The Shore

March 23, 2015
This searing debut novel comprises 13 nonlinear chapters that interweave past and future, realism and fantasy. Ranging from 1876 to 2143, their primary
setting is the Virginia coastal islands (Chincoteague is the best known) that residents call simply the Shore. Taylor’s story centers on the family of fictional Shore resident Medora Slater, who can heal women powerfully but is scarred by male violence. The book opens in 1995, when her descendant, teenager Chloe Gordy—whose mother is dead and whose father is abusive and addicted—battles fiercely to keep her younger sister safe. In later chapters we meet her mother Ellie, who conceived Chloe amid a night of tragedy, and Medora herself. Chloe’s contemporary, Sally Lumsden, from another branch of the family, is a gifted herbalist with paranormal powers; she predicts the bleak future we see her great-niece Tamara struggling to survive. Though the parts of the book fit together in confusing ways, and two chapters set in the future are less convincing than the rest, the novel offers a promising new voice. Taylor excels at imagining outsider identities, female strength, the connection of people to place, and a world so perilous that damage and healing, brutality and resourcefulness merge.

March 15, 2015
An isolated stretch of coastal Virginia provides the eerie backdrop for a series of interconnecting tales of entrapment and escape. Debut author Taylor focuses both a microscope and a telescope on a remote area of Eastern Virginia and its longtime residents in this novel made up of an array of linked stories. Set-primarily-on "The Shore," a string of islands in the Chesapeake Bay that includes Assateague and the legendary Chincoteague, Taylor's tales relate the lives of several of the area's denizens over a two-and-a-half century span. Reaching into a dystopic future from a rural but far-from-idyllic past, Taylor weaves together accounts of misogyny, patricide, other garden-variety murders, and racism. The resulting collage of stories contains shifting narrators and perspectives as well as hints of family mystery. Few of the assembled tales lack a reference to pharmaceuticals of one sort or another, ranging from Native American plant lore to post-plague survival and the customs of the methamphetamine trade. Permeating each part of the work is a deep-rooted sense of place, from the endless marshes to the stink of the poultry farms. When one disaffected woman briefly escapes (with a drug-dealing boyfriend) to a farmhouse in the Blue Ridge Mountains, she discovers an antique bird cage in the attic-and it's hard not to think the residents of The Shore aren't trapped in a much bigger, creepier bird cage. The closed ecosystem of The Shore provides Taylor with an ideal setting for illuminating the course of Life over Time.