Review_FICTION
42 PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ■ OCTOBER 14, 2019
Reviews
Colleen Oakley’s satisfying novel You Were
There Too blends an old-fashioned love story
with a fresh psychic mystery (reviewed on this
page).★ Follow Me to Ground
Sue Rainsford. Scribner, $25 (208p) ISBN 978-
1-9821-3363-4
Brimming with dark folklore and
underworld energy, Rainsford’s stellar
debut features a memorable heroine chafing
against her monstrous isolation. Ada and
her father are vegetal creatures born of the
Ground, a special patch of hungry earth
that “gorge[s] on bodies” and shapes “them
to its own liking.” They are strange, slowly
aging beings who live apart from the
human population, or “Cures,” but are
tolerated for their extraordinary healing
capacity. Ada and her father can open up
bodies and sing away sickness; the most
serious cases are put into the Ground to
heal, though the results are unpredictable.
Rainsford excels in describing the gro-
tesque beauty of this alternative medicine
in which the humming healers feel their
“way to the pitch of [the patient’s] hurt.”
The novel alternates between short sections
in which various Cures describe their
impressions of Ada, the lonely young
creature with an “unseeded” heart, and
Ada’s own narration of her rapturous
affair with a young man named Samson.
Ada tries to hide the romance from her
disapproving father, who sees Samson’s
longing for Ada, as well as his intense
relationship with his pregnant sister,
Olivia, as indicative of a diseased nature—
too poisonous even for the Ground to
cleanse. This is a subtle, unsettling novel
in which desire is an ineradicable sickness
that can be preferable to health. Agent:
Amelia Atlas, ICM Partners. (Jan.)Big Lies in a Small Town
Diane Chamberlain. St. Martin’s, $27.99
(400p) ISBN 978-1-250-08733-1
This rich novel from Chamberlain
(The Silent Sister) tracks artists whose lives
intertwine after a mural is commissioned
for a small town. In 1939, 22-year-old
New Jersey artist Anna Dale is in Edenton,
N.C., having won a federal art contest and
being chosen to paint a mural for Edenton’spost office. The completed piece, however,
is mysteriously never installed. In 2018,
another 22-year-old artist, Morgan
Christopher, is connected to the mural.
Morgan has served a year in a North
Carolina prison for a felony DUI, but she’s
released by a powerful private lawyer in
order to restore Anna’s damaged mural,
which has been in storage. An artist and
philanthropist, Jesse Jameson Williams,
has died, and in his will, his adult daughter,
Lisa, is instructed to ensure that Morgan
restore the painting. Morgan doesn’t
understand how Williams knew of her,
though she had admired his work for years.
Single father Oliver Jones, another recip-
ient of Williams’s generosity and curator
of Williams’s gallery, uses his training in
restoration to help Morgan. She’s grateful
for his help, and an attraction develops
between them. Anna and Morgan’s passion
for their craft serves as an enticing connec-
tion as they work on the same project
decades apart. Chamberlain’s depictions
of creative beauty and perseverance across
time and in the face of inevitable obstacles
will keep readers turning the pages. Agent:
Susan Ginsberg, Writers House. (Jan.)★ You Were There Too
Colleen Oakley. Berkley, $16 trade paper
(352p) ISBN 978-1-984806-46-8
Oakley (Close Enough to Touch) blends an
old-fashioned love story with a fresh
psychic mystery for a satisfying look at
commitment, forgiveness, and fate in this
can’t-put-it-down story of a young couplewhose dreams and regrets challenge their
marriage and plans for a family. Artist Mia
and her doctor husband, Harrison, have just
moved to a small town near Philadelphia
when Mia miscarries for the third time. The
crisis worsens: Mia’s recurring dream of a
stranger gets starkly realistic when she
meets Oliver, the flesh-and-blood “man
from my dreams,” who confesses “I dream
about you too.” Meanwhile, Harrison sinks
into depression over the death of a young
patient, and rejects the idea of any more
attempts at starting a family as Mia and
Oliver embark on their own search together
for why they’ve shared versions of the same
dream. Their journey, however, becomes
increasingly fraught as Harrison retreats
further into his grief, and they turn to each
other. “I know you’re married. And it’s
messy... I believe that this all means some-
thing,” Oliver says of their disturbingly
prophetic dreams. A visit to a psychic
notches up Mia’s anxiety about both her
marriage and Oliver. There is a splendid
blend of humor throughout Oakley’s
alternately romantic, idiosyncratic, and
foreboding love-conquers-all tale that
easily engages new readers and will please
the author’s fans. (Jan.)Long Bright River
Liz Moore. Riverhead, $26 (496p) ISBN 978-0-
525-54067-0
Moore (The Unseen World) weaves a
police procedural and a family drama into
a captivating novel. Mickey Fitzpatrick, a
single mother, is an officer for the
Philadelphia PD, tasked with patrolling
Kensington, a neighborhood devastated
by opioid addiction. Drugs have impacted
Mickey’s life as well: her mother died of
an overdose, her father, also an addict, is
thought dead after disappearing, and her
estranged younger sister, Kasey, is a known
user and prostitute. While on her beat,
Mickey tries to keep tabs on Kasey by
speaking to locals and shop owners, but
when Kasey vanishes amid a flurry of
unsolved murders of women in the
neighborhood, Mickey dedicates herself
to finding Kasey and the killer, all the while
praying her sister isn’t the next victim.
Moore breaks her novel into sections
labeled “Then” and “Now,” filling each
with short, direct chapters that explore
Mickey and Kasey’s history while also
propelling the narrative’s murder mystery.Fiction
©^
sarah
dorio