Melissa Brown

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.

Brooke Davis’ story of a little girl named Millie Bird turns child abandonment into an adventure. After her father dies and her mother leaves her in the ladies’ underwear department, Millie finds two improbable helpers: Karl, who types out everything he says or feels with his fingers, and Agatha, who writes complaint letters and catalogs her aging body’s daily changes. Karl and Agatha, both in their 80s and widowed, have lived long lives but don’t quite know how to live now. Millie’s predicament gives them a reason to try. 

In Lost & Found, Australian author Davis renders Millie, especially, in careful detail—she’s fragile, yet not completely unhinged by all the upheaval in her life. Millie comes across as a 7-year-old should: curious, experimental, hopeful, afraid but covering with bravado and optimism. From vantage points further on, Karl and Agatha are doing much the same. 

Davis’ vivid imagining of the grieving process as a roller coaster of questions with no easy answers reflects some of her personal struggle, as her mother’s sudden death occurred not long before she began this project. Readers will find themselves pondering difficult questions along with Millie, Karl and Agatha. A literal cross-country journey aids in their individual quests to find out and embrace what it means to still be here after loss.

This article was originally published in the February 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In space, in that weightless environment, any disruption to an object’s proper orbit can result in catastrophe. Within families, those often insular orbits of individuals, the loss of the center causes a similar spiraling out of control. In Everything I Never Told You by first-time novelist Celeste Ng, the Lee family is unanchored by sudden tragedy and then undone slowly by recriminations and regrets.

Like many parents, Marilyn and James Lee carry past hurts and insecurities with them, shaping their children to embody what remains unfulfilled in them. Their daughter Lydia especially “absorbed her parents’ dreams.” The discovery of her body in a lake in their small Ohio town answers none of the family’s questions as to what happened.

Grief binds Marilyn, James and their two other children, Nath and Hannah, but it also threatens to rend them completely. Ng writes lyrically about the interior lives of each member of the Lee family: the father, a still self-conscious son of Chinese immigrants who is desperate to belong; the beautiful white mother, an escapee from a closeted life prescribed for her by her own mother; and their children, the oldest (Nath) frustrated, the middle (Lydia) suffocated, and the youngest (Hannah) ignored. Lydia remains an enigma for much of the novel as Ng pieces the how and why of her death together through her family’s knowledge (of lack thereof) first, and then Lydia’s own perspective near the end. No pain is glossed over, no unpleasantness swept aside. The fracture that Lydia’s death has created splits open the hairline crack already running through her family. Ng’s deftness with detail draws the reader close into the family’s struggle to understand.

While Ng is an eloquent and thoughtful writer, the many shifts from the past to present (the novel is set in the 1970s) can disrupt the continuity at times. But her pinpoint precision on the feelings and actions after loss make for a very strong and emotional debut that will linger in the mind.