EVE GREEN

A pregnant young woman reflects on her childhood in a tight-knit Wales community in Fletcher's debut, a novel rich—sometimes too rich—in melancholic, misty atmosphere and poetic poignancy. When Eve's mother dies unexpectedly, the seven-year-old is sent to live with her loving, hard-working grandparents. She devours stories about distant relatives, but is forbidden to ask about her father, an Irish thief who deserted her mother; her only knowledge of him comes from her mother's heartfelt diaries ("In the rain K's hair looks like feathers"). Fletcher is a gifted writer—her turn on loss ("[it] billowed out before me, snapping at itself and pulling me with it, streaming out over the sheep hills like a funeral flag...") is especially lovely—but the novel often feels overwrought. When a local girl, Rosie, disappears, Eve is dragged into the town's snarled relations in familiar ways, with familiar characters. (Fletcher's debt to Harper Lee includes Billy Macklin, a deformed man ostracized after a head injury that supposedly made him insane, and who is revealed to be gentle and kind.) The dreamy emotionality of the prose takes away from the book's more subtle and singular scenes, such as the awkward, bewitching meeting of Eve and Rosie, child rivals for an older man's love. Such moments—stark, troubling and unresolved—are too rare in a novel about devotion and guilt. Agent, Vivienne Schuster. (Sept.)