BETTY

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.

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