MOVING LILA

An intimate drama of family secrets that moves at a compelling pace, yet leaves one wondering what all the fuss was about. On his deathbed Wesley DeLand asks his older daughter, Mira, to move a house—no small assignment logistically but an even greater task emotionally. It is Mira’s childhood home, dubbed “Lila” and long abandoned in North Carolina, that he wants her to relocate to Arkansas. Besides the more typical girlhood memories, Lila carries a few skeletons in the closet, carefully guarded from baby sister, Kat, who has never seen the house. When Wesley dies, Mira, Kat, and a moving crew journey to retrieve Lila (leaving brother Kearney nervously behind) and uncover the secrets of the house, inextricably bound with their dead mother, Helen. Appropriating the typically quirky features of the road-trip genre—the alarming shabbiness of motels, truck-stop buffets, and the occasional sighting of roadkill—the plot complicates as Mira drives her unsuspecting sister (who hopelessly worshiped their mother) closer to the truth. Before Kat was born, Helen conducted a shameless affair with the town’s minister, going so far as to share details at the dinner table and inviting him over, forcing Wesley to make himself scarce. After the affair ended, Helen insisted on moving and obliterating all mention of Lila. The terrible secret, exposed to the reader long before it is to Kat, plays a bit too southern gothic for the contemporary behavior of the characters, negating any sense of doom its imminent disclosure might create. Meantime, Mira develops an attraction to married Ray, the homespun honey in charge of the structural move, while Aron, the other driver, picks up a runaway and lets her tag along. Thrown in as well are a few revelations about Wesley (how the house got its name), providing a cathartic trip for his daughters, if not for the reader. A nicely written debut, but with little emotional punch.