MUSTARD GREEN

The humidity and peculiarity of the Louisiana bayous are palpable in McConnell’s dreamy fictional evocation of the life of an unusual 11-year-old boy.

Young Luc Theriot lives with his Cajun parents in the bayous outside of New Orleans in 1925. The family struggles with poverty, just scraping by due to his work selling creatures that he traps, such as crawfish and snails. He makes friends with the introspective Doc Marsh, who medically treats people and animals and also writes poetry. The story is as slow-paced as the setting in which the protagonist lives; the main plot doesn’t kick in until many pages in, when Luc finds an apparent frog that’s the size of a pig, which has “yellow-gold skin” and an extraordinarily long tongue. He names this curiosity Mustard Green, and it becomes his pet; the two soon form a tight, seemingly magical bond of friendship. Mustard Green becomes the toast of the community and leads Luc to friendships with a reformed bully and a sweet young girl who uses a leg brace. Mustard Green doesn’t mind the attention that follows and is happy to perform for curious crowds, which alleviates Luc’s family’s financial hardship. Peril arrives with men who want to steal the creature for profit and a professor who wishes to study it. This ambitious book creates atmosphere with confidence, often through dreams and poems, rather than a conventional narrative; however, the unhurried plot and oblique prose sometimes cause the story to meander and lose direction. Much of the novel explores Luc’s interior world; he’s a youngster with an old soul who navigates life with imagination and emotion: “Luc holds an almost religious belief that Human Creatures have an overriding flaw—their determination to Control Nature rather than living within it.” This outlook allows him to form a symbiotic friendship with Mustard Green, and he soon receives visions and revelations through dreams; these send him on a mission to a local pond, which provides the story’s greatest revelation.

An ambitious, if dense, tale of a profound friendship between a boy and an enigmatic creature.