SCAVENGERS

A mother and daughter rekindle their relationship as they search for buried treasure.

Bea Macon makes a living foreseeing disasters. Her job as a commodities analyst in New York demands that she predict and profit from floods, hurricanes, and droughts, all of whose seemingly imaginary consequences occur far from the desk she rarely leaves. When Bea prophesies a storm that never arrives, she’s visited instead by a slew of personal disasters: HR, the feds, termination, blacklisting. Alone and unemployed, Bea buys a one-way ticket to her last resort—her mother. Although Bea approved the house in Salt Lake City and pays its rent, it’s her first visit, and the first time the two have lived together since Bea was 13 years old. Bea and her mother, Christy, stiffly get in and out of each other’s way in the manner of those lacking true intimacy. Both women tread society’s surfaces, bereft of any substantive ties to anchor them, including with one another. Living in proximity seems only to reveal that they are strangers. Christy is a character, not a caretaker. When Bea was 13, Christy followed her husband to Canada in pursuit of divorce papers, only to end up living with him, his new girlfriend, and their son for the following years while Bea traversed middle and high school without her. Bea finds her mother’s resourcefulness embarrassing, her optimism foolish. Chief among Christy’s totems of naïve optimism is her map: She’s an avid member of an online forum called the Conversation, whose devotees plumb the wilderness in search of an alleged treasure hidden by a recluse dubbed the Poet. When the mother-daughter duo is evicted, Bea decides to tag along on Christy’s trip to a town called Mercy and accompany (and heckle) her mother on the next leg of her journey. Bea and Christy’s adventure is marked by shady characters, dizzying desert heat, and the kind of disasters Bea can neither predict nor prevent. This depiction of a mother-daughter relationship is agonizingly apt, proof that mothers can, at times, bring out the best in their children; they do bring out the worst. A slow-to-start book eventually results in rich, vivid characters. Gasps of gorgeous prose are weighed down by occasionally plodding plot points.

Like panning for gold; there are moments that gleam with brilliance.