Mulholland Books: 384 pages, $29
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An early line from \u201cSalt Bones,\u201d the latest novel from talented poet and novelist Jennifer Givhan, reads, \u201cDaughters disappear here.\u201d <\/p>\n
It is a line that haunts the Salton Sea region, where Givhan has set her latest novel and infuses the toxic air upon which her characters must survive. In other words, this warning to keep your daughters close clings to everything. It is in the air, but also \u2014 in this thriller that employs elements of magical realism and mystery \u2014 it is in the water, buffeting each of these characters with the cadence of windblown waves crashing against the shore.<\/p>\n
The Salton Sea is just as much a character here as Givhan\u2019s main protagonists: Mal, a mother of two daughters, and the two daughters themselves \u2014 Amaranta, in high school, and Griselda, a science major in college. Through them, we get a sense of this place, what it was, what it is and what it is becoming. A sea that evaporates and pulls back year after year, exposing a lake bed contaminated with agricultural runoff and revealing not just the bones of fish but also a painful history that many would rather remains beneath the water\u2019s surface.<\/p>\n
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\u201cSalt Bones\u201d by Jennifer Givhan<\/p>\n
(Mulholland Books)<\/p>\n
El Valle, the fictional town that serves as the primary setting for \u201cSalt Bones,\u201d is haunted by what surrounds it. By the memories of the missing. Daughters like Mal\u2019s own sister, Elena, who disappeared more than 20 years before.<\/p>\n
Now with two daughters of her own, Mal is a butcher at the local carnicer\u00eda. But when one of the workers at the shop, Renata, a young woman the same age as Mal\u2019s eldest daughter, doesn\u2019t show up for work one day, Mal begins to spiral into the past, questioning what she could have done differently, and then what she could do now. And, most of all, why does all of this seem to keep happening here in El Valle?<\/p>\n
For Mal and her family, there is no escape. They are followed not just by memories, but also by Mal\u2019s mother\u2019s spite-fueled dementia, which returns all of them again and again to the fissures in time just before and just after the disappearance of Mal\u2019s sister. And now, with Renata gone missing, there is nowhere to hide from the tragedy of this place, not at work, not at home and not even at the edges of the Salton Sea where Mal can sometimes find a tenuous peace.<\/p>\n
But it is not just Mal who roams these shores, but La Siguanaba, a shape-shifter often associated with Central American and Mexican folklore, wearing \u201cwhatever a man lusts after most. Sequins. Spandex. Fishnet. Nothing at all.\u201d And then after enticing these men to approach, this being \u2014 often described as a woman \u2014 turns and reveals the \u201cwhite-boned skull of a horse\u201d beneath her long dark hair. <\/p>\n
\u201cBy the time they scream,\u201d Givhan writes, \u201cit\u2019s too late.\u201d<\/p>\n
La Siguanaba is a cautionary tale and a myth to some in El Valle. She is a ghost story to keep the kids safe and away from danger, but to Mal, she is very real. La Siguanaba comes to her in dreams; in her waking hours, she lurks just beyond the light. Her smell \u2014 something like urine and unmucked stables \u2014 floats on the wind, acting like a warning, a memory, a message.<\/p>\n
But all this \u2014 the monster in the shadows, the missing daughters and even a rising tension in El Valle over a lithium plant and a looming ecological disaster \u2014 is only part of the story. Mal can only know so much, and it is through the details revealed by Mal\u2019s daughters, Amaranta and Griselda, that we begin to comprehend the depth of this story.<\/p>\n
Like all good mysteries, there is a whole world just out of reach: secret lives, secrets kept, secrets used like currency. For us \u2014 the readers \u2014 the clues are there. Givhan does a wonderful job infusing the early pages with hints and observations from each of the three perspectives, Mal, Amaranta and Griselda, all of whom are hiding things from each other.<\/p>\n
To the reader, who benefits from the combined knowledge of these characters, each perspective adds a different lens. Mal, with her mother\u2019s intuition and almost otherworldly connection to La Siguanaba, Amaranta, who is the youngest and still very much a child and who sees what others don\u2019t expect her to, and then Griselda, home from college, who looks on all of this with a fresh, almost outside perspective. All of them come to the same conclusion very early on: Something is very off in this small community.<\/p>\n
\u201cSalt Bones\u201d is a worthy read. It\u2019s a book infused with the language and culture of a strong Mexican American and Indigenous community. In some way, like La Siguanaba, it\u2019s a conduit into another world. A complicated, real and very much welcome, if a bit scary, world.<\/p>\n
And though the layering of information \u2014 of what we know, what remains hidden from us and what has been foreshadowed \u2014 does add up (delaying what becomes a propulsive search for the missing in the second half of the novel), Givhan\u2019s talents as a writer of blunt, strong sentences and remarkable poetic passages regarding the landscape and the sea more than make up for any delay.<\/p>\n
\u201cSalt Bones\u201d is a triumph. One of the most masterful marriages of horror, mystery, thriller and literary writing that I\u2019ve read in some time. And it is certainly a book that will haunt you (in a good way!) for a very long time after you\u2019ve turned the final page.<\/p>\n
Waite is the author of four novels and a book critic for the San Francisco Chronicle.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Book Review Salt Bones By Jennifer GivhanMulholland Books: 384 pages, $29If you buy books linked on our site,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":16230,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[15384,223,15388,6461,15385,88,15390,15381,15386,15391,15382,15380,15389,695,15383,15387,2384],"class_list":{"0":"post-16229","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-amaranta","9":"tag-books","10":"tag-character","11":"tag-daughter","12":"tag-el-valle","13":"tag-entertainment","14":"tag-ghost-story","15":"tag-givhan","16":"tag-griselda","17":"tag-haunting-novel","18":"tag-la-siguanaba","19":"tag-mal","20":"tag-mother","21":"tag-mystery","22":"tag-salt-bone","23":"tag-salton-sea","24":"tag-time"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16229","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16229"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16229\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16230"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16229"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16229"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16229"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}