LIES IN BONE

A teenage girl moves to her dad’s Pennsylvania hometown and confronts tragedies old and new in Symons’ debut novel.

Frances “Frank” Coolidge is almost 16 and still scarred by the fact that her mother left the family years earlier. Her single dad, Chuck, tells her and her little sister, Boots, that they’re all moving from Troy, New York, to live with their grandmother in the old steel town of Slippery Elm, Pennsylvania. Grandma Ruth has cancer and Chuck is afraid she might fall and hurt herself if left on her own. Frank also has an unshakeable sense of dread: “I sensed doom like a dog senses an impending earthquake.” Ruth is a cantankerous woman, Frank is bullied by kids at her new school, and Chuck staggers home drunk every night. But there’s something more serious hanging over everyone’s heads: It turns out that over 20 years before, Chuck’s brother, Danny, was killed when a poisonous cloud of smog hung over the town for four days, suffocating town residents, and there are rumors that Chuck was somehow involved with his sibling’s death. Sadly, other Slippery Elm locals come from troubled homes, and a little girl named Bernie starts regularly visiting the Coolidges. As Frank continues to worry, more secrets from the town’s past are revealed. Over the course of this novel, Symons shows that she’s unafraid to confront some of the gritty realities of old industrial towns in America. Her story starkly highlights Slippery Elm’s frightening characters, its rampant economic despair, and its tragic history, and it contrasts these sharply with the sweet kids at the heart of the narrative. Although it reads like a literary novel, the compelling plot features elements of a detective story, and the investigation is exciting to read. It’s skillfully written throughout, and the novel’s overall sense of sadness isn’t mitigated by its numerous strengths.

A moody, hard-edged coming-of-age story that keeps the horrors coming until the very end.