E-book Evaluation
Salt Bones
By Jennifer GivhanMulholland Books: 384 pages, $29If you purchase books linked on our website, The Occasions could earn a fee from Bookshop.org, whose charges assist impartial bookstores.
An early line from “Salt Bones,” the newest novel from gifted poet and novelist Jennifer Givhan, reads, “Daughters disappear here.”
It’s a line that haunts the Salton Sea area, the place Givhan has set her newest novel and infuses the poisonous air upon which her characters should survive. In different phrases, this warning to maintain your daughters shut clings to all the pieces. It’s within the air, but in addition — on this thriller that employs components of magical realism and thriller — it’s within the water, buffeting every of those characters with the cadence of windblown waves crashing in opposition to the shore.
The Salton Sea is simply as a lot a personality right here as Givhan’s fundamental protagonists: Mal, a mom of two daughters, and the 2 daughters themselves — Amaranta, in highschool, and Griselda, a science main in faculty. By way of them, we get a way of this place, what it was, what it’s and what it’s changing into. A sea that evaporates and pulls again 12 months after 12 months, exposing a lake mattress contaminated with agricultural runoff and revealing not simply the bones of fish but in addition a painful historical past that many would quite stays beneath the water’s floor.
“Salt Bones” by Jennifer Givhan
(Mulholland Books)
El Valle, the fictional city that serves as the first setting for “Salt Bones,” is haunted by what surrounds it. By the reminiscences of the lacking. Daughters like Mal’s personal sister, Elena, who disappeared greater than 20 years earlier than.
Now with two daughters of her personal, Mal is a butcher on the native carnicería. However when one of many staff on the store, Renata, a younger girl the identical age as Mal’s eldest daughter, doesn’t present up for work at some point, Mal begins to spiral into the previous, questioning what she might have completed otherwise, after which what she might do now. And, most of all, why does all of this appear to maintain taking place right here in El Valle?
For Mal and her household, there is no such thing as a escape. They’re adopted not simply by reminiscences, but in addition by Mal’s mom’s spite-fueled dementia, which returns all of them time and again to the fissures in time simply earlier than and simply after the disappearance of Mal’s sister. And now, with Renata gone lacking, there may be nowhere to cover from the tragedy of this place, not at work, not at house and never even on the edges of the Salton Sea the place Mal can generally discover a tenuous peace.
However it’s not simply Mal who roams these shores, however La Siguanaba, a shape-shifter typically related to Central American and Mexican folklore, sporting “whatever a man lusts after most. Sequins. Spandex. Fishnet. Nothing at all.” After which after attractive these males to method, this being — typically described as a lady — turns and divulges the “white-boned skull of a horse” beneath her lengthy darkish hair.
“By the time they scream,” Givhan writes, “it’s too late.”
La Siguanaba is a cautionary story and a fantasy to some in El Valle. She is a ghost story to maintain the youngsters protected and away from hazard, however to Mal, she could be very actual. La Siguanaba involves her in desires; in her waking hours, she lurks simply past the sunshine. Her odor — one thing like urine and unmucked stables — floats on the wind, appearing like a warning, a reminiscence, a message.
However all this — the monster within the shadows, the lacking daughters and even a rising rigidity in El Valle over a lithium plant and a looming ecological catastrophe — is just a part of the story. Mal can solely know a lot, and it’s via the main points revealed by Mal’s daughters, Amaranta and Griselda, that we start to grasp the depth of this story.
Like all good mysteries, there’s a entire world simply out of attain: secret lives, secrets and techniques saved, secrets and techniques used like foreign money. For us — the readers — the clues are there. Givhan does an exquisite job infusing the early pages with hints and observations from every of the three views, Mal, Amaranta and Griselda, all of whom are hiding issues from one another.
To the reader, who advantages from the mixed information of those characters, every perspective provides a distinct lens. Mal, along with her mom’s instinct and nearly otherworldly connection to La Siguanaba, Amaranta, who’s the youngest and nonetheless very a lot a toddler and who sees what others don’t count on her to, after which Griselda, house from faculty, who seems to be on all of this with a recent, nearly exterior perspective. All of them come to the identical conclusion very early on: One thing could be very off on this small neighborhood.
“Salt Bones” is a worthy learn. It’s a e book infused with the language and tradition of a robust Mexican American and Indigenous neighborhood. In a roundabout way, like La Siguanaba, it’s a conduit into one other world. An advanced, actual and really a lot welcome, if a bit scary, world.
And although the layering of data — of what we all know, what stays hidden from us and what has been foreshadowed — does add up (delaying what turns into a propulsive seek for the lacking within the second half of the novel), Givhan’s abilities as a author of blunt, robust sentences and memorable poetic passages relating to the panorama and the ocean greater than make up for any delay.
“Salt Bones” is a triumph. Probably the most masterful marriages of horror, thriller, thriller and literary writing that I’ve learn in a while. And it’s actually a e book that may hang-out you (in a great way!) for a really very long time after you’ve turned the ultimate web page.
Waite is the writer of 4 novels and a e book critic for the San Francisco Chronicle.
