The third in a series of four historical novels, Kent Wascom's The New Inheritors is about the building, and curdling, of love. Set mostly on the American Gulf Coast from the late 1800s to the end of the First World War, the book is a lonely meditation on how humans come together and inevitably fall apart, whether through the simple passage of time or their own hubris.
Adopted at a young age, Isaac Patterson grows up along the gulf, learning to depict nature through art as he spends most of his time outdoors. After dropping out of art school and moving back in with his parents, he begins a relationship with Kemper Woolsack, daughter to his family's neighbors and inheritor to a modest fortune in the fruit trade. Her parents, Joseph and Marina, were the protagonists of Wascom's previous novel, Secessia, though The New Inheritors doesn't require readers to know that story to be invested in Kemper and Isaac's growing entanglements. Complicating everything are Kemper's two brothers, Angel and Red, whose growing animosity mimics the larger conflict happening across the world at the outbreak of World War I.
Wascom charts the destruction of the Woolsack clan alongside Kemper and Isaac setting up a life for themselves, showing how generations shift the nature of what it means to be a family. The romanticism he conjures up in the latter is heavily tempered by the former, creating a novel where violence and beauty butt up against each other in fascinating ways. --Noah Cruickshank, adult engagement manager, the Field Museum, Chicago, Ill.