Jewelweed

There’s a benevolent sort of rural American magical realism in Rhodes’s latest ensemble novel, set in the Driftless region of southeast Wisconsin, where recently paroled Blake Bookchester returns from prison after serving over 10 years for drug trafficking. In the oddly isolated town of Words, Wis., Blake haltingly reintegrates himself into a vividly real landscape, but one that is peopled by a cast of characters too thoughtful to be believed. There’s his unacknowledged son, Ivan, a 10-year-old whose profound reasoning gives him wisdom far beyond elementary school, and Ivan’s best friend August Helm, a fifth-grader with a precocious vocabulary and a propensity for awkward exclamations too mannered for even a “gifted” child. Blake’s father, Nate, is a truck-driving epicure struggling with his connection to his just-released son and the deep romantic feelings he has harbored for a distant cousin. Other residents of the town include a pastor with a crisis of faith, a sickly teenage boy, and a turbulent but determined single mother. Words is a place where small actions unfold slowly, with Rhodes sometimes bearing down too hard to make the point that actions and words of this size and simplicity have profound redemptive qualities. Agent: Lois Wallace, Wallace Literary Agency. (May)