SHINER

In an Appalachian hamlet, a girl’s world is shattered by the secrets of the adults around her.

Burns’ first book, Cinderland (2014), was a memoir about her childhood in western Pennsylvania. She sets this assured debut novel nearby, in the remote hollers outside the ominously named Trap. It’s a minuscule, poverty-ridden West Virginia town where the dying coal industry still poisons the environment and the moonshiners of the title still make illegal liquor for tradition’s sake. At age 15, Wren Bird, who narrates much of the book, has never been more than a few miles from her family’s cabin. Her father, Briar, is a snake handler, a preacher whose services, held in an abandoned gas station for a shrinking congregation, revolve around him grasping his venomous rattlers and copperheads and raising them skyward while speaking in tongues. Wren tells the reader, “My father obeyed the rituals of snake-handling law, which meant he pretended we still lived in the 1940s instead of the age of the internet.” Called to God when a lightning strike blinded him in one eye as a teen, Briar fell in love with Wren’s mother, Ruby, not long afterward. He’s ruthlessly protective of his wife and daughter, forbidding most outside contact and only grudgingly letting Ruby home-school Wren. Ruby’s closest relationship is not with Briar but with her longtime friend Ivy, who lives down the mountain with her four kids and opioid-addicted husband. As girls, Ruby and Ivy dreamed of escape, but Ruby—also a snake handler’s daughter—married at her father’s command, and restless Ivy married so she wouldn’t have to leave Ruby. As the novel opens, Ivy falls into an open fire, but it seems Briar has worked a miracle when she suffers no grievous injury. That fall, though, sets off a cascade of revelations and rebellions. And Briar’s lethal snakes are this book’s version of Chekhov’s gun—you know they’re going to bite someone. Wren’s engaging, convincing voice leads the reader through her strange world.

A teenage girl is the strong center of a fever-dream story of hidden pasts.