Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Ward's language is simply music, and the story of Jojo and Leonie and the ghosts that haunt them on their pursuit to reunite a family that never really was is dense and complex. Told in three generations of experience growing up in rural Mississippi, the tenderness the Jesmyn Ward uses to illuminate the full humanity of complicated characters in all her novels is entirely present in this one as well. The level of mysticism was a little tough for me, but ultimately, the hauntings help us come to know the living characters better, and ghosts don't seem unreal.

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Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Candice Carty-Williams has created a highly lovable, reasonably flawed heroine in Queenie. On the surface, the plot's deceptively simple (a young twenty-something navigates the messy terrain of a devastating break-up), but ultimately the novel is a fabulous illustration of how race and mental wellness twist around individual and systemic realities. Queenie's friendships with other women are essential to her survival, but they also serve to show readers the many forms privilege can take. I thoroughly enjoyed this one.

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High Tide at Noon by Elisabeth Ogilvie
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is my second trip through High Tide at Noon, and re-reads of the rest of the trilogy are soon to follow, I think. I've written elsewhere, and at length, about how I feel about Elisabeth Ogilvie (really stinkin' good!). To be clear, these are romance novels. They are relics of a an age when the anatomy of a romance novel was less concrete, when authors drafted by hand without the revision benefit of word processors. And, for the Bennett's Island books, part of the love affair is with the setting and a bygone way of life. The gender roles and light discussion of class and race don't hold up, but the idea that we long for fantasy worlds to call home that are similar-to-but-different-from our regular lives endures, and I'm grateful to E.O. for every word she gave us on Bennett's. I will come back to these books again and again, if only to hear Owen Bennett whine that his kid sister is "teaming" him around while she knits trap heads in the living room.

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