HENRIETTA HUNG THE MOON

In Williams’ novel, a young girl’s personae shift as the tensions of a small town are revealed.

The story centers on the Appalachian town of Summerton and a 9-year-old girl named Henrietta Moon, who appears in starkly different guises in loosely interwoven plotlines. Readers first meet her as a fourth grader at Neil Armstrong Elementary School, where she dreams of becoming the first woman to land on the moon and designs a rocket booster to take her there. While volunteering at a retirement home, she bonds with 86-year-old Gerald Harris over their love of space flight. A second storyline probes Summerton’s darker side through the perspective of Henry, a writer whose bestselling novel Mountain Holler explores the decaying town’s criminal underworld; he ponders the town’s fraught history after racists burn a cross on the lawn of the Black provost of a nearby university. In this storyline, Henrietta is Henry’s infant daughter and dies two days after her birth, pitching the writer into a spiral of anger and despair. Henrietta is then reimagined by Robert Montgomery, a lonely widower who mourns at her graveside and then writes a graphic novel for kids—included here, complete with Clarke’s vivid full-color cartoon illustrations. It depicts her as a socially awkward schoolgirl whose parents suggest that she slow down and savor life. In Henrietta’s intertwining plotlines, Williams delves into themes of innocence and ambition, unhinged grief, continuity, and remembrance. His prose is supple and as changeable as Henrietta herself, shifting from dreamy lyricism (“if he stared at the moon long enough and he let his eyes relax just so, the moon blurred and transformed from a light in the sky, a satellite, into a hole—a hole in the darkness through to something brighter”) to gritty realism full of evocative details: “The flames were lipping higher than his roof. The crackle and snapping sounds made him nauseous. Like breaking bones or the crack of a whip.” The result is a captivating read that’s poignant and magical.

A beguiling and luminous tale of loss and hope.