SPINDLEFISH AND STARS

An epic tale of abandonment, travel, secrets, family, and the meaning of art.

Clo and her father, art restorer and small-time thief, never live for long in one village; when it’s time to move on, he signals her, she meets him at the forest’s edge, and they walk through the night to someplace new. One day, he doesn’t show. A swineherd delivers a half-legible note: Clo must take this paper ticket of “half passage” to someone named Haros, near “th’ water…full o’ salt.” So Clo, “wall-jumper, turnip-picker,” embarks on a lonely journey halfway across a raging sea to an island where people and skies are gray, time doesn’t pass, a dried-apple–faced old woman inexplicably knows her, and fish can be carded and spun into shimmering yarn. Exquisite in detail, Andrews’ stunning novel gives careful importance to objects; even a simple shawl holds revelations. Chapter titles sparkle and tantalize (“In Which Our Hero Dies”), and prose sings. Tropes of sacrifice and Greek mythology serve as scaffoldings. There must be a way for Clo to escape her repulsive fate of carding and spinning silver fishes’ guts into yarn and maybe even to help a vulnerable, always-damp, flute-playing boy who was scooped from the ocean—but that path must allow for the literal, physical, yarn-based weaving of “humid forests and gleaming deserts, rimy fields and green valleys”—and human lives. Characters seem White.

A tapestry, both humble and rich.