Jo Morey takes readers deep into the hot, tangled jungles of Belize in her mesmerizing debut novel, Lime Juice Money, creating a story with a richly imagined setting and complicated family dynamics. Laelia Wylde, named after one of the orchids her father loves so dearly that he has retired to the jungle of Belize to live near them, is losing herself. Recently divorced and experiencing hearing loss after an injury, she's just been fired from her job in an upscale London kitchen following a preventable mistake. Her doctors tell her that hearing loss can cause memory issues, and her grip on facts feels tenuous, her memories fuzzy. So when her father collapses from a stroke at his own birthday celebration, it seems the obvious choice to extend her trip to Belize indefinitely, staying on to tend to her father's jungle home and making sense of the chaos she finds there.
The jungle becomes a character unto itself in Morey's care, as she brings to life "an abundance of lush self-protection, teeming with life upon life upon life. But everything rots faster in the heat." Laelia's father's isolated house is no exception; it's falling into disrepair and surrounded by danger of both human and natural varieties: snakes, betrayal, gaslighting, jaguars, greed, violence, guns, unstable men, creeping vines, secrets, and lies. Amid all this, Laelia is the best kind of unreliable narrator, uncovering long-buried secrets about her family and herself alongside readers in a well-paced and believably convoluted narrative. Lime Juice Money is a captivating story of a woman seeking the truth and coming into her own--by any means necessary. --Kerry McHugh, freelance writer