McDaniel (The Summer That Melted Everything, 2016) returns to the Ohio of her ancestral roots for this epic, lyrical coming-of-age tale. Inspired by the life of McDaniel's own mother, the story follows Betty Carpenter, one of the youngest of her parents' many children. Born to their Cherokee father and white mother, Betty is the only sibling with Indigenous lineage evident in her face. She endures unthinkable discrimination as early as kindergarten, where it becomes evident that finishing her education will be the fight of her life. She also witnesses great violence against her mother and sisters, leading Betty to question why womanhood is so endlessly bloody. To soothe a lifetime's worth of hardship experienced before adolescence, Betty picks up a pen. She writes to understand the unthinkable, even when she does not share her words with the world, even when she buries them deep into the ground. Even as a young child, Betty is wise and empathetic to the pain all around her: her town's, her family's, and her own. McDaniel's sophomore work is a sweeping and heart-wrenching exploration of how we understand our parents' lives and how our children will one day understand our own.Women in Focus: The 19th in 2020

McDaniel bases her raw if overwrought bildungsroman (after The Summer That Melted Everything) on the life of her mother. Born in 1954, narrator Betty is one of eight siblings whose cherished father, Landon Carpenter, a Cherokee, tells wondrous tales, and whose mother, Alka Lark, shares cruel truths ("God hates us," she says, referring to women). Betty recounts poverty, puberty, and the tragic loss of one sibling after the other. Betty looks like Landon and is abused at school by the prejudiced children and teachers of Breathed, Ohio. The episodic narrative revolves around Betty's struggles over whether to divulge a family secret involving incest and rape at the story's rotten core. Along the way, Landon, a finely rendered character, dispenses most of the wisdom ("Some people are as beautiful and soft as peonies, others as hard as a mountain"), but McDaniel gives Betty exceedingly precocious insights (at nine: "William Shakespeare wrote my father a Romeo heart and a Hamlet mind at the same time Henry David Thoreau composed him to have sympathy toward nature and a longing for paradise to be regained"). Still, she brilliantly describes Betty's self-image based on her father's stories of their ancestors. McDaniel is an ambitious and sincere writer, and occasionally her work transcends. (Aug.)

A Southern gothic coming-of-age story from the author of The Summer That Melted Everything (2016). The eponymous narrator of McDaniel's second novel is born in 1954, one of eight children. Her family is on the road as her father follows work throughout her early childhood, but the Carpenters eventually settle in the town of Breathed, Ohio. The house Betty's father, Landon, has chosen for his family is a dilapidated Victorian that's empty because its previous inhabitants disappeared. The children wonder if the house is cursed, but, as the story progresses, it seems increasingly likely that the hardship that haunts this family is hereditary and would have followed them anywhere. As a little girl, Betty's world is defined by the fanciful stories and traditional Cherokee tales Landon tells her. As she grows older, she must learn to endure terrible secrets and acts of cruelty that are at odds with the magical view of the universe her father tried to give her. This is not the first time McDaniel has taken readers to Breathed. Her debut invited the devil himself to this Appalachian town, and, while this new novel hews closer to realism, the voices recorded here are overblown to the point of fantasy. Betty and Landon are both presented as gifted storytellers, but virtually every character who speaks in this novel talks like a poet or a prophet. There are moments when the prose becomes kitschy: "These stories, like all the rest, had become down-home myths full of easily swallowed moons and deep-dug sorghum cane." And sometimes whatever it is McDaniel is trying to express is overwhelmed by strenuously artful language: "I would come to learn that between heaven and hell, Breathed was a piece of earth inside the throb, where lizards were crushed beneath wheels and the people spoke like thunder grinding on thunder." Nevertheless, Betty is a compelling protagonist, a character readers may be willing to follow through clichés, hothouse prose, and depictions of tremendous violence. Lyrically brutal. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

McDaniel returns to the Appalachian foothills of southeastern Ohio for her second novel (after The Summer That Melted Everything), presented as a fictionalized account of her mother Betty's family and told from Betty's point of view. The story is an ode to Betty's father, Landon Carpenter, a man of Cherokee descent, who is wise in Native American Indian lore, natural medicines, wood carving, and other unlucrative pursuits. Landon has a silver tongue and can translate their world of rural poverty into mythic language, a skill that is passed to Betty, the writer in the family. One of eight children, a few of whom die young, Betty is the only one to inherit her dad's black hair and dark complexion, for which she suffers discrimination at school and sometimes within her own family. McDaniel's writing is rife with striking images and surprising turns of phrase that are at first wondrous and childlike but display growing insight as Betty begins to comprehend the family's troubled past. VERDICT In McDaniel's telling, members of this hardscrabble family stride through their Ohio community like minor gods, leaving amazement in their wake. Highly recommended; a coming-of-age novel that is a treat for lovers of stylistic prose. [See Prepub Alert, 1/15/20.]--Reba Leiding, emerita, James Madison Univ. Lib., Harrisonburg, VA