Shiner

March 2, 2020
In Burns’s layered, evocative debut novel (after the memoir Cinderland), trauma and hope pass from mother to daughter in a West Virginia family. Wren Bird is the 15-year-old daughter of a one-eyed snake-handling preacher, Briar Bird, and his wife, Ruby Day. Superstitious, charismatic, and devoted to a wife who openly despises him, Briar forces his family to live isolated in the mountains, resulting in few chances for Ruby and Wren to interact with the people of Trap, the nearest town. Their only regular visitor is Ruby’s childhood best friend, Ivy, whose deep connection with Ruby led her to settle with her family nearby. “It started with a burn,” begins the novel—Ivy visits Ruby and Wren one fateful day, and her dress and hair catch on fire. Briar heals her, with nary a scar, but when she starts calling Briar “White Eye,” Ruby and Wren question what happened to Ivy. As Wren contends with the ramifications of her father’s “miracle,” she also begins to uncover the history behind his faith. Though the recursive structure stutters toward big reveals, making it difficult for readers to fully connect with any of the characters, Burns beautifully renders the isolated Appalachian landscape and the urgent desperation of her characters. Burns’s stunning prose is reason enough to keep an eye out for this promising writer’s next effort.

March 15, 2020
In an Appalachian hamlet, a girl's world is shattered by the secrets of the adults around her. Burns' first book, Cinderland (2014), was a memoir about her childhood in western Pennsylvania. She sets this assured debut novel nearby, in the remote hollers outside the ominously named Trap. It's a minuscule, poverty-ridden West Virginia town where the dying coal industry still poisons the environment and the moonshiners of the title still make illegal liquor for tradition's sake. At age 15, Wren Bird, who narrates much of the book, has never been more than a few miles from her family's cabin. Her father, Briar, is a snake handler, a preacher whose services, held in an abandoned gas station for a shrinking congregation, revolve around him grasping his venomous rattlers and copperheads and raising them skyward while speaking in tongues. Wren tells the reader, "My father obeyed the rituals of snake-handling law, which meant he pretended we still lived in the 1940s instead of the age of the internet." Called to God when a lightning strike blinded him in one eye as a teen, Briar fell in love with Wren's mother, Ruby, not long afterward. He's ruthlessly protective of his wife and daughter, forbidding most outside contact and only grudgingly letting Ruby home-school Wren. Ruby's closest relationship is not with Briar but with her longtime friend Ivy, who lives down the mountain with her four kids and opioid-addicted husband. As girls, Ruby and Ivy dreamed of escape, but Ruby--also a snake handler's daughter--married at her father's command, and restless Ivy married so she wouldn't have to leave Ruby. As the novel opens, Ivy falls into an open fire, but it seems Briar has worked a miracle when she suffers no grievous injury. That fall, though, sets off a cascade of revelations and rebellions. And Briar's lethal snakes are this book's version of Chekhov's gun--you know they're going to bite someone. Wren's engaging, convincing voice leads the reader through her strange world. A teenage girl is the strong center of a fever-dream story of hidden pasts.

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Starred review from March 1, 2020
Fifteen-year-old Wren's father, Briar, is a snake-handling preacher, a legend in their Appalachian village. Briar keeps Wren close to their rude home on the mountain; indeed, she is almost cloistered. As for her mother, Ruby, she needs only two things in life: bread and Ivy, her best friend since they were seven. The two women love each other, but the question is: Are they in love. There is no doubt, however, that the local moonshiner, Flynn, is in love with Ruby and has been since they were young. The great sadness in his life is that she married Briar, who was his best friend. Briar's legend is enhanced when Ivy catches fire, and he heals her. Can he truly work miracles? These are only the bare bones of this gorgeously written, plot-rich novel that examines the complex lives of these five beautifully realized characters. The novel is, of course, about what happens to them, but it is also about the lives of women and their fraught relations with men; being set in Appalachia, it is no surprise that the novel is also about story and its gradual morphing into legend. The tone of the novel is melancholy, and things happen that exacerbate that mood, but everything is perfectly apposite. This memorable first novel is exceptional in its power and imagination. It's clearly a must-read.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

December 1, 2019

It's tough enough for 15-year-old Wren Bird to live in a mountaintop cabin with no car and no visitors but her mother's best friend, even as her father lords it over the family and spends his Sunday spouting sermons in an empty gas station and handling snakes. And it gets worse when a supposed miracle performed by Wren's father leads to tragedy, making her examine her family history. A debut echoing Burns's LJ-starred memoir, Cinderland.

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