Little Jordan — Marly Youmans

n her haunting and exquisite first novel, Marly Youmans brings us to a town on the banks of the Little Jordan River, where in the span of a summer season an entire lifetime of experience and sensations unfolds.

Told from the perspective of Meg, a precocious thirteen-year-old who is part nymph, part young woman, Little Jordan recounts a series of unusual events a death, an attempted suicide, a mother's disastrous affair, a young girl's first kiss - that resonate, and finally coalesce, in the reader's mind.

Marly Youmans conveys with elegance and economy the unpredictable tragedies and subtle oddities that hover above a small Southern town one special summer. As you tumble through the smells and sounds of the season mown hay, wet grass, a search party's flashlights scanning a dark field you come to realize that this could be your town, an otherwise ordinary town, but one that harbors deep secrets for even the ordinary teems underneath with strange happenings.