose in the climactic middle section starkly conveys Rice’s descent into a wild existence: “Hysteria fluttered like a moth in the back of his throat.” When Rice is attacked, the previous caretaker and other mountain people—including an ex-soldier turned criminal, a locksmith, a reclusive beekeeper and hillbilly brothers working their way into a nefarious biker gang—play their parts to bring about old-fashioned justice.

Smart and sophisticated, with animals both wild and domestic acting as metaphors, Bearskin is a gritty, down-home tale told with brute force. Rice is a memorable, reluctant hero for both his community and the animals in his charge.

Read more: James A. McLaughlin shares how he dug in deep to write Bearskin.