IF THE DEAD BELONG HERE

Multigenerational novel about the gifted women of a Native American family near the shores of a blackwater river in South Carolina.

One night in March 1996, 14-year-old Nadine discovers that her 6-year-old sister, Laurel, is missing from the Wisconsin home they share with their mother, Ayita, and great-aunt Rosebud. The search for Laurel stirs up trouble from the past, including her often violent father, who left before Ayita knew about her second pregnancy and who is initially accused of kidnapping Laurel. It also begins Nadine’s discovery of the powerful inheritance she had dismissed as superstition: the traditional healing ways and visionary gifts of her people that go back centuries. Nadine’s disconnection from her legacy began long before her birth, when her grandmother obeyed her own father’s command to “stay godly” and avoid “the medicine, the witchery.” The novel is intricately structured, following two timelines through its first half, one beginning with the loss of Laurel and the other beginning in 1899, with an encounter between Nadine’s great-great-grandmother Sophronia and the ucv’kse, or Little People, who have the “real medicine” and exist in the “in-between,” between life and death. The two timelines converge when Nadine goes with Rosebud back to South Carolina to connect with her other great-aunt and great-grandmother and learn the healing arts they hope will restore Laurel to them. The resolution of this turbulent, slowly paced, and lyrical debut novel is unsettling, suggesting that though restoration is possible, it may not be in this world.

A harrowing and lyrical debut about the costs of healing multigenerational trauma.