THE TURTLE CATCHER

In a dark, sometimes lurid debut, misdeeds and guilt shape the conjoined fates of two feuding families in Minnesota.

Death, deformity and derangement are only part of the story; this gothic first novel also ropes in incest, physical abuse and mental disability, not to mention ghosts, spirits and cross-dressing uncles. Set in New Germany, a rural, midwestern outpost with strong roots in Germany, it spans the late 1890s to the 1920s through several generations of the Richters and the Sutters. Wilhelm Richter marries recent Bavarian immigrant Maggie unaware that she is pregnant by her Jewish lover, a secret which both burdens Maggie and convinces her, when her daughter Liesel is born with a “strange organ” at her genitals, that her sin has been made flesh. Pa Sutter, meanwhile, probably beat his wife to death, may have impregnated his daughter Pernilla and certainly assaulted his son Lester badly enough to damage his brain. Maggie dies in childbirth, leaving Liesel to look after her four brothers: Herman, Benjamin, Luther and Otto. The advent of World War I divides New Germany between those still allied to their German roots and those who feel American. Sutter and his cohorts attack anti-war Richter, tar him and burn down his barn, killing Pernilla and Luther in the process. Herman enlists, loses an arm in the war and returns half-crazed by his own battlefield sins. The darkness continues with murder and self-inflicted wounds until eventually there is a chance for atonement.

An energetic, oddly shaped historical, lacking polish and control.