The Moonflowers
“Any story worth telling has more than one storyteller.”
Tig Costello goes to Darren, Kentucky, to paint a portrait of the town benefactor, her grandfather Benjamin Costello, and finds an oddly unwelcoming community, considering that she has been invited by the mayor. Her presence in 1997 revives stories that reach back into the 1930s and ´40s, stories the town would rather not think about. When she decides to interview Eloise Price, the woman who has been imprisoned for the last 50 years for Benjamin’s murder, she begins to untangle those old stories, sorting them into a new portrait that is a far cry from the heroic statue of Benjamin newly erected in the town square.
At the heart of it all are a series of missing wives and the women of Whitmore Halls, a now decaying mansion on the hill, to whom desperate women, bruised or pregnant or both, came for help. Eloise is only one of the women who, warming to Tig despite some of the men’s hostility, help her piece together the story of Darren, Benjamin Costello, and Whitmore Halls.
The present narrative is told in Tig’s voice and the past in Eloise’s, with shorter sections from the others. Rose-Marie gives us an almost tactile sense of this small Kentucky town, not much changed since Benjamin’s day, and of the claustrophobic atmosphere of living in a place where everyone knows everything, even the things they don’t talk about. Tig’s final act of defiance before she leaves probably won’t change anything, but it has changed her, and the reader feels the burden of Tig’s own weight lift with the last sentence.
