THE SHINGLE WEAVER'S PICNIC

In this debut novel, trauma rocks a small town in Washington State during the summer of 1942, baring the secrets that lie just below the place’s bucolic surface and ending the childhood innocence of a group of young friends.

Anne Elizabeth Jordan, known as Cricket, was born in 1935, the adored daughter of Makyla “Makie” Lara Bane Jordan and Maxwell Calder Jordan. Readers meet Cricket just after her aging mother has died. Cricket is cleaning out Makie’s cottage. Her younger brother arrives to help, and he asks Cricket to tell him what happened during that fateful summer in Everett, Washington, just before his birth. It is a story that the family has never been willing to discuss. So begins Smith’s novel, a troubling tale of good and evil in a bygone time. Cricket’s father is an airman stationed in Hawaii. Convinced that America will be pulled into World War II, he arranges for his wife and young daughter to move back to the mainland to live with his father on the family’s cattle ranch in California’s San Joaquin Valley. Max visits them once, and then he is killed in the Pearl Harbor attack, a calamity only slightly softened by Makie’s announcement that she is pregnant. Soon, 7-year-old Cricket is sent to tranquil Everett alone for her annual summer visit with her maternal grandparents. The author devotes separate chapters to each of the central characters—Cricket and her coterie of summer friends, her grandparents, and an older woman she meets on a train. Most of these chapters conclude with a dire prediction of the unknown evil to come. It is a technique that successfully builds tension. But the ultimate event, while tragic, falls short of the implied cataclysm. The author’s cringeworthy, graphically violent scenes of domestic abuse and rape come as a surprise, juxtaposed as they are against her sugary descriptions of the joys of childhood. Still, the scenes position the novel to skillfully confront the issue of society’s willful disregard for what happens behind closed doors.

Despite its Hallmark Channel–style portrait of America, an engaging tale with a final twist.