CLOVIS

In Dike’s novel, a woman pieces together her fractured family history after suffering an accident.

In Clovis, New Mexico, Calliope “Callie” Potts grows up in the flat, red dirt beside her older brother, Jude—her teacher, protector, and mirror (“In every cracked cow patty memory from my childhood, Jude looks like he doesn’t fit there”). They are in the charge of a mother with a cigarette in one hand and a glass in the other, and a father who comes and goes with the wind; the siblings’ childhood is shaped by their efforts to survive chaos. Decades later, Callie wakes up in a hospital after a car accident she can’t explain. “I am here,” she tells herself, reading her name from the hospital monitor like proof of her existence. As she tries to piece together what happened, fragments of her past surface: the sting of her mother’s voice (“Stop. Yer. Crying…What’s crying gonna do?”), the heat of the desert, the sound of Jude’s laughter, the quiet ways they both learned to live with pain. Dike writes memory as terrain—harsh, luminous, and full of ghosts. Her sentences carry the rhythm of dust storms and dustier hymns. “Scars make good stories,” Callie recalls her father saying, and every page proves him right. The scars here are small and enormous, including a cut on a child’s foot, a lost brother, and a mother’s unreachable love. Midway through, Dike’s narrative deepens from one of survival to reckoning (“Be brave and do the hard things I didn’t,” a voice reminds Callie). Love and grief intertwine until they’re indistinguishable; this isn’t a tale of redemption so much as endurance, the chronicle of a woman crawling back through time to reclaim the pieces of herself she left in the desert. What emerges is a raw, radiant portrait of sibling devotion and the long, uneven work of forgiveness.

A vivid, unflinching, and tender exploration of family trauma.