Along the Indigo

December 18, 2017
In this bleak tale from Chapman (Dualed), high school junior Marsden Eldridge is desperate to escape her hometown of Glory, along with her younger sister, Wynn. To do so, she skims money from the bodies she finds in the nearby covert, purportedly cursed property owned by her family—it draws people from miles around to kill themselves there. The sisters live in a brothel masquerading as a boarding house, where their half-Chinese mother works as a prostitute. Soon, Marsden will be forced into prostitution to help repay her late father’s debts. Then Marsden’s classmate Jude Ambrose shows up, looking for answers about his older brother’s suicide. Marsden and Jude, both mixed-race outsiders, start falling for each other, but Marsden has secrets she fears having uncovered and the mystery of her father’s death to solve. Overlapping subplots abound, though Marsden’s fixation on speaking with the dead is an extraneous one without much traction. The setup is enticingly eerie, but Chapman’s lyrical writing is weighed down by a slow-moving plot. Ages 13–up. Agent: Victoria Marini, Irene Goodman Literary.

March 1, 2018

Gr 9 Up-For Marsden, coming of age has meant finding a way to get her and her younger sister, Wynn, out of the town of Glory, by any means necessary. Wages stored up from her job in the kitchen of the brothel where her mother works as a prostitute are supplemented by skimming: taking money from the bodies, largely suicide victims, that appear in her family's darkly wooded land known as "the covert" to the rest of the town. Marsden knows that in time, she and Wynn will be expected to follow in her mother's footsteps; and after her father's body was found in the covert several years earlier, her sole focus has been on escape. It's only when Jude, a boy that she knows remotely from her high school, asks for help finding a box his brother Rigby may have hidden in the covert prior to his suicide that her plans are interrupted. It quickly becomes clear that she and Jude have more in common than both being biracial-Marsden is of Chinese descent and Jude is of African American descent-in a very white town, and an interest in the covert. Chapman's darkly poetic narrative can at times be slow paced but ultimately takes a lyrical turn toward both love story and murder mystery, and leads readers to a satisfying and surprising conclusion. VERDICT A good selection for most thriller shelves.-Joanna Sondheim, Columbia Grammar & Preparatory School, New York City

Copyright 2018 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 15, 2018
Love, mystery, and tragedy in a small town with a haunted past. Marsden does not want to be a prostitute. She and her sister manage to lie low, working in the kitchen of the boardinghouse that fronts as iron-fisted Nina's brothel. Marsden is multiracial Chinese and looks strikingly similar to her mother, who provides exotic diversions for Nina's largely white clientele. Marsden's desperation to protect her younger sister from the debauchery they live among leads her to skim cash from dead bodies--and in this dark and mysterious tale, dead bodies abound. The covert--the neglected wooded land that is her birthright--captures the imagination of the lost and hopeless. Local folklore and a history of bloodshed lead many to believe that earth from the covert, along the Indigo River, contains magical powers of absolution. Suicide victims with cash in their pockets are a common occurrence in the covert, where Marsden runs into Jude, a boy from school who is also "as mixed as she was, except black to her Chinese." Jude is there to look for clues to his older brother's suicide, and Marsden reluctantly agrees to help. The story builds on eerie developments and real-world fears as Nina blackmails Marsden to turn her first trick. The book is captivating and unearthly, with beautifully poignant writing and elegantly drawn characters. However, resolutions are disappointingly mundane, leaving readers craving more poetry and magic. Fans of fabulism will love this book but may find the denouement unsatisfyingly prosaic. (Fabulism. 12-16)

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January 1, 2018
Grades 9-12 The town of Glory has a dark side, as Marsden knows all too well. Along the Indigo River, a bed-and-breakfast serves as a front for a brothel, where Marsden's mother works as a prostitute. And her father? Well, he was one of the many suicides to turn up in a covert by the river. Marsden, desperate to avoid her mother's life, plans to escape Glory with her little sister, but to do that she needs money, and that means skimmingsearching the bodies of the Indigo River suicides for money. It's skimming that leads her to meet Jude, a boy whose brother was one of the suicides. It's not long before they begin a tenuous friendship that slowly becomes more, but both their families harbor dangerous secrets that might tear them apart. Most of the novel is a slow burnboth the mystery and Marsden and Jude's relationshipand the pacing can lag because of it, especially early on. But for teens in search of strange premises and moody, atmospheric narratives, this is a safe bet.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)