The Marsh Queen

DEBUT Hartman’s first novel is interwoven with strong natural history themes, evoking the works of Barbara Kingsolver. Raised in the swamps of northern Florida, Loni Mae is now a bird artist with a plum job at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, DC. When her mother starts showing signs of dementia, she returns to her hometown to help her brother sort through their mother’s belongings, all the while stumbling over clues that seem to indicate their father’s decades-ago death wasn’t a suicide. On a quickly diminishing family leave, Loni Mae is unable to chart a path forward. She goes about her disorganized days juggling family expectations, questioning townsfolk about her father’s death, sketching birds, and skittishly avoiding romance with a local man. The nonlinear story line is interspersed with long passages on drawing birds, the Floridian swamp, and gardening lore. Four-fifths of the way through the book, the action suddenly picks up when Loni Mae uncovers town secrets that threaten her understanding of the past. Her subsequent undertakings occur at an incongruously breakneck pace before the story wraps up a little too neatly with a family gathering at the nursing home.