WWW.PUBLISHERSWEEKLY.COM 47Review_FICTION
Lost Boy Found
Kirsten Alexander. Grand Central, $16.99
trade paper (368p) ISBN 978-1-5387-0056-3
In Alexander’s uneven debut, a wealthy
Louisiana family loses its youngest child
and resorts to extreme measures in an
attempt to heal. While visiting their family’s
Louisiana lake house in 1913, seven-year-
old George Davenport and six-year-old
Paul return from a walk in the woods
without their four-year-old brother, Sonny.
Their father, John Henry, spends the next
two years chasing dead ends in search of
answers about Sonny, while his wife, Mary,
grieves and the older boys remain quiet
about how they’d told Sonny to run away.
In 1915, pregnant Grace Mill works as a
maid in Magnolia, Miss. As she prepares
for her new baby, she asks Gideon Wolf,
who does odd jobs, to take her four-year-
old mute son, Ned, for a few weeks. Gideon
agrees, but doesn’t return when he was
supposed to, and Grace later learns of his
arrest in Louisiana for kidnapping Ned,
whom the Davenports have identified as
Sonny. They know that he is not their son,
but they pull strings to claim him anyway.
In Alexander’s didactic, black-and-white
narrative of class injustice, Grace can’t
possibly win when the rich decide they
want something. While Alexander pulls
off a truly horrific ending, what starts out
as a strong narrative devolves into a flat
melodrama with cartoony caricatures of
the spoiled and wealthy Davenports. The
narrative’s lack of moral complexity is a
real turn-off. Agent: Natasha Solumun,
Jacinta Di Mase Management. (Mar.)
142 Ostriches
April Davila. Kensington, $15.95 trade paper
(258p) ISBN 978-1-4967-2470-0
In Davila’s vivid, uplifting debut, a
free-spirited woman navigates her obli-
gations to a dysfunctional family. Tallulah
Jones, 24, works at her grandmother
Helen’s ostrich ranch in the California
desert while planning to follow her
dream of joining the Forest Service in
Montana. After Helen’s suspicious death
in a car accident, estranged family members
gather at her funeral, including meth-
addicted Uncle Steve, who is furious
that Helen left the ranch to Tallulah.
With a buyer for the ranch, Tallulah
looks forward to Montana, until Laura,
the nomadic and alcoholic mother she
hasn’t seen since she was 13, shows up
wanting a share of Helen’s estate and
threatens to contest the will. Tallulah
finds comfort in caring for the ostriches,
but then they mysteriously stop laying
eggs. As Tallulah gets help with the
animals from a sympathetic local while
fighting the volatile Steve and riding out
Laura’s demands, she reconsiders her
future. Davila’s breezy, elegant prose
captures the desert’s growing appeal to
Tallulah (“Finally, the sun cleared the
horizon and blasted everything with its
full light”; “There wouldn’t be mornings
like this in Montana”). The fascinating
details of operating an ostrich ranch elevate
this family tale. Agent: Joel Gotler and
Murray Weiss, Intellectual Property Group.
(Mar.)The Girl on the Moon
Julie Mannix von Zerneck. Blue Blazer
Productions, $16.95 trade paper (204p)
ISBN 978-0-9857358-5-2
Drawing on themes of adoption and
reunion from her memoir, Secret Storms,
von Zerneck spins an implausible but
affecting fairy tale. In a church in 15th-
century Paris, the young painter Lucienne
Badeaux lights a candle for her late father
and is killed by a pack of wolves, a scene
referencing a bizarre incident in Parisian
history. She is
reincarnated as
Josie, born in
1946 to
Philadelphia
socialite Jewell
Russell, and
begins a career
in journalism.
She gets preg-
nant by her
married editor,
Aaron Goldman, and agrees to give up the
baby for adoption with Jewell’s help. Two
years later, Josie marries Aaron and has
two more children, but the identity of her
first daughter, Kate, is kept secret from
her by Jewell. Von Zerneck weaves the
separate stories of Josie and Kate, showing
how Josie channels her anguish and guilt
over her lost daughter into a series of
successful children’s books about Luna, a
girl from the moon, while Kate becomes
powerfully drawn to Badeaux’s painting
of a Parisian church. Though the plotraces by with minimal emotional interludes
and the coincidences are too convenient,
von Zerneck succeeds at making Josie a
woman to root for. Readers who enjoy
stories that celebrate familial bonds will
appreciate this. (Self-published)Mystery/Thriller
Murder at the Mena House
Erica Ruth Neubauer. Kensington, $26 (304p)
ISBN 978-1-4967-2585-1
In 1926, American widow Jane
Wunderly, the narrator of Neubauer’s
promising debut, decides to vacation in
Egypt with her matchmaking aunt, who’s
determined to find her a beau. Jane, who
appears to be in her 20s, doesn’t welcome
those efforts, as she’s still struggling with
the emotional fallout of her marriage to a
man who viewed her as a “trophy... to win”
and then break. That trauma has led Jane to
vow to stand up for herself going forward,
and that resolve is soon tested at the Cairo
hotel where she and her aunt are staying,
Mena House. Fellow guest Anna Stainton,
a British colonel’s daughter, takes a dislike
to Jane. Their public spat makes Jane the
focus of the police inquiry after someone
shoots Anna to death in her room. To clear
her name, Jane sets about investigating on
her own, even as she wrestles with feelings
of attraction toward a handsome and mys-
terious stranger, who calls himself Redvers,
whom she believes looks “too dangerous”
to be the banker he claims to be. Mystery
readers who enjoy a heavy dose of romance
will be eager for the next installment.
Agent: Ann Collette, Rees Literary. (Apr.)★ Mrs. Mohr Goes Missing
Maryla Szymiczkowa, trans. from the Polish by
Antonia Lloyd-Jones. Mariner, $15.99 trade
paper (368p) ISBN 978-0-358-16146-2
Set in 1893 Cracow, this exceptional
debut and series launch from Polish author
Szymiczkowa (the pen name of writing duo
Jacek Dehnel and Piotr Tarczynski) intro-
duces Zofia Turbotynska, a 38-year-old
professor’s wife, who finds household
management, novel reading, and the search
for social prestige insufficient outlets for
her prodigious energy. At a nursing home
run by nuns that she visits to promote a
charitable cause, she becomes involved in
the search for a missing resident, Antonina