As is the case with many book lovers, my “to read” pile is growing way faster than my ability to keep up with it. That means that I’m late to discovering some true gems. One such gem is Donna Gordon’s heartrending début novel, What Ben Franklin Would Have Told Me. With compassion, sensitivity, and insight, the novel explores the potentially life-changing power of connecting with others, even though it may first seem that we have nothing in common with them.

Gerry Wilson is a seventh-generation Mississippian, and she says of That Pinson Girl, “In this novel I return to the myths of my childhood and the rural landscape of north Mississippi. I was born in Pontotoc, a little town nestled in the red clay hills of north Mississippi, thirty miles from William Faulkner’s Oxford and far from just about everywhere else.” Wilson’s prose style is straightforward, but the questions and complexities that run throughout That Pinson Girl will be familiar to those who have read Faulkner. It is appropriate that an early draft of the novel was a finalist in the Faulkner-Wisdom Writing Competition. 

This searing, emotionally resonant story collection immerses us in the struggles of characters who, in many cases, are trying to make sense of the past, or of murky or troubled relationships–often, when they are at a crossroads in their lives. Haunting virtually all of the stories are traumas from the wars in the former Yugoslavia.

Linforth considers how chasms may exist between family members, or between (current or former) lovers–and how it may be possible to never fully connect with, much less understand, those with whom we share blood, or with whom we’ve shared our lives. Yet sometimes, those chasms can be bridged, and he captures such moments with powerful prose.

Spanning three generations and the interconnected lives of multiple characters, The Door-Man is an inventive and revelatory novel. At the heart of it are two possibly unbridgeable gaps: between the central character’s fragmented understanding of his family’s history and the truth, and between an ancestral cycle of tragedy and a potentially hopeful future.

This haunting young-adult novel weaves together two mysteries: an engrossing whodunnit and also the enigma posed by the young woman who could play a role in solving it: Maggie Warshauer, a budding scientist and keen observer of the natural world.

Maggie lives on a cramped and run-down houseboat with her father, Drew, who manages the marina where the boat is docked. Although Drew clearly loves Maggie, his struggles with alcoholism leave him unable to be fully present for her. So does his inability to let go of his relationship with his ex-wife (“my so-called mother,” in Maggie’s words). He writes to her regularly, begging her to come back to him and Maggie. But without fail, the ex returns the letters to him, apparently unread. Drew’s limitations as a parent push Maggie into the role of caring for herself, and often, for him as well.

When it comes to seemingly impossible capabilities, two of the most wished-for ones must be time travel and the ability to meet notable figures from the past. In this engrossing novel, both of these wishes become a reality, delivering profound rewards and significant dangers, some of which could reverberate across time. The result is a gripping and thought-provoking read.