THE CICADA TREE

As a cicada brood emerges, dramatic events swirl around a musically gifted girl’s life in this debut historical novel.

Growing up in Providence, Georgia, narrator Analeise Newell and Etta Mae Johnston are childhood friends. Analeise, 11, recalls that their mothers met “packing pickles into jars at the Mayfield Pickle Company, my Mama at the white table, and Etta Mae’s at the colored.” Ever since Etta Mae’s mother died, she’s been raised by her grandmother Miss Wessie, who looks after the two girls when Grace, Analeise’s mother, is at work. As for Claxton, Analeise’s father, he’s usually drunk. It’s the summer of 1956, 13 years since the last cicada brood hatched, and now the insects are returning, littering their shells everywhere. Ominous currents begin swirling around Analeise, a natural piano virtuoso. She tastes music, feels burning pains in her legs, and detects a meanness inside her. She becomes jealous of Etta Mae’s singing success and deals with Claxton’s sudden death. Analeise also develops a strange fascination for the wealthy, charismatic Mayfields and their haughty, underhanded daughter, Marlissa. Although warned away by Miss Wessie, Analeise becomes drawn into the Mayfields’ web of hidden truths and ruthless manipulations until—as the town is mobbed by cicadas—a maelstrom climax reveals long-kept secrets. In his novel, Gwaltney assembles some classic ingredients of the Southern gothic tradition, with Analeise’s world being haunted by death, madness, the past, and the supernatural. This can become over the top even for the genre, particularly in the extended and histrionic denouement, but the eerie tone is well orchestrated for those who appreciate a sinister frisson. Still, Analeise’s final certainty of personal, deep-down badness seems overstated compared to her actual actions. Similarly, the book reaches sometimes for the portentous, as with Analeise’s (rare but normal) synesthesia.

A richly described but sometimes-unconvincing tale of a piano prodigy.