Tennessee Hill's first novel, Girls with Long Shadows, is a dreamy, atmospheric tale of sisterhood and coming-of-age in the fictional town of Longshadow, on the Texas Gulf Coast. Nineteen-year-old triplets Baby A, Baby B, and Baby C were orphaned when their mother died in childbirth; their father's identity remains a mystery. But they have always known family in the form of their loving but distant Gram ("Manatee" to the townsfolk, for her swimming prowess) and their adopted, nearly deaf younger brother, Gull. The whole town looks askance at the girls, spookily identical and associated with their mother's early death. The family's golf course, Bayou Bloom, provides respite, and the bayou itself offers a connection to nature, with its fecundity and floods. Then one fateful summer, an act of violence, combining desire and objectification, ruptures the triplets, the family, and the town.
A tautly plotted Southern gothic, Girls with Long Shadows takes a distinctive perspective in Baby B's elegiac narration. Baby B speaks as "we" as often as "I." Only a few people other than themselves can tell the girls apart; even the boys they date may not make the effort. And intermittently the perspective shifts to a "Front Porch Chorus," in which the town speaks collectively, observing the girls from without: "They're a blur we never bothered to untangle." This lack of distinction is both a wound for the triplets and an indelible part of their identity.
Encompassing a single summer in the dripping, humid South, Hill's haunting debut deals in lyricism and tragedy as it considers the harm done to young women by the outside gaze. --Julia Kastner, blogger at pagesofjulia