Téa Obreht (The Tiger's Wife; Inland) is a wildly inventive magician of a writer, every performance new and wonder-inducing, every book a distinctive blend of realism and fantasy. The Morningside enters the same world as the author's short story of the same name, but the novel is a weightier thing. It teases out the strands of truth and secrets that circle the narrator, Sil, who moves with her mother to the Morningside building when she is 11.
Their presence in Island City is due to the Repopulation Program, an effort to save the once-great city, much of which is now under water. Sil's aunt Ena serves as the super for the mostly uninhabited apartments at the Morningside who welcomes them in. There are familiar elements, notes of wildfires and refugees and rising sea levels, but this is a novel about people and their histories and the truths they might choose to withhold or even create.
Where Sil's mother has revealed almost nothing about their past, Ena opens Sil to a world of family stories, mythologies, and magic. With this knowledge of "a world underneath the world," Sil fixates on Bezi Duras, the elusive painter who lives in Morningside's penthouse, becoming convinced that she is actually a Vila, a fairylike creature, whose dogs transform into men each day and back to dogs at night.
Reminiscent of Harriet the Spy, Sil attempts to discover incontrovertible evidence of her truth, and in the process learns more than she could have imagined, about her mother, their past, and about what happens when a person is ruled by a need for secrecy. --Sara Beth West, freelance reviewer and librarian