cover image IN THE BREEZE OF PASSING THINGS

IN THE BREEZE OF PASSING THINGS

Nicole Louise Reid, . . MacAdam/Cage, $22 (273pp) ISBN 978-1-931561-42-6

A Southern girl watches her fractured family succumb to chaos as her father is consumed by mental illness in this evocative but rather monotonous first novel. Eleven-year-old Iva Giles, her seven-year-old sister, Mally, and their mother, Lilly, crisscross the South in perpetual flight from Iva's father, Jameson, who is depressed and unreliable, fixated on his brother's death in a drowning accident. Gracefully weaving flashback sequences into the family's helter-skelter journey, Reid reveals Jameson's dementia and strange obsession with lakes and rivers—he eventually becomes so unbalanced that he threatens his family. Iva initially resents her mother, Lilly, whom she views as the unstable parent-villain because of their peripatetic lifestyle and Lilly's disastrous affair with Iva's uncle, Davis. However, Iva discovers a darker side of her idolized father when she runs away and tracks him down in Mississippi. Reid sometimes strives too hard for lyricism ("I couldn't help giggling, so loud Mally woke and shot right to silk"), but she gets Iva's stubborn, innocent voice right. The Southern settings—from Texas to Tennessee—are warmly drawn, though the succession of travel scenes become redundant. Reid doesn't transcend the familiar tropes of the mother-daughter road-trip novel, but this is a richly imagined debut. (Nov.)