"That Cheri Stoddard was found at all was the thing that set people on edge, even more so than the condition of her body." So opens Laura McHugh's delightfully and darkly disturbing debut novel, The Weight of Blood. The town of Henbane is agitated because it is so good at keeping its secrets--and bodies are so easy to hide in the twisted, wooded Ozark Mountains.
Eighteen-year-old Lucy Dane is troubled not only by the disappearance of her sort-of friend Cheri, but also the unexplained departure of her mother, Lila, who walked out of the house carrying a handgun and nothing else when Lucy was a year old. The perspective switches between two primary narrators: Lucy keeps the reader up to date on current goings-on, and it is through Lila that we begin to learn the ugly secrets that Henbane keeps. The town is almost a character itself, insular, suspicious and largely unmarked by passing time. As Lucy probes the question of Cheri's fate and finds it apparently linked to her mother's, she becomes disturbed at how close her inquiries lead her to home.
The atmosphere is wonderfully spooky, exemplifying Southern noir. As its title suggests, The Weight of Blood is concerned with the strength of our bonds to our family, and the tension between biological ties of blood and the families we choose for ourselves. In a remarkably convincing portrayal of young adulthood, Lucy allows McHugh to explore themes of loyalty: where it's owed, and to what extremes. --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia