Winner of the PEN New England Book Award for Fiction, MacArthur's Half Wild offered polished stories about women from the backwoods who want up and out. Her debut novel draws on the same milieu, featuring New Orleans-based Vale, who heads home to Vermont in August 2011 after Tropical Storm Irene devastates the state. Her long-estranged mother has been reported missing, and trying to find her leads Vale to a secret about her family's origins as she wends her way through three generations of hang-tough women. Half Wild is a personal favorite; with a 30,000-copy first printing.

DEBUT First novelist MacArthur (Half Wild) spins a tale of family and history in this multigenerational novel set in rural Vermont. During the aftermath of Hurricane Irene, Bonnie, a drug addict, decides to view the scene from a bridge over the raging river. Her daughter Vale lives in New Orleans, tending bar and stripping for a living, but drops everything to return home when she hears her mother is missing. As Vale reconnects with her family and digs into the past, the story line presents several points of view: of her great-aunt Hazel, still living on the mountain; her aunt Deb, who once was part of a commune; and her eccentric maternal grandmother Lena, who inhabited a cabin with a one-eyed owl. Through Vale's search and the group's memories, the tangled story of the past, both hidden and known, comes into focus. VERDICT Although the point-of-view jumps can be confusing and the narrative takes its time gaining momentum, the characters are richly drawn and authentic, so this book should be warmly welcomed by readers of contemporary literary fiction that plumbs the depths of rural American experience, especially that of women. [See Prepub Alert, 7/17/17.]—Nancy H. Fontaine, Norwich P.L., VT

Three generations of women seek comfort and closure in storm-wracked Vermont in this tender debut novel by MacArthur (after the story collection Half Wild). When heroin addict and mother Bonnie goes missing during 2011's Tropical Storm Irene, her daughter, Vale, leaves a bartending job in New Orleans to return to the small town of her birth and find her. Still living on the family's mountain are Bonnie's nonagenarian aunt and once-guardian, Hazel, and widowed cousin-in-law, Deb. Although Vale's return is welcome, it churns up their own resentments about living such an isolated existence. The novel is told from each of their perspectives: Vale digs for family lore before it is lost to the passage of time and death, Deb confronts tragedies of the past and present, and Hazel spirals through long-hidden memories. Secondary characters are just as strong as the narrators: Bonnie's mother, who treasured her cabin in the woods; Deb's husband, whose silence made him complicit in tragedy; and Bonnie, who relishes the hurricane's wrath from a perch on a bridge. The resulting narrative is nuanced, poetic, and evocative; MacArthur empathetically depicts each of her characters in their wounded but hopeful glory. (Jan.)