3 minute read
WHAT STORM, WHAT THUNDER by Myriam J. A. Chancy
when ghosts come home
WHEN GHOSTS COME HOME
Cash, Wiley Morrow/HarperCollins (304 pp.) $23.99 | Sep. 21, 2021 978-0-06-231266-2
In the 1980s, a small North Carolina town is thrown into turmoil when the sheriff discovers a dead body and a crashed plane. When Sheriff Winston Barnes is awoken by a loud noise in the middle of the night, he gets out of bed to investigate at the local airport. But what he finds there surprises him—an empty plane and a dead body. Now Winston, in the middle of an election against an entitled younger man named Bradley Frye who wants power more than he wants to be sheriff, has to figure out what was on that plane and who shot the man. As Barnes investigates the case, he’s drawn deeper into the anger and resentment that bubble just below the surface in his small North Carolina beach town. The man who was shot, Rodney Bellamy, is Black, and now the White Bradley Frye and his friends are terrorizing Bellamy’s family—driving through their neighborhood with Confederate flags, breaking their windows, and threatening them. In addition to the racism in his town, Sheriff Barnes is also dealing with his daughter, Colleen, who’s back home and grieving after losing her child. Cash skillfully balances three points of view—those of Barnes, Colleen, and Jay, Rodney Bellamy’s 14-year-old brother-in-law, who bears the brunt of Bradley Frye’s racist attacks. Through the eyes of these very different characters, Cash creates an exquisitely detailed world that feels real and lived in. Sheriff Barnes is an easy character to root for as a man trying to do his best while living in a town that’s fighting against him. Although the plot alone is compelling enough to keep readers turning the pages, this is also a quietly moving look at how realistically flawed characters deal with the tragedies life throws at them.
A gripping mystery with characters that will linger in readers’ minds long after they turn the last page.
WHAT STORM, WHAT THUNDER
Chancy, Myriam J. A. Tin House (330 pp.) $27.95 | Oct. 5, 2021 978-1-951142-76-6
Survivors and victims tell their powerful, moving stories in this fictional account of the 2010 Haitian earthquake. On Jan. 12, 2010, a massive earthquake struck the island of Hispaniola, changing the face of Haiti forever. Between 250,000 and 300,000 people are estimated to have perished, many of them in the crowded capital of Port-au-Prince, while 1.5 million others were left homeless. In her searing new novel, Chancy, who spent years talking to survivors, sifts through the wreckage of this inconceivable calamity. She has shaped the stories of the living and the dead into a mighty fictional tapestry that reflects the terror, despair, and sorrow of the moment as she examines questions of Haitian identity in a world that doesn’t seem to care. Among her unforgettable characters are a desperate husband who abandons his grief-stricken wife in a sprawling, dangerous tent city; a sex worker who steps out of a hotel moments before it collapses; a drug trafficker trapped in an elevator who begins to reassess his life; a wealthy businessman who left Haiti and has returned to make a deal at the worst possible moment; a teenage girl terrorized by a former classmate in the refugee camp; a Haitian cab driver in Boston who has discovered religion and the perils of being Black in America; and an architect who returns home from Rwanda, where she’d been working for an NGO, only to find herself stymied by bureaucracy and unable to help anyone. The thread that connects these voices is Ma Lou, a market woman who has witnessed the tides of fortune in Port-au-Prince for decades and who holds no illusions about the future. The stories are not always easy to read, but
