Pond
By Claire-Louise Bennett, Riverhead, 208 pages, $35
"I only wish you could just spend five minutes beneath my skin and feel what it's like. Feel the savage swarming magic I feel." A woman abandons her doctoral thesis and the city for a reclusive existence by a rural pond – those are the broad strokes of Claire-Louise Bennett's debut novel, but what this book is really about is that "savage swarming magic." "Fecund" is the word that kept popping to mind – fecund the way a pond is fecund, teeming with life, a riotous cycle of growth and decay. A pond is a little bit mad. So's this narrator. She's come undone – there are hints of a breakup, pre-existing skittishness, reliance on drink – and she continues to unravel in the Irish coastal countryside, though here it seems an almost productive undoing. Then there's that appeal: "feel what I feel." Pond's narrative style allows no distance between reader and protagonist-narrator: We know this madness intimately. A wild, rewardingly ecstatic ride.
The Good Sister
By Chelsea Bolan, Harper Avenue, 352 pages, $22.99
"Papa wanted no sign of Gabriela. She wasn't his daughter, he said, never was. He wanted her presence erased, down to her name, which was not to spill through anyone's lips ever again." At their father's edict, Gabi's family has cast her away from their home in Baja California Sur, Mexico, when Gabi is just shy of her quinceanera. The family burns everything that belonged to her and cuts her face from the photos they don't burn. In the opening chapters we see the situation from all sides – Gabi's older sister Lucy, their papa, their mama, their brother-in-law, the guy who works at the family bar – everyone but Gabi. The narrative is like the family photos; at its centre, a mystery: What did Gabi do? And where is she? Winner of the HarperCollins/UBC Prize for fiction, The Good Sister is a gripping, thoroughly researched novel about sexual double standards, Mexico City's sex trade and Lucy's quest to find her sister.
Grace
By Natashia Deón, Counterpoint, 400 pages, $38.50
I approach a new novel about American slavery, I admit, with foreboding. We need to ask the question: what kinds of moral exchange are these representations of violence meant to signify for us as readers? Nevertheless, two slavery novels published this summer are worth your attention. Last month I reviewed Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing; this month it's Natasha Deón's Grace, which concerns Naomi, a runaway slave who lands as a housemaid at a brothel, and Naomi's daughter, Josey. Compared to Homegoing, Grace is the more conventional American slavery story, set in rural Georgia and Alabama in the lead up to and aftermath of the Civil War. Initially what sets Grace apart is aesthetic: Naomi tells her own story, and witnesses Josey's, as a ghost. What stuck with me about this novel, though, is its questioning of what redemption and justice would mean in this context. Naomi finds resolution, but this remains an unsettled and unsettling, literally haunted, debut.