It is the rare debut novel that reveals a writer of such immense talent as to achieve a dazzling literary home run the first time up to bat. Such is the case with Benjamin Ludwig’s Ginny Moon, an extraordinary coming-of-age story told from the perspective of a 14-year-old protagonist with autism.

Ginny’s disability isn’t even the most formidable challenge facing this plucky young heroine, who has survived the horrors of living with her violent, drug-addicted mother, Gloria, as well as a sad trail of failed foster care placements.

Ludwig’s novel begins as Ginny has finally found solace in the “Blue House” with her “Forever Parents,” a courageous young couple who, despite their determination to be the teen’s salvation, soon realize that they have signed up for more struggles than they anticipated. When Ginny becomes obsessed with reuniting with her birth mother and her beloved “baby doll,” her adoptive parents and school officials alike must struggle to keep the teen safe from her impulsive and methodical, albeit well-intentioned, behavior.

Despite the novel’s sobering subject matter, including child abuse, kidnapping and the realities of living with an autistic child, Ludwig has interjected his often-heartbreaking narrative with laugh-out-loud observations from Ginny, who loves Michael Jackson and displays a wicked sense of humor.

In a letter to his readers, Ludwig explains that he and his wife experienced similar, although less dramatic, challenges after adopting an autistic teenager, who helped inspire this tremendous debut novel.

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

BookPage Top Pick in Fiction, May 2017

Salt Houses is a dazzling debut about four generations of the Yacoubs, a Palestinian family originally from Jaffa. Told from multiple points of view, the novel offers a unique perspective on Arab displacement, assimilation and the very notion of home. At the same time, it puts a human face on a conflict that many of us need to better understand.

The Yacoubs were relocated from Jaffa to Nablus before the novel even begins. The story opens in 1963, 15 years after this first relocation and just as Salma is reading the future in coffee grounds on her daughter Alia’s wedding day. Though Salma tries to soften the message she detects, it soon becomes clear that the family will experience further displacements. After the Six-Day War (1967), they are forced to leave their home. Salma joins extended family in Jordan, and Alia and her husband, Atef, relocate to Kuwait where they raise a family. After Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait, the family scatters once again; this time the grown children of Alia and Atef, now with families of their own, disperse to Paris, Boston and Beirut.

Palestinian-American author Hala Alyan, who is also a practicing psychologist, balances the ordinary joys and burdens of family life with the deeper clashes of culture and homesickness that occur as the Yacoubs spread across the globe. Whether she is depicting the stormy marriage between Alia and Atef or their daughter Widad’s concerns over her stepson’s interest in the more extreme practitioners of Islam, Alyan serves her story well through precise, almost poetic language and empathy toward her characters.

Though the novel is not overtly political, both Alia and Atef are haunted by memories of Alia’s brother, Mustafa, who died in an Israeli jail. But nostalgia is an indulgence they can ill afford. Transience is their way of life, and resilience is their legacy to their children. Salt Houses speaks to the specificity of the Palestinian diaspora, but it also mirrors the experiences of immigrants and exiles all over the world, making it very much a book for every reader.

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

From its brilliant opening sentence, “Tell me what you can’t forget, and I’ll tell you who you are,” Julie Buntin’s debut novel creates a hauntingly original atmosphere for a familiar story. In Marlena, a woman in her 30s recalls events from two decades earlier, when a brief friendship had a profound impact on her life.

When Cat was 15, she and her “full-blown poor” family, which included her divorced mother and older brother, moved from their home in a Detroit suburb to a “grubby half-acre” in the woods of Silver Lake, Michigan. As she helps unload the U-Haul, Cat meets Marlena Joyner, two years her senior, who lives nearby in “a renovated barn coated in layers of lilac paint that were sticky to the touch.”

Cat and Marlena become best friends. Their friendship lasts only a year, until Marlena “suffocated in less than six inches of ice-splintered river.” But it’s a life-changing year for Cat, one in which Marlena introduces her to a world very different from her accustomed environment. She encourages Cat, an excellent student in her previous school, to cut classes, drink heavily and take recreational drugs. And Marlena’s father is hardly a stabilizing influence; he cooks meth in a railcar behind their house.

Today, Cat has a prominent job in New York, but the effects of her Silver Lake years remain. She still struggles with alcoholism, and when Marlena’s younger brother, Sal, who was 8 when his sister died, calls Cat to say that he’s in town, events from a past she never quite forgot come rushing back.

Despite an error in chronology—YouTube, which figures into the narrative, wasn’t around 20 years ago—Marlena is still an unforgettable portrait of teenage confusion and experimentation, a time when one discovers “that time doesn’t belong to you. All you have is what you remember.”

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

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.

Every lost item holds within it a story. Perhaps it was a treasured memento, or a useful item thoughtlessly left behind. Whatever the case, Anthony Peardew collects those items and the histories he imagines for them.

Anthony knows loss. His fiancée, Therese, gave him a communion medallion that depicted St. Therese of the Roses. It was a thank you for the rose garden he planted at what was to be their first home. “It’s for you, to say thank you for my beautiful garden and to remind you that I will love you forever, no matter what,” Therese said as she bestowed the gift. “Promise me you’ll keep it with you always.”

The day he lost it was the day she died.

Anthony began to collect lost items and write stories about their origins. His first story collection was a success, but as Anthony ages, his work becomes darker and his publisher displeased.

These lost objects are more than Anthony’s attempt at salvation after losing his love, and more than a publisher’s means to an end. When Anthony dies and leaves his collection to his assistant, Laura, she becomes the Keeper of Lost Things. Anthony leaves instructions: Laura should return the items to their rightful owners, in hopes that she’ll heal at least one heart. In the process, she befriends a neighbor and Anthony’s gardener. They become key to Laura’s own healing after a failed marriage.

As the trio works to reunite the items with their owners, they periodically encounter sadness—both their own and that which seems to accompany the objects themselves. That’s part of living, Laura’s young friend says. “If you never get sadness, how do you know what happiness is like?” In The Keeper of Lost Things, debut novelist Ruth Hogan ties together the lives of her characters and the objects they discover. It’s a quiet but beautifully intricate novel that will remind readers that we are each other’s points of connection. When life becomes confusing or sad, showing a bit of kindness and appreciation for each others’ stories can lead to redemption.

In her first novel, Emily Robbins thrusts the reader into the throes of a forbidden love triangle, set amidst political unrest in the Middle East. Bea is an American student studying abroad and working as a maid for a family in a country that is never named, but strongly resembles the current state of Syria. Obsessed with the Arabic language and the idea of love, Bea’s deepest desire is to have access to a book called “The Astonishing Text.” The story inside the text bears a striking resemblance to her own, as she falls for a policeman she is not supposed to talk to, and he, in turn, falls in love with the other maid that serves her host family named Nisrine, who is an Indonesian woman with a husband and child in her home country. Despite her ties to her family abroad and knowledge of Bea’s affection for the policeman, Nisrine returns his sentiments and Bea becomes the carrier of their love poems to each other.

As their romantic interest develops, so does the growing unrest in their country. The father of Bea’s host family participates in the revolutionary protests in the city, and turmoil surrounds him as the government seeks to expose him as a rebel.

A Word for Love is modest and lovely; it deals with complex issues like the flaws in language and the distance between what is said and what is meant through beautiful composition and simple words. Robbins does a wonderful job of writing about the uniqueness of Arabic in a relatable way: “In Arabic, the words for freedom is hurriya. I remember first learning this word as a beginning student, and memorizing it by its nearness to the English word ‘hurray.’ The joy it brought me.” As the novel moves to its dramatic and shocking climax, every word begins to feel heavy and important, as if the reader is also holding an “astonishing text.” Robbins drives home the lesson that, despite conflict, language is transcendent.

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

“This is a hell of a country, isn’t it? You choose your story. Then you go out and make it happen.” In Lydia Peelle’s debut novel, The Midnight Cool, main characters Billy and Charlie are doing exactly that, harnessing their charm, grit and self-reliance to forge a better life. This theme is not new, but in the gifted hands of Peelle it rises off the page in a fresh, daring fashion. 

The Midnight Cool opens in the summer of 1916, as war rages in Europe and political tensions are running high. Charlie and Billy are traveling horse traders who arrive in Richfield, Tennessee, a fictional town just north of Nashville. Both are smooth-talking grifters who specialize in the art of the underhanded deal. 

Upon arriving in town they set their sights on a gorgeous mare who belongs to the wealthy Leland Hatcher. Despite warnings from Catherine, Leland’s daughter, they purchase the mare only to discover her violent, deadly past. Indebted and unable to unload the temperamental animal, they turn to selling mules to the British army to recoup their lost funds. All the while, Charlie’s feelings for Catherine, a woman very much above his station, are intensifying, and the bonds between Charlie and Billy are beginning to fray.

Peelle is a writer to watch. She deftly recounts the surprisingly fascinating history of mules, who bore the brunt of American labor during this period and whose resiliency and strength made them key players in the war effort, while also giving us a rich, satisfying novel, full of memorable characters grappling with love, loyalty, identity and the struggle to build something that lasts in a rapidly changing world.

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