The Girls in the Stilt House by Kelly Mustian

This is a fantastic debut novel! I love Southern Fiction as a genre and this did not disappoint. The novel takes place in the swamplands of the Natchez Trace in Mississippi in the 1920s and, as with Where the Crawdads Sing, the wetland becomes another character in the story. The historical aspect of the story, including elements related to Prohibition, also made it come to life.

The novel centers around Ada and Matilda, both in their late teens. Ada is white and has had a hard life in the Trace with a harsh father. She had escaped the Trace but is now back after losing the home she left for in Baton Rouge. Matilda is black and the daughter of a sharecropper. She plans to move to Ohio to escape the Trace and is secretly saving money to put her plan into action.

Events in the story put the girls together at Ada’s family’s stilt house. The girls struggle to open up to each other as they work to survive with the secrets they each harbor in the harsh world in which they live.

While this in not a light story by any means, it was a worthwhile read. I recommend this debut for readers of historical fiction or Southern Fiction.

Check out The Girls in the Stilt House by Kelly Mustian at the Library (https://catalog.lclibs.org/polaris/search/title.aspx…).