JOHN RILEY’S DAUGHTER

It’s 1973, and Memphis Riley, who’s just turned 13, has had an explosive fight with her aunt Clover, a 29-year-old woman whom a childhood bout with meningitis left “broken inside her head.” After smashing her guitar, a precious memento that once belonged to Memphis’s dead mother, Clover stomps off down the road. Memphis doesn’t give Aunt Clover’s departure a second thought until that night when her aunt doesn’t reappear. Memphis’s grandmother Naomi, whom Memphis has lived with since her father, John Riley, “dumped” her there “and never looked back” the day after her eighth birthday, is deeply distressed. As the hours, then days, mount, Naomi begins to think that her granddaughter, whom it’s clear she never cared for, might have actually hurt the childlike Clover. Memphis only has two allies in the tiny town of Blue Parrot, her grandmother’s childhood chum whom she calls Aunt Birdie and her friend Samson, and she’s becoming increasingly scared. The surefooted first-person narrative keeps the pressure steadily building, and the reader becomes ever more fearful not only about Clover’s fate, but how it will affect Memphis’s tenuous position in her household and the community at large. Memphis comes to learn the sad lesson that “being born into a family doesn’t necessarily mean that they’ll . . . love you,” and discovers that home “isn’t brick or board” but instead “a feeling of belonging.” Matthews’s strength is that she creates no villains, but sees all her characters, even the most deeply flawed, with a compassionate eye. (Fiction. 12-14)