Light Beneath Ferns

Here's a review for Anne Spollen's Light Beneath Ferns. (*I just submitted this review to Amazon.com and Powells.com*) I read her debut novel, The Shape of Water, this summer and just finished up her second book this week.
*****
The quirky, macabre lovechild of Shirley Jackson and Ray Bradbury, Anne Spollen casts a spell of hopes, haunts, and hurts in her second coming-of-age novel, Light Beneath Ferns. Eliza Rayne, our fourteen-year-old protagonist, experiences an adolescence both familiar and foreign. Her gambler father has abandoned her and her mother, other girls bully her at a slumber party, and a popular boy doesn’t understand her but tries to kiss her anyway. But where other girls may keep diaries, Eliza creates jewelry from bird bones and studies graves in the cemetery that borders her home. One day Elizah finds a human jawbone in the river, and her whole world – and perception of it – shifts. Soon she’s tangled in a romance with Nathaniel, who may or may not be a ghost. Nathaniel takes her on rides down the river in the middle of the night and walks her through a village where reflections linger longer than they should in mirrors. What’s most impressive about Spollen’s novel – besides her sharp, poetic prose – is her ability to break our hearts for Eliza not because she may be caught in a mystery between life and death but because we can all relate to her struggle for both self-identity and kinship. Her mother wants her to try harder to be “normal” and her guidance counselor pushes her to get more involved in “typical” school activities, but Elizah Rayne insists – through strength of spirit – on holding out for people and places that are aligned with her own beliefs and values. Even if those people are literal spirits – and those places are ghost-villages long gone save for rubble, memories, and dashes of magic.