One of Mary Bet Hartsoe's earliest memories is of a faceless rider on a black horse coming for her, only to turn aside at the last moment; another is of the deaths of twin siblings Annie and Willie to consumption. The youngest of the Hartsoe children, Mary Bet struggles to find her place in her rural North Carolinian family. Her siblings all seem talented in ways she is not: Ila, the caregiver; Myrtle Emma, the musician; O'Nora, the adventurer; Siler, the genius. Yet, one by one, they too are claimed by death while Mary Bet can only watch and try to maintain the crumbling bonds of her family. Eventually, Mary Bet must choose: Will she allow her life to proceed as a pale imitation of the death that has claimed her kin, or will she commit herself to forging new bonds of living familial love?
In Love and Lament, John Milliken Thompson binds together the best of the southern gothic tradition of William Faulkner and postmodern studies of human character and psyche like Joanna Greenberg's I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. Mary Bet is a deeply sympathetic character, even--or especially--in her darkest moments, and Thompson's handling of detail makes the novel's early 20th-century setting feel real. Love and Lament captures the complexity of coming of age in the face of death and rapid industrialization, and the sense that although things will never be the same, life may yet endure. --Dani Alexis Ryskamp, blogger at The Book Cricket