Upcountry

The lives of three women from different social strata are entangled in Lee’s melodramatic debut. Claire Pedersen, a New York City lawyer, has moved to the Catskills with her husband, Sebastian, who hopes to reignite his previous career as an artist. They acquire through foreclosure the former family home of April Ives, a working-class mother of three. A parallel narrative follows Anna, a young member of an insular religious community that maintains a wary relationship with the other locals. Tragedy erupts early when a very pregnant Anna agrees to Sebastian’s request to model for him, precipitating a traumatic stillbirth. Thereafter, the lives of all three women converge as much by fate as by the happenstance inevitable in a town this small (Anna and April share a domestic cleaning job, Claire works on a case involving April’s godson). Lee develops her main characters convincingly, especially the remarkably resilient April, but her tale unfolds less as a well-plotted story than as a series of vignettes yoked together by unlikely coincidences: an explosion during a drug deal involving April’s ex-convict husband, offstage deaths of key players, bad storms, and so on. Despite some fine episodes, this doesn’t quite hang together. Agent: Pamela Malpas, Jennifer Lyons Literary. (Nov.)