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, published as part of the New York Times Decameron Project, 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 and, as she is their only living relative, she welcomes them in. When the book opens, however, readers know none of these details, dropped into this place with little to orient them. Obreht loads the first pages with scintillating details: a case file, a photo of a corpse, an old Polaroid featuring Sil and her mother and, in the background, the mysterious Bezi Duras and her three massive dogs.
Despite those true-crime teasers, readers will temporarily shelve that mystery as they delve into the lives of these characters and their taut existence in a world gone terribly wrong. There are familiar elements, notes of wildfires and refugees and rising sea levels, but this is not a story about an unfolding climate disaster. It's 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: "If the past had previously felt like a forbidden room, briefly glimpsed as my mother was shutting its door, here was Ena, holding the door wide." With this knowledge of "a world underneath the world," Sil fixates on the elusive painter who lives in the penthouse, becoming convinced that Bezi Duras 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
Shelf Talker: Téa Obreht takes readers on an inventive tour inside The Morningside, a once-great apartment building full of magic, mystery, and the remnants of a city in decline.